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How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

theage.com.au

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Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#91

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #74
roughcoat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh huh. Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century? How does a disarmed and helpless populace look in those circumstances? And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy? You trust them to protect you…

> Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century? Have you? Before Hitler came to power, the Weimar government was destabilized by - among other things - a latent civil war between armed paramilitary extreme-left and extreme-right groups. Hitler himself relied on such groups (from the right) to stage his first attemt to come to power via a coup. Even after he got elected, the groups were a cornerstone of his powe…

[deleted]

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#92

Post by curun1r »

jarym wrote: post #32
cJ0th wrote: post #28

> "I personally want to live in a world where reasonable people and companies would say, 'You know what? Under the rule of law, and with the right oversight and a warrant, communications can be listened to when it's needed to protect us.'" Yes well, I don't. But hey – why not facilitate foreign actors spying on our companies so that we may or may not catch any terrorists?

I would if it meant: 1. The rule of law has not been compromised (snowdon has shown it has already) 2. warrants are issued by a proper judiciary (not the likes of FISA) 3. Oversight that protected citizens privacy rights (let's all laugh at this one since it requires Snowdon to show us that oversight just doesn't exist) So, agree with you :)

Also important:

- warrants should have explicit expiration dates...no more indefinite intercepts. - cooperating companies should be able to publicly say anything as soon as the warrant expires. The gag orders are what have allowed the scope of monitoring to be hidden from public scrutiny and that scrutiny is what's needed to keep surveillance to reasonable levels.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#93

Post by irundebian »

roughcoat wrote: post #76
xg15 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. The argument was that law- violating gun owners kill children (and others) while law-violating encryption does not.

I doubt encryption does anything all by itself. And apparently, encryption-using terrorists--who would be violating the law if such laws were in place--do kill children. Manchester, you know, it just happened. Nice. Berlin. Stockholm. Pretty soon, it'll just be a "name the city" game where the only question is how bad the most recent terrorist attack they suffered was compared to the rest. And just as gun control law…

Of course law aren't magic, but of course they can have impact on society such as the reduce of weapons.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#94

Post by type0 »

amboar wrote: post #8
askvictor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing firms not to implement end-to-end encryption is forcing firms to implement flaws in their encryption software. Which is why they're not pursuing it presumably.

> Given the difficulty of cracking end-to-end encrypted messages during transmission, one option would be to improve warrant-based access to communications at the sender or receiver ends, Senator Brandis said. > "At one point or more of that process, access to the encrypted communication is essential for intelligence and law enforcement," he said. > "If there are encryption keys then those encryption keys have to be…

> "If there are encryption keys then those encryption keys have to be put at the disposal of the authorities."

And if each user has their own set of keys? Will every user get a visit from security agencies asking to turn those over to the government?

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#95

Post by badminton1 »

cynicalbastard wrote: post #37

freedom-loving internet users will soon know how gun owners feel. every single bogus argument for gun control or "assault weapons" bans can, and will be, used against internet speech freedom and information privacy, now that the western political establishment has taken it upon themselves to strip you of your free speech rights after seeing how trivial it was stripping you of your guns, and how much enthusiasm their…

The problem is the fallacy consisting in the idea that that owning a gun puts you in equal terms with the government. That used to be the case maybe circa 1776, but no longer the case in 2017, 241 years later.

The government operates a regular, professionally trained armed forces with modern, military grade equipment. Your weapons can barely counter law enforcement, let alone an army.

Good luck solving a dispute with the government by firing a semi-automatic gun at an Apache Helicopter firing you back with 6000 rounds per minute.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#96

Post by dang »

diego_moita wrote: post #55
roughcoat wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What nonsense. It's obvious what the parent comment meant. Law abiding gun owners by definition do not kill innocent children, just like law abiding people do not use encryption nefariously. Encryption and guns are both tools, with nothing intrinsically good or evil about them. Yet law abiding gun owners were punished and had their rights stripped throughout most of the world on the pretense that it would somehow hel…

> Encryption and guns are both tools Fireworks are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous. Sulfuric acid is a tool, but need to be regulated because is dangerous. Plutonium is a tool, but needs to be regulated because is dangerous. Opioids are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous. Cars are tools, but it's use needs to be regulated because are dangerous. I find it amazing that I need to…

Would you please not do flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong or irritating some other comments are? We're really trying to avoid the downward spiral here.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#97

Post by dang »

roughcoat wrote: post #61
diego_moita wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Encryption and guns are both tools Fireworks are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous. Sulfuric acid is a tool, but need to be regulated because is dangerous. Plutonium is a tool, but needs to be regulated because is dangerous. Opioids are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous. Cars are tools, but it's use needs to be regulated because are dangerous. I find it amazing that I need to…

If your idea of reasoned discussion is responding to my comments with logical fallacies, there's no point in wasting any more time on you. Good day.

This breaks the HN guidelines. Accounts that are uncivil and flame others eventually get banned, so would you please (re)-read the following, and abide by them? That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

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

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

Another thing we're trying to avoid is the generic ideological tangent: that's when a topic with something specific in it (Australian government current encryption plans) gets diluted into topics like "pacifism" and "genocide", about which no HN thread has anything new to say, but plenty of people will get agitated and sucked into battle. This is the reason why the guidelines say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#98

Post by dang »

shermozle wrote: post #38
cynicalbastard wrote: post #37

freedom-loving internet users will soon know how gun owners feel. every single bogus argument for gun control or "assault weapons" bans can, and will be, used against internet speech freedom and information privacy, now that the western political establishment has taken it upon themselves to strip you of your free speech rights after seeing how trivial it was stripping you of your guns, and how much enthusiasm their…

So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me? Sorry, your argument is bullshit.

This violates the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't do that, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Besides frequently being uncivil, it leads to massively poorer comment threads, as demonstrated below.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#99

Post by dang »

cynicalbastard wrote: post #53
shermozle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me? Sorry, your argument is bullshit.

> So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me? don't worry, i suspect your government will be ramming this answer down your throat by year's end.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do this with.

If you want to comment here, you need to be a good community member. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all—and certainly avoiding ideologically inflammatory, nationalistically nasty comments.

Re: How the Australian government plans to access encrypted messages

#100

Post by dang »

roughcoat wrote: post #44
shermozle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I go crazy armed with military grade encryption, how many school kids can I kill before the cops get me? Sorry, your argument is bullshit.

Wait, you're calling his argument bullshit? You didn't even make an argument, you just said something completely nonsensical.

This is the sort of wretched flamewar that we ban accounts for if they do this again. Please don't do it again. HN is not a place for nasty battles.
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