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Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

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Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#401

Post by rhizome »

brunoTbear wrote: post #24

The claim of catching 99% of activity is really hard to justify. In many detection systems you cannot know your true number of false negatives. It's inherently unknowable in this case. A better metric would be mean time to detection for a given CEP sharer or perhaps a metric around how much CEP is shared before detection, or perhaps a metric for network size of CEP and how well FB can clean up an entire network at on…

>How do we balance the need to fight child abuse with privacy?

Well, one place to start is with the realization that 99% of molestation comes from people the child knows. Encryption doesn't affect that pipeline at all, so the gov't shouldn't be worried.

I'd also remind that probably effectively 100% of physical child abuse and violence also comes from people the child knows.

Surveilling strangers can't have anything to do with dealing with any form of child abuse, except the extremely rare case where strangers have been able to find each other and create a subculture with which to provide evidence that exists on Facebook's servers. That's a pretty specific and narrow set of conditions.

I'm not saying Facebook allowing government surveillance on their wires can't produce some hits, but I'd be extremely curious to learn of wider implications and costs that are proportional.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#402

Post by BLKNSLVR »

No one is physically raped, murdered, or even injured (beyond choosing to be offended by a certain combination of letters on a screen) in the electronic arena. All crimes they like to mention for the fear factor take place in meatspace and as such leave traces that can be followed by appropriately skilled investigators.

Electronic surveillance is primarily used for reconstruction and back tracking after a significant crime has taken place. After the fact.

Electronic surveillance is paying cheap lip service to a problem instead of paying the expensive price of doing it properly, in meatspace, with boots on the ground.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#403

Post by qwerty456127 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #181
Kinnard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Second Great CryptoWar: https://reason.com/2013/03/12/the-second-great-crypto-war/ > "The proponents of this process use fear tactics to win support, what the four cypherpunks dub "The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and the War on Some Drugs." In other words, laws passed to go after child pornographers, terrorists, money launderers, and drug dealers end up chi…

I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. I'll take the privacy side in most any discussion of privacy-vs-security, but categorically denying the possibility that some crimes could be aided by encryption seems a step to far. It's also bad PR strategy: anybody not already on your side will be put off by your apparent lack of reasoning skills. Instead, ac…

> some crimes could be aided by encryption

Some crimes could be aided by virtually anything. E.g. let's destroy all the roads so criminals won't be able to travel.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#404

Post by hugey010 »

danShumway wrote: post #182

> mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children. Oh, bull crap. By this argument, literally no protection or liberty that allows even one child to be harmed could ever be tolerated. Why stop at vetting baby-sitters or teachers? We ought to require mandatory background checks for every person who ever visits a family or goes into a public space that might contain children. Law enforcement also o…

If they cared about children they'd be putting money and effort into the education system instead of surveillance. Napkin math - It costs the feds roughly $1000 per child per year for school, and the NSA about $250,000 per employee per year. BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN we could be spying on!

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#405

Post by skybrian »

drawkbox wrote: post #376

It is amazing to me that people that are supposedly "pro-business" and "pro-market" are against encryption. Mostly encryption protects privacy and business information. Corporate espionage is bigger than state espionage or terrorism my many multiples, and directly threatens national security as well as markets. Encryption is pro-business and pro-privacy for business and individuals. Without encryption or with backdoo…

Many businesses like encryption but not end-to-end encryption because they need to monitor their employees' communications. For some businesses (financial firms) this is a regulatory requirement, which is why they were against TLS 1.3.

(I'm not saying they're right, but to say that end-to-end encryption is always pro-business is naive.)

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#406

Post by newguy1234 »

jMyles wrote: post #399
carapace wrote: post #216

The problem is deeper than just protecting your data against the government: One of the products these guys sold to corrupt goverments was a tool to plant CP on people's computers. https://hacked.com/italian-hacking-team-hacked/ How do you like those apples? I can't think of a technical defense against a threat like that that doesn't involve disconnecting all the computers in my house and throwing them away.

> a tool to plant CP on people's computers. This tool is not described in the article you've linked. Do you have an additional link for those of us who want to read more about this?

Here is another discussion on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836336

It is true, there is a tool that was developed to basically plant evidence on a compromised machine. So the idea here being that the hired hackers would compromise the machine and then the government client would tell the hackers to put CP, incriminating evidence or other stuff on the machine before the police raided the house/building. The computers would be seized and then it would be used as evidence to prosecute the target.

It is real.

Also if you are interested, dark net diaries did an episode on this group called "hacking team".

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/38/

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#407

Post by mindcrime »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #254
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. I'll take the privacy side in most any discussion of privacy-vs-security, but categorically denying the possibility that some crimes could be aided by encryption seems a step to far. It's also bad PR strategy: anybody not already on your side will be put off by your apparent lack of reasoning skills. Instead, ac…

> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. They're not. A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption. However. You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone . It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live tel…

Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

FWIW, I applaud your willingness to make such a statement. (And no, this is not sarcasm!) Self-censorship is a horrible thing, and I feel like I die inside a little bit every time I catch myself doing it. But more and more these days it begins to feel like even hinting at a willingness to engage in "thought-crime" is exceedingly dangerous. I mean, shit, a woman got passed on for a job because she had a picture of herself in a bikini on her Instagram. Imagine if a prospective employer find a comment online which could even remotely be twisted into saying that some child deaths are a sacrifice that may be inevitable in order to protect an abstract principle like Freedom, or "Free Speech". Zoinks!

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#408

Post by BLKNSLVR »

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #334
scott_s wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tension between privacy and child abuse is laid out in the linked NYT piece (which I also recommend reading): many of the images and videos of child sex abuse are created because they can be shared. They can be shared because the creators have some confidence they can do so without getting caught. Once the content is discovered, the authorities also have a difficult time finding that child, who may still be in da…

Is it? I just read the NYT article. Maybe I'm missing something, but it clearly states that the main issues saving children are a lack of enforcement availability (i.e. the 3 points mentioned in my comment) and the lack of timely cooperation of existing orders. Then they talk about how 'some criminals' hide behind encryption. So... we have a situation where many cases are reported but aren't followed up on. Yet we fo…

I know a number of teachers, and there are quite strict mandatory reporting policies for when child abuse is even suspected.

The reality is that the organizations responsible for looking into these reports of abuse only have enough resources to investigate those where the child's life is in immediate danger.

The venn diagrams of "internet chat surveillance" and 'solutions to the problems of child abuse" are mutually exclusive.

Politicians are grossly morally corrupt to use child abuse as an argument against encryption when they're the ones controlling the purse strings for Child Services-type organizations. Feathering their own nests at the cost of actual, real progress on protecting children from abuse.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#410

Post by nearbuy »

dheera wrote: post #110
hannasanarion wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third party observer cannot read the messages as they pass through the whatsapp network, but Facebook can read the messages at both ends. Facebook has said that they don't do this outside of Australia, where it is required by law, but come on, are we really going to take Zuckerberg's word for it?

> Facebook can read the messages at both ends This is why I believe that end-to-end encryption is not truly useful unless the source code of the clients is public, or the protocol is open. Any closed source client can read messages at the ends, or be forced to do so by an evil government. At the very least, they could open up XMPP compatibility again so that people could write their own open source clients for it. Au…

It should be easier to detect if they're reading it at the ends because they'd then have to retransmit the data to Facebook with a different key.
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