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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

#561

Post by dang »

ccrush wrote: post #224
saagarjha wrote: post #5

> We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety. Oh, so you’re asking for more end-to-end encryption? > While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content t…

In light of all the Epstein stuff, it sure sounds like "were raping children, so don't implement end to end encryption, or someone might rape your children." I'd say it's ballsy, but with how publicly they executed Epstein right under our noses, it seems like they just don't face punishment for breaking the rules and want to rub it in our faces. It's not like any of us would get away with that. Fucking pathetic. The…

Please don't post flamewar rants here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#562

Post by JamisonM »

feanaro wrote: post #525
JamisonM wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed.

Everyone should avoid silly arguments.

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

#564

Post by greyfade »

lxjm wrote: post #487
greyfade wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been bouncing around the idea of a fully decentralized end-to-end encrypted chat protocol for exactly this reason, but I've been afraid to work on it for precisely the reason this thread is being discussed. I know that if my name were attached to the project, I'd be facing all kinds of unwelcome scrutiny from the government and news agencies. I'd lose the very privacy I want to maintain by designing privacy-prot…

XMPP with OTR is exactly this. Facebook messager used to be compatible with XMPP.

Not exactly. I rather dislike XMPP's design, and what I'd like to see is something not only decentralized (relying at most on a DHT seed), but supporting group chats with trivially-expirable keys. My limited exposure to OTR suggests it only reliably supports one-on-one exchanges.

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

#565

Post by greyfade »

Unklejoe wrote: post #379
greyfade wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been bouncing around the idea of a fully decentralized end-to-end encrypted chat protocol for exactly this reason, but I've been afraid to work on it for precisely the reason this thread is being discussed. I know that if my name were attached to the project, I'd be facing all kinds of unwelcome scrutiny from the government and news agencies. I'd lose the very privacy I want to maintain by designing privacy-prot…

Check out Matrix. Sounds like what you’re describing.

There's a lot I'm not explaining, in part because I don't (yet) understand crypto well enough to know if my idea even makes sense, let alone is feasible.

Matrix is close, but not what I'm describing. It's far more centralized than I'd like to see.

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

#566

Post by gorgoiler »

gorgoiler wrote: post #494

How many crimes are solved through wiretapping or evidence gathered from Facebook servers? Facebook’s 99% figure needs more context — maybe that’s 99% of just 1% of all child abuse / sexual assault / terrorism crimes? Some more statistics would be useful to quantify the impact on criminal justice of losing either of those options. Otherwise the arguments just feel political or emotional. End-to-End won’t impact the m…

2,500 prosecutions as a result of “the work we did with Facebook in the last year”, according to UK government (Brandon Lewis, a minister on Radio 4, October 4th.)

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

#567

Post by concordDance »

SamBam wrote: post #513
concordDance wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very unconvinced it's lead to an explosion is child abuse. Child abuse has always been happening (several of the older members of my family were abused), it just wasn't broadcasted. Even today I bet 99% of child abuse is never caught on camera. The increase from child porn is probably negligible.

If you actually read the article above, you can see that there's actually now lots of new evidence that viewing child porn makes people more likely to commit abuse, and that it seems to be a causal relationship, not a "marijuana is a gateway drug" relationship.

I couldn't find that in the article and would be immensely skeptical of such a claim (how on earth would you establish causation as opposed to common cause?).

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

#568

Post by feanaro »

godelski wrote: post #532
feanaro wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 immutabl…

Why does my point have to depend on immutables? I'm really pointing out Pareto, which is still going to exist if you add or remove crimes. The only way I can see your counterpoint being an actual rebuttal, and not just pedantic, is if you redefine crime to be something meaningless. But if we're allowed to change definitions then we can't really have any conversation about anything. But language is imprecise and we ca…

It was not meant as a rebuttal of your overall point, which I agree with.

I'm adding to your point by saying that I don't consider "0% crime" as a desirable goal since crime is something defined by people and people are fallible, hence the definition is also fallible.

The problem is not in removing meaning from the word "crime". We all have an imprecise, handwavey meaning of the word in our minds when we use it. We usually mean something like "undesirable behaviour which benefits a single individual while harming others". The problem arises when you try to operationalize this loose notion into laws since this process frequently results in errors. Another way this can go sour is due to overreach by groups currently in power in an effort to stay in power, leading to loss of freedom (which is more applicable in this case).

In other words, some crime is actually people breaking the law because for good reason, like rebelling against an unjust, inefficient or overreaching law.

Therefore, it's better to strive for a low crime rate than a zero crime rate. This is also the conclusion you arrive at through the application of the Pareto principle.

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

#570

Post by Veedrac »

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…

Honestly, on HN I feel there is much more disdain for my position. Given the world we're in, Facebook being able to assist law enforcement around child abuse, sexual slavery and human trafficking provides a lot of value. I feel people on HN are underestimating the extent of these issues, underweighting their severity, and overstating the dangers of letting Facebook store private data.

Estimates say there are something like 20-40 million slaves in the world, and that 50,000 people are trafficked per annum in the USA. Something like 20% of slaves are sold for sex. Facebook is believed to be a common platform to facilitate this, though I haven't been able to find numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

In contrast, despite the occasional news post of a particularly incompetent company leaking a database of plaintext passwords, Facebook's data storage is pretty safe, and encryption does still afford a lot of protection. The idea that hundreds of thousands of people are going to have their private data extracted from Facebook through individual attacks against the servers is not well corroborated.

Totalitarianism is an important long-tail risk, but I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that these programmes are a path to it. Overall privacy rights quite plausibly are, but that issue exists primarily as a matter of policy and law, not as a matter of technology. If the laws are bad, Facebook illegally preventing protection of trafficking victims will not help those laws change to a more moderate position, and if the laws are reasonable, cooperating to prevent trafficking victims would not be harmful to positive political outcomes.

The scale of abuses would have to be multiple orders of magnitude smaller, or detection mechanisms incredibly ineffective, before this tradeoff made sense to me.

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