Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California • Hacker News Board

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#441

Post by tomcooks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #399

dannyw wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of how easy it is to find drugs and prostitutes?

Is it? I honestly don’t know. Seriously. I’ve never been offered drugs by anyone in my life and I couldn’t tell you if someone standing on a street-corner is someone simply wanting to cross the street when the lights change or an undercover cop… or an actual prostitute. What am I supposed to be looking for? (Yes, I’m on-the-spectrum and don’t get invited to parties, so I’m not representative of everyone else’s experi…

Similar situation as yours yet I got offered several times to so it's just a matter of learning how to spot them and not of going to parties, although that would make things faster (more people would help you ID the professionals).

Going downtown around 1am on a Sunday morning should get you the full package, at least in most European cities. City parks, albeit edgy and dangerous, are an almost sure bet.

Dealers usually ask you if all is fine and you need help with anything, prostitutes clues are usually attitude and attire, plus they often work in groups. A good undercover cop will be unrecognisable, for obvious reasons (they have to copy criminal behaviour to be successful).

Providers have a harder time than their customers (longer jail time and higher fines) hence the secrecy which makes it diffocult to spott them.

When in doubt assume it's not a professional, if they are they will make it obvious.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#442

Post by thegrimmest » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #440

thegrimmest wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells you a whole lot about the composition of either end of the bell curve. It means that in a given population the shortest people are much more likely to be, say, Taiwanese (average aheight 5'3"), and the tallest Dutch (average height 6'½"). Edit: To your point about group taxonomy, usually precision is only available to a level where genetic markers are present and distinct. This in turn comes from groups not…

There are two adult brothers somewhere in New York City. They have both of the same parents. One of them is 5'3" and the other one is 6'½". What's the probability that one of them is Dutch and the other one is Taiwanese? If your answer wasn't zero I would like to see your work.

If they are brothers then I suppose they could be mixed Taiwanese-Dutch. But that really isn't the point is it? I'm talking about trends in populations. It's an answer to the question of "Why do we see different representation of these groups on the height spectrum?", not "Explain the difference between these two individuals".

Edit: Also to assert that, given two random people on opposite ends of the height spectrum, it's much more likely that they are distantly related than closely related (controlling for sex) because (controlling for nutrition) height is a heritable trait.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#443

Post by tomcooks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 5:59 AM UTC

diebeforei485 wrote: post #341

nnutter wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACLU is not what it once was. I will not donate to them. Even the EFF is growing questionable. I would definitely be curious what recommendations people have.

The EFF takes weird policy positions. They're against speed cameras, but in favor of the status quo (police with guns manually pulling people over for speeding in cities).

Sorry what's weird about this? I assume they're against the creation of automated government databases of cars, licenses and persons (say with ML) and not tech per se

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#444

Post by genewitch » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

germinalphrase wrote: post #383

dcolkitt wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it really doesn’t. The United States has been a stable democracy with absolute freedom of speech for two and a half centuries. The same for Switzerland and the UK (British hate speech laws were only installed in the 1990s). In contrast the country where the Nazis actually came to power, Weimar Germany, had some of the most extensive hate speech codes of any Western nation in the 1920s.

We’re not even a hundred years out from culturally and legally discriminating against an entire race of people in the US. Democracy has been stable here (and continues to be) but for whom was it representative?

Which race? The US interred Japanese people during WW2. I hear that we interred people from central and south America for the last 5+ years, too.

We're not a hundred years from anything except gaslights.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#445

Post by int_19h » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

nonbirithm wrote: post #224

skoskie wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Apple is making a direct attempt at solving the issue as it relates to CSAM (and easily expanded to other data) and facing a huge backlash. I wonder if there’s no solution because we’re (myself included) are just stubbornly unwilling to consider any solution that isn’t absolute privacy. I’m not willing to sacrifice my privacy to a nosy government, but willing to consider solutions that might allow the governme…

Agreed. The general sentiment I perceived from HN at the time was that almost nobody was willing to accept Apple's CSAM scanning, even though CSAM had been confronted as an issue before the internet was widely available. I perceived a lot less room for opinions in favor of sacrificing a limited amount of privacy for greater public good, or similar. After the media finished its reporting on the subject, it seemed like…

It is driven by a moral panic - that the panic in question is about a very real issue doesn't change its underlying nature. So whatever measures are put in place this time, they'll be normalized and deployed when the next one happens.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#446

Post by tomcooks » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #428

zarzavat wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paradox of tolerance arises because (neo)nazis want to abolish free speech, indeed they want to abolish entire groups of people. What is legally protected as speech and what is actually speech cannot be equal. For instance, speech that involves property damage is not protected, even though that is a common kind of speech in certain circumstances (e.g. graffiti "Romans go home") Conversely, some groups abuse free…

> The paradox of tolerance arises because (neo)nazis want to abolish free speech The argument you're making is that free speech is important so we need to protect it by censoring people who advocate imposing censorship. But then you're advocating imposing censorship, which implies you should censor yourself. Which is why it's a paradox. You still have to choose between "don't censor things" and "censor things" with t…

It's not a paradox if you guarantee equal chance to express oneself in written form or speech and equally punish violent behaviour, which is what PP wanted to express I believe.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#447

Post by int_19h » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:13 AM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #393

jollybean wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you have no other way of investigating these criminals?" "Could you not put an officer out to surveille them?", Your argument kind of falls on itself there --> We can surveil them in person, but not digitally? Why? I think the tech crowd has this wrong. The issue - as you have indicated - is not 'By What Means To Surveil'. The issues are: Legitimacy, Proportionality, Oversight. Messages, tech, sign language, in p…

> proportionality and tactics are rare and unique Are they though? First it's "only" to catch the super-terrorists. Then it's only to catch the murderers. Then it's for VIP missing person cases. Then it's petty crime. Then it's for political opponents. Then nobody dares ask anymore about "legitimacy, proportionality, oversight." When those in power grant themselves more power, the onus is on them to prove they can't…

And to be clear, this isn't some hypothetical slippery slope, either - we've literally already seen it happen. E.g. various legislation passed ostensibly to target terrorism is routinely misused. Here's just one example that predates the Patriot Act, even: https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/04/without-suspicion/stop....

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#448

Post by int_19h » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:15 AM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #350

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The Internet may interpret censorship as damage and route around it, but spy agencies interpret laws as inconveniences and ignore them. As access closes in one place (i.e application layer), they will just get closer to the source (i.e operating system or supply chain)

I fully believe that by the end of the decade it will be illegal in some Western countries to go online with a device that doesn't provide a measured boot attestation that it is running a government-approved operating system.

I'll make a bet that it'll be UK, specifically.

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#449

Post by caf » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:15 AM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #246

teawrecks wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misread the post above. They're saying that the govt should be allowed to issue subpoenas, and nothing more. They shouldn't be allowed to mandate backdoors, or hack suspect's machines, etc. And citizens should be free to use cryptography to control their information. Also, "Impossible" is not the right term. "Extraordinarily expensive" is a better one. And yes, anyone can share public keys with each other…

> should be allowed to issue subpoenas, and nothing more Issue a subpoenas for something they know they can't architecturally fulfill? I would imagine the government will get mad and shut them down, no?

This doesn't seem that different from subpoening a McDonalds for their security footage, and getting an answer back like "sorry, we've already deleted the footage from that day".

Re: Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California

#450

Post by tomjen3 » Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #327

[flagged]

There is no paradox. You either support the right of everybody to peacefully assemble or you do not and if you do not, you don't support freedom of speech.