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U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#551

Post by kazinator »

didntcheck wrote: post #373
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There should no compromise on my privacy ever. We are not (yet) in a dictatorship and I’m not a criminal. Why should I suffer because governments are incompetent?

Devil's advocate: we accept compromise of people's basic freedom of movement (via arrest) when under investigation. Even though we know a non-negligible amount are innocent, virtually everyone considers it a necessary compromise Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy,…

A compromise here is not technically possible. There is no half crypto. Crypto with a backdoor is not crypto.

Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits.

Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#552

Post by shwouchk »

koiueo wrote: post #526
koiueo wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because russia is a bag guy? (Idk about China, but considering they support russia...) Have you been living under a rock?

I'll be explicit: russia is a terrorist state. Majority of russian population supports the unprovoked genocidal war it currently wages on Ukraine.

Are you the speaker for the majority of the population?

Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#553

Post by isaacremuant »

wkat4242 wrote: post #141
maeil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this? If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.

But the Tories are not in power. Can't labour just repeal it?

My sweet summer child. It's a false dichotomy, like most of these types of issues, it has actual bipartisan support.

Same thing happens in many other countries no matter how strongly HN users want to tell you A is literally hitler and B is great.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#554

Post by nozzlegear »

reverendsteveii wrote: post #531
r3trohack3r wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there. https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/ Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.

You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"

> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.

What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#555

Post by oneplane »

TechnicalVault wrote: post #347
matthewdgreen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that turning off ADP in the U.K. is sufficient to appease the British Government. The Investigatory Powers Act can also be interpreted to give the U.K. the right to ask for encrypted data from users outside of the U.K. (see Apple making this exact point in a filing here [1].) Turning off ADP in the U.K. doesn't end the controversy if that's what's at stake. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.b…

It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?

What stops them is one of two things:

Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.

Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#556

Post by blibble »

Jigsy wrote: post #520
blibble wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quite why Labour deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything authoritarian I don't know Labour was behind: - forced key disclosure (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000), still in force - 72 day detention without charge (Terrorism Act 2006), defeated before it became an Act - national identity register and mandatory id cards (Identity Cards Act 2006), ripped up by the next Tory government - various attempts a…

Didn't they abolish double jeopardy and introduce secret trials as well?

yes, more Jack Straw specials

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#557

Post by ajsnigrutin »

botanical76 wrote: post #198
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this kinds of arguments... both sides want to read your private data, but it's bad if 'the other side' does it? It's your current MI5/government that wants access to apples data.

My interpretation is that it is an argument against trust in authority in privacy discussions. A: Privacy matters! B: Why should you care if you have nothing to hide? A: If you have nothing to hide, then give me the password to your Facebook. B: I don't trust you with that, but I trust my governments and relevant authorities. The point is that B's faith in authority is flawed as the "powers that be" are an eternally…

I always look at this from the other side...

Side A abuses (legal, governmental) power, and instead of "lynching" them for that, we turn the issue into "this will become bad only because of side B will do the same". To me it looks like someone supports side A, and wants to limit the "badness" of whatever they did, but still can't support the thing, so they find the way out by claiming that the other side will do something bad with that data, as if the collecting the data (chats,...) isn't bad enough by itself.

I understand your analogy with friends and facebook, and explaining that stuff to your grandma in this way would probably work... maybe even better if you used "your neighbor Sally works for the government, she could read your chats too, do you really want that?"... but on a technical "forum", it (to me) gives off very politically biased vibes.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#558

Post by selendym »

pmlnr wrote: post #530
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #503

For years, law enforcement pushed for encryption backdoors, arguing they were necessary to combat crime and terrorism. In the US, after Salt Typhoon compromised telecom networks—including court-authorized wiretap systems—the FBI has now (somewhat reluctantly, I think) started advising government officials to use end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp to protect themselves . [1] I think the UK government i…

No, the government is always exempt. Citizens shouldn't be allowed e2e, the government, that's ok.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the government is, of course, composed of... individual citizens.

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#559

Post by gnfargbl »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #522
gnfargbl wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except perhaps for people living near the border in Northern Ireland, "going to the EU" for warranty work is a completely unfeasible suggestion. It's not exactly a short or cheap journey for most of us!

Ireland doesn't have a single apple store in it. The closest thing that exists are stores in their authorised reseller program.

That's really odd -- Belfast but not Dublin? Why?

Re: U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

#560

Post by JusticeJuice »

TechnicalVault wrote: post #347
matthewdgreen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that turning off ADP in the U.K. is sufficient to appease the British Government. The Investigatory Powers Act can also be interpreted to give the U.K. the right to ask for encrypted data from users outside of the U.K. (see Apple making this exact point in a filing here [1].) Turning off ADP in the U.K. doesn't end the controversy if that's what's at stake. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.b…

It creates a nasty precedent doesn't it? If Apple can provide the UK government with foreign data, what's to stop Russia or China making them provide data on UK minister's phones, or more likely dissidents in exile? I can't see on what basis the government thinks they're going to get to be exceptional here?

There are tangentially similar precedents already, such as the American FACTA law. It is obviously a quite different context, as it just relates to financial information, not all information - but it's a law from the US government, that demands foreign companies send information back to the US.

The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...

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