Live data from Hacker News

U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

reuters.com

81–90 of 109 posts

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#81
post #20

Easily tapped central server(s) is my nutshell theory of why rightwing extremists aren't being kicked off of Twitter. Third-party doctrine, and all that.

I honestly can't tell what groups are being banned, nor what the rules are. Isis isn't banned but random right winger is. Jimmy Dore and Kyle Kulinski have pointed out seemingly random left wingers getting banned, Sarah Jeong gets a blue check. It all seems so random and incoherent. I am genuinely lost.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#82
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a case of the government trying to force Facebook to essentially strip out their technology; saying technology is the solution here is kinda ignorant of the actual issue

technology owned by a single company you can coerce is the issue.

I think that’s close, but until a technical solution to this comes around, we’ve got to look elsewhere.

An easy target is saying the government is too powerful. That would be a mistake. If Facebook were more powerful than the government, we would no be in any better hands.

The problems with the US government are that it does not work for the people.

It would be painfully short-sighted to say this debacle goes to show the gov and private companies are not too involved with one another. This will be handled with some deal that will deepen the coupling and citizens will not have a say. That’s how most things in our lives get handles. Without regard for us, that is.

Private interests have eroded our state of civility. Citizens voices mean nothing and that is all that’s going on here.

We need our government back. Nothing else is going to solve this, unless of course we can actually address the technical issue that you raised. That would be nice.

A government that was our government would simply not step over this line. It’s possible; not easy, but possible.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discussion should never be framed as a choice between legal solutions and technical solutions. They are complementary. The legal approach is correct and easy for the public to understand. Explained correctly it is also popular. The government used to have to do things like get a warrant and investigate specific crimes. They couldn't listen to everyone's phone conversations all the time and they shouldn't be able…

Technical and legal solutions are not complementary, they're relatively unrelated. Legal rules addressing behavior are about what we "should" do. Technical rules are about what we "can" do. Technology is about implementation and enforcement, law is about what we consider to be the correct result. But the main place where law and tech come together is enforcement. For law to work at all, it has to be enforced relative…

> Technical rules are about what we "can" do.

And legal is about what recourse we can seek afterwards, when we understand we've messed up the implementation and security had failed.

Relying on legal protections alone is absurd. Relying on technology without any legal recourse for failures maybe somewhat less so, but still not suitable for this "real" world we live in. Not without reconsidering our approaches and attitudes to way too many things.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#84
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No good, it is already standard for forensic teams to clone and checksum a hardrive before attempting to look through files. The clone is sent to evidence and any password attempts will be made on a copy. The "original" copy will be kept safe and any number of passwords can be used against nth iteration of copying the clone.

Isn't this the purpose of the secure enclave on iPhones? Taking the drive away from the secure enclave makes the drive useless and the enclave only allows a few password attempts.

This is exactly this. It also allows a weak password (4 digits PIN) to de ok. The enclave which holds the actual encryption keyd will refuse to hand them over if the right trigger is hit (too many attempts, too high a rate,...)

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see the point, without encryption, there's no modern web, no e-commerce, no smartphones, absolutely everything relies on it like water. Unless you want to go back to pre-2000's technology of course.

Of course e-commerce will be fine, because browser vendors will obtain licenses to ship TLS modules and as a condition of such will include the .gov root cert. It's trivial when you can pass arbitrary legislation. Back in the 90s we had to deal with US gov restrictions on encryption export. Software companies and organisations fell into line. It was a big deal when 128-bit keyed Netscape became available globally in…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#86
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's too late to criminalize prostitution, every is already having sex" "It's too late to criminalize possession of drugs. Half the country takes pharmaceuticals!"

The War on Drugs is considered a failure and in parts of the world like NSW, Australia made prostituion legal in 1979 in both cases because criminalising things most people use generally doesn't work and all you do is randomly jail people for doing the exact same thing as a large proportion of the population.

Sure, it's a failure. But you can still be jailed over it.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#87
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point does the technical community stop trying to technically interfere with the efforts of law enforcement, and start trying to change the laws that make law enforcement behave this way? Law enforcement and government are addicted to power to an unhealthy degree. Convincing people to voluntarily give up power is rarely successful. You seem to believe majority support is enough to make something happen. It…

The Public Option has 75% popular support. Medicare-For-All has 59% popular support. [HR] Yet we have neither. Brexit was decided on an embarrassingly close vote: 51.9% So we have two seemingly popular things that haven't happened and one that has happened but was not so popular (but it turns out that it was more popular than was suspected by anyone beforehand). I'm afraid that is politics. If it helps, I am not a fa…

> Sometimes we simply have to accept that our personal will does not always dovetail with that of the majority - that is how democracy works.

That's true. But said acceptance doesn't need to translate to acceptance of the laws that the misguided majority enacts - you can sabotage those instead, Underground Railroad style.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#88
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

technology owned by a single company you can coerce is the issue.

I think that’s close, but until a technical solution to this comes around, we’ve got to look elsewhere. An easy target is saying the government is too powerful. That would be a mistake. If Facebook were more powerful than the government, we would no be in any better hands. The problems with the US government are that it does not work for the people. It would be painfully short-sighted to say this debacle goes to show…

I am not sure what you are onto. People are still voting for about every election so the realization that the government is not what they wanted is not anywhere in the public psyche.

Id say it would be better to decentralize governments so that you dont have any great accumulation of power anywhere, and by bringing government closer to communities you automatically bring back power to the people.

Re: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger

#90
It's strange for the same issues with China there is 'outrage', and then for the exact same things here we see hand waving and 'technical' solutions.

What technical solution is going to protect the human being from the indignity of security personnel presuming the right to going through your personal papers and thoughts? And this is already in effect in US airports with no pushback.

It is this denial by many about what is happening at home and the absence of mainstream protests and push back that has allowed the the rise of surveillance capitalism, the NSA, secret courts, secret orders, secret processes and brazen surveillance demands by governments.

The worse it becomes the more the need to posture and distract by seeking to hold others accountable for the very things you are neck deep in.

Post reply on HN