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Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

fortune.com

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Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#401

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

s3p wrote: post #374
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse, and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E. Apple provided the answer for the how.

HN commenters leave so much context out of the discussion. Google is already scanning photos for CSAM. Meta is already scanning photos for CSAM. Dropbox, OneDrive... EVERY storage provider is scanning your photos for CSAM. And yet confusingly you only complain about Apple.

It's amazing how many times this has to be repeated. Meta/Google/DropBox can scan to their hearts content on their own machines. They own their machines, they can do whatever they want with them. Apple normalized the notion of having your own hardware spy on you at the government's behest.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#402

Post by ipv6ipv4 »

s3p wrote: post #375
ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #87

This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity. Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.

No, this has nothing to do with that. Dropbox scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Google scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Meta scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Microsoft scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Apple did not (and still does not) scan your images in the cloud for CSAM. Notice anything different here? The privacy company wanted to do what everyone else was already doing in a privac…

This argument is over. The 'screeching minority' convinced Apple that the 'privacy-preserving' nonsense was nonsense. I don't know why you are so desperate to cling to such a bad idea that its main proponent, Apple, decided it was indeed bad. It's like trying to be holier than the pope.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#403

Post by frabbit »

s3p wrote: post #376
frabbit wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Signal is not the solution. The position that they are taking publicly in this dispute with the UK vassal state is correct on the face of it. But they now have some people on their board that raise red flags for anyone interested in privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346396

Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Unless you have a well-known, more powerful alternative organization that we can donate to, this is the solution for right now.

Signal Corp is doing just fine. Those donations would have a much bigger effect for the people developing Matrix and associated applications.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#404

Post by frabbit »

int_19h wrote: post #391
frabbit wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are legally recognized to have personhood in the USA. They are also legal entities. Anyway is a "person" not also a legal entity in some way? In short, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is precise enough.

"Legal person" is not the same thing as "person", not even in law. But to be pedantic, empathy is for those who are capable of expressing empathy in return.

Agreed. My attempt at a quibble was foolish.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#405

Post by maqp »

_8j50 wrote: post #225
maqp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific targeted client. So how are you backdooring the client that -- where ever you download it from -- can be dumped from the phone and compared against self compiled client with a cryptographic hash? Introducing intentional, ubiquitous vulnerabilities is also a terrible idea, because exploits for those can leak or be stolen (that has already happened, see Shadow…

> Introducing intentional, ubiquitous vulnerabilities is also a terrible idea No e2ee app has compromised device part of their threat model. People get ratted all the time on their phones bu criminals. This is the same thing except the gov is nice enough to not look ar everything, just scan for content > Writing a script that comments out the lines of code for such scanning, and that compiles the application from sou…

>No e2ee app has compromised device part of their threat model.

Oh really, here's one I made earlier https://github.com/maqp/tfc :-)

>The whole OS can.

So how are you backdooring a bash script that comments out lines of code from Linux source before compiling it?

You lying to policy makers with "it can be done" mindset sound like a stupid con that burns a lot of money and time in the process.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#406

Post by norir »

logicchains wrote: post #237
norir wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this idea. A somewhat related idea I've had is that instead of giving the supreme court ultimate power to overrule and/or reinterpret existing legislation they instead would be given power to call a referendum. Each justice would have the ability to attach their own revised version of the law to the referendum and there would be a voting process to determine which version of the law to accept as canonical. Thi…

>This would prevent the kind of situation we have right now where the court is controlled by a minority group that is imposing its views with impunity You're completely missing the point of the supreme court. It's explicitly not a democratic institution; it's purpose is to protect the constitutional rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. The other two branches are democratic; isn't that enough for y…

I have much more faith in democracy, flawed as it is, than the Supreme Court.

> Surely you see the point of the US being a republic; rule by law, not by men.

Men wrote the laws.

> In your vision of the supreme court, if the majority decided they wanted to lock up some minorty and send them to gas chambers, the court couldn't do anything to stop them because the populace would vote for it in a referendum. That kind of thing has happened countless times in history in countries that didn't have a strong court system capable of protecting people's rights from the tyrrany of the majority.

I agree the Supreme Court has effectively protected minority rights: the minority of wealthy property owners. I'm somewhat confident that the historical list of Supreme Court injustices that served to oppress vulnerable minorities (e.g. Dred Scott and Japanese internment) is longer than the list of times the Supreme Court has lifted those same minorities up.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#407

Post by AdrianB1 »

thebiss wrote: post #389
AdrianB1 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people describe the UK situation like these, they are cancelled, downvoted to hell and called right wing extremists. I am positively surprised you were not downvoted or flagged. What is UK trying to achieve? To maintain, as much as possible, a pretty controlling state in power. It is a country with no free speech, no significant human rights of any sort, population is at the mercy of the govern and they want to…

As an American with family that engages political debate at too many gatherings, can you explain what "no free speech" means in the UK? I assumed that members of the UK public could always say "_____ the prime minister". There was even a Black Mirror episode involving a pig...

You can be arrested for speech offenses, like a Facebook or Twitter post. Plenty of solid examples on Internet.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#408

Post by ric2b »

ghklqa wrote: post #265
etothepii wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand anything about the British system if you think that "removing laws from the books" matters at all. As demonstrated by COVID regulations in emergency the law can be changed very quickly. Modern armies (like NATO members) have really got very little to gain by conscription. Being a modern soldier has very little to do with being cannon fodder.

Modern warfare against insurgents, where CNN broadcasts the night vision green victory footage. Unfortunately, in Ukraine both sides are cannon fodder again because modern anti air defenses are so good that the fighting relies on 155mm howitzers again. Which NATO has just run out of and has no capacity to manufacture in sufficient quantities.

Russia constantly shares footage of their Ka-52 helicopters striking land vehicles, so clearly air vehicles are still able to operate in important areas.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#409

Post by immibis »

Barrin92 wrote: post #136
immibis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.

Given that according to the last question on that survey the public also overwhelmingly (~90%!) supports holding senior managers personally accountable and punishable by law should firms fail to comply I think it's fair to say they want authorities to have the ability to enforce these measures. The GCHQ has nothing to do with it.

If you ask people "Should CSAM be caught?" they'll say "yes" because, duh.

If you ask people "Should phones scan their files for CSAM?" a good part will say "yes" because it doesn't sound like it affects anyone outside of child pornographers.

If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM?" most people will say "no".

If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM, and should we send Apple executives to prison if they don't make their phones do this?" most people will still say "no".

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