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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

#801

Post by chgs »

anonym29 wrote: post #724
8note wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the UK has been ahead of the US on anti-liberal policies for the past decade or more. bexit came before the trump election

do you have other examples? I have a limited perspective as an American, but I understand Brexit to have been more or less an exception to the way the political winds have generally been blowing in the UK in the last 15 years? Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l…

Brexit was the tipping point. The “right wing” Tory party in power was progressive - gay marriage for example. This fell apart when the U.K. said it wanted more right wing and kicked out the Liberal Democrat’s. The leader of the Tories - Cameron - had to then rely on the right wing minority of his party and compromised with a referendum. This was lost by 4 percent and that was everything needed for 5 years of chaos, which then doubled down with the most statist intervention in centuries with covid.

Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.

Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.

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

#802

Post by chgs »

DocTomoe wrote: post #738
anonym29 wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have other examples? I have a limited perspective as an American, but I understand Brexit to have been more or less an exception to the way the political winds have generally been blowing in the UK in the last 15 years? Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l…

Well, ever since the early 1990s the UK have been CCTV capital of the world, where you could not go to a neighborhood shop without being watched by the government in medium-to-large cities. We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.

Yet it’s a private American company that has the most cameras everywhere, with no control over them. I’m far more concerned about my neighbours ring camera than I am about a regulated public cctv system.

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

#803

Post by necovek »

Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.

I believe we should increasingly turn to steganography as a way to ensure our privacy (obviously, combined with encryption). Something that provides simple plausible deniability but lots of data to use as a carrying medium should become the default selection (like "personal videos" — a great use for our phone cameras to build an extensive collection), so even if "identified" as potential carrier for the data, it would be impossible to convict someone over it.

I can imagine a scheme where your secret passphrase defines what bits of data in a video to use to carry actual data and yet avoid changing the output too much. Obviously, coming with a non-reversible algorithm that takes into account different lossy video encoding schemes is non-trivial, though I am sure there is some (plenty?) prior art to build off of.

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

#804

Post by [deleted] »

MrScruff wrote: post #760
xp84 wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t think the UK is a big enough market for Apple to be that worried about the following, but if the government and Apple escalate to the point of Apple pulling out of the UK, it would be pretty easy for the government to force all of its telecoms to ban any new iPhones from their mobile networks. So the citizens will probably not get to simply walk right around the restrictions that way, assuming the gover…

Given the desperation for economic growth in the UK, the idea that they would inflict such a massive bit of self harm on themselves over increased spying options is frankly ludicrous.

[deleted]

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

#805

Post by chgs »

leoc wrote: post #775
michaelg7x wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don’t understand where they went wrong on curtailing free speech rights of their citizens, privacy rights, etc. Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminali…

The war on terror was a big thing in the UK long before 2001—largely because there was in fact quite a lot of terrorism going on there, to be clear.

30 years of US funded bombings across the U.K. stopped in 2001 so there’s that.

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

#806

Post by ChrisKnott »

negus wrote: post #174

Not surprised, considering UK's ridiculous key disclosure law (United Kingdom The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), Part III, activated by ministerial order in October 2007, requires persons to decrypt information and/or supply keys to government representatives to decrypt information without a court order.) that makes anyone with high-entropy random data (which is undistinguishable from the crypto-…

It's incumbent on the prosecution to prove that you know the key they are claiming you are withholding. It is a defence to say you forgot it, or that the data is random. The prosecution would have to prove that you didn't forget it and that the data is not random.

In most cases it requires a court order as well.

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

#807

Post by ExoticPearTree »

JusticeJuice wrote: post #560
TechnicalVault wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Actually the foreign banks have to do this, and if they don't and get caught, they will be barred from accessing the US financial market.

That is why, as a side effect, some refuse service to US citizens.

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

#808

Post by mr_toad »

autoexec wrote: post #540
Paradigma11 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think that is actually true in those cases. Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns....... Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power.…

> Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia. America's concer…

People were wary of Russia as an aggressive imperialist state both before and after Russia was communist.

Fear of communism is almost an orthogonal issue, and it has more to do with fear of insurrection and revolution.

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

#809

Post by krn1p4n1c »

int_19h wrote: post #659
krn1p4n1c wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is increasingly becoming “where?”. Every place seems to be moving in this direction.

New Zealand.

They're seeing their own shift to the right as well. https://theasialive.com/how-progressive-new-zealand-shifted-...

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

#810

Post by milesrout »

talldayo wrote: post #567
altairprime wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government. I don’t agree that your citation is relevant here. Apple is a US company. Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices, however uncomfortable that is to consider. Revoking privacy guarantees globally, reversing years of public opinion gains overnight, is not. The UK cannot do anything to materially harm Apple…

> As Apple isn’t based in the UK and owes no fealty to their government Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt. > Bribing loc…

Apple has nothing to fear from antitrust because it has no market power. It is an expensive premium product in every category in which it operates and there wre numerous cheaper alternatives in those categories.

The delusion of people on this website thinking that Apple, a minority supplier of cellphones, is somehow a monopoly. LOL is the only reply I can think of.

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