Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by spsful » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

leshow wrote: post #120

SamBam wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rephrase as "They are responsible for capturing 99% of the illegal content that is caught." i.e., of the illegal stuff that goes through their system, some of it is captured, and the majority of that is caught by Facebook's own system. Note, this article is recent and highly relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... > And when tech companies cooperate fully, encryption and anonymizatio…

> Note, this article is recent and highly relevant.. Talk about fear mongering, that article is horrible. It's the same old argument. "Child abuse is bad therefore you can't have any privacy", they position you as being against protecting children when your stance is actually pro security & privacy.

Exactly. I see it from those exact same perspectives.

The USA took steps to actually protect property in its founding, something the Supreme Court has interpreted to include privacy as well. From this perspective, the rights of citizens wither away when the government is allowed to take the smallest step towards mass surveillance. For that reason I am very much against it.

My other perspective is from a security standpoint. I believe that if companies are not doing everything in their power to protect themselves and their users from data loss / hacking / theft, they put everyone at risk. Intentionally lessening the security of a product at the request of the US government means giving a potential thief or hacker more attack vectors to exploit.

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

#522

Post by sjy » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:21 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #178

cmroanirgo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this article is for real, then it's certainly not being pushed mainstream. > The Times’s reporting revealed a problem global in scope — most of the images found last year were traced to other countries — but one firmly rooted in the United States because of the central role Silicon Valley has played in facilitating the imagery’s spread and in reporting it to the authorities. Clearly the NYT is laying the problem a…

These aren't new images, they're the same images that have been around the web for decades, that's why they are able to be flagged (via hashing, unless companies are training neural networks to know what child pornography is vs regular pornography). You need to benchmark those numbers versus the increase in regular images sent over the web in general. If it's increasing faster than that increase then there is an argu…

The NYT article refers to "both recirculated and new images" and states that "in some online forums, children are forced to hold up signs with the name of the group or other identifying information to prove the images are fresh." Isn't it just common sense that the proven existence of online paedophile communities that explicitly encourage the "production" of new child abuse material, in fact results in some net increase in the number of abused children, even if that increase is a small proportion of the total number of victims? Isn't it worth asking what can be done about it?

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

#523

Post by sjy » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

kd3 wrote: post #499

dheera wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Open source doesn't guarantee that the compiled source running on your device is the same as what you can view on, for example, GitHub. That is also a trust problem.

It is much easier to trust that `apt-get install pidgin` will run the published Pidgin source code, than it is to trust that Messenger or WhatsApp will only do the (undocumented) things that I expect them to do.

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

#524

Post by xenocyon » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

justanotherjoe wrote: post #421

xenocyon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I reject this disingenuous pretense of concern for "the children". Folks are eager to invoke children to justify the surveillance state while conveniently forgetting the plight of children when it comes to concentration camps, poverty, and climate change. Secondly, children themselves have frequently been the victim of surveillance abuses and there is no reason to suspect that this instance will be any d…

"Children have frequently been the victim of surveillance abuses" What are you talking about? I'm seriously asking. This sounds like something people say without having anything real behind it.

Here is one particularly egregious example: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/610k-settlement-in-school-webca...

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

#525

Post by feanaro » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:43 PM UTC

JamisonM wrote: post #385

tw04 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing the rape. But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecur…

That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else. It is trivial to prove that the second a criminal realizes a given communication mechanism is insecure they do not stop using it if it is convenient. Has every criminal in the world stopped using the phone after the first phone was ever tapped? And ALL of the above…

> You need better arguments than "if we can't stop all crime with an action it has no value" because it is a silly argument.

Arguments like "we all need to abandon privacy to maybe, potentially stop some crime somewhere" are equally silly.

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

#526

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

krzepah wrote: post #461

mindcrime wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ok let's turn that the other way, Do you say you want to apply a dictatorship state of global surveillance because criminals are going to use the internet? What about other tech available to them? Are we going to set up a surveillance mechanism in those as well? Scooters? Cars? Who's going to compile all that data? How is it protected? It's about the Governance of Information, and guess what, I want to be Governing m…

Not sure why this reply is to what I posted, since it seems to be making a different point. But FWIW, I almost completely agree with what you said there.

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

#527

Post by feanaro » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

iaml wrote: post #492

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else. It's not an assumption at all. The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications use…

> The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications used against them in court demonstrates this to be true It only demonstrates that for some people, it's true. What about cases where they were using secure channels and thus haven't been caught/charged?

What about it? Every criminal ever that never got caught managed to do so through using "secure channels" (and thus not getting caught).

Perhaps we should aim for not leaving any piece of space on Earth unsurveilled?

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

#528

Post by feanaro » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 3:59 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #292

loup-vaillant wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the two key things to remember are that "failure will happen" and Blackstone's principle. We have to, as a society, decide which direction we want to fail (modes of failure). We also have to decide what amount is acceptable (having 0 crime is a good goal, but we will never get there and need to be realistic). I think it is clear which way the founders of the country wanted failure to happen, which is Blacksto…

> (having 0 crime is a good goal, but we will never get there and need to be realistic).

Actually, please stop there and think about this for a second.

Having zero crime depends extremely strongly on the precise definition of "crime". Much more so than other, non-zero levels of crime.

This is only a good thing if you are absolutely sure that the definition of what constitutes a crime right now is perfect and immutable.

Extreme positions are almost always a bad idea and I think this is one of those cases.

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

#529

Post by johnisgood » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

thelittleone wrote: post #397

thothamon wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the specific question is, do you keep a phone in your home? If so, how is that better than having Alexa in your home?

I'm not suggesting one is better than the other. But two potential sources is surely better than one when it comes to surveillance.

Or worse, depending on the POV. :)

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

#530

Post by sjy » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

tmerc wrote: post #520

sjy wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this analogy apply to the competing goals of protecting privacy vs. detecting and preventing crime by monitoring private conversations? Which one corresponds to a plane getting shot down?

"captures 99% of child exploitation" The majority of bullet holes are in the wings, so those need armor; the majority of child exploitation is through Facebook, so they need access to the content of the messages. It's an assumption made on incomplete information. The engineers only saw bullet holes in the planes that returned. And law makers only have information about the criminals who get caught. At least that's my…

The wrong assumption is in BuzzFeed's reference to "99% of child exploitation." The letter, which they deserve credit for quoting in full, says that "more than 99% of the content Facebook takes action against – both for child sexual exploitation and terrorism – is identified by Facebook's safety systems" (which rely on Facebook being able to automatically analyse unencrypted messages), "rather than by reports from users" (which could still be submitted if Facebook implemented E2EE by default).