Sure, encryption helps terrorists as well as ordinary citizens but it's my belief that freedom and privacy are more important than that. The work of police and security services has never been easy in a free society, but protecting and upholding that free society is the very essence of the job. Dilution of that freedom is therefore counter to the purpose for which these agencies exist, and so when the government tries to move in that direction we, as citizens, should voice our resistance, and keep voicing it until they understand.
There really aren't many other alternatives.
I'm all for a Utopian society where nobody needs to encrypt private messages, but so long as there are people in power who feel they need special treatment, then I will continue to demand the same level privacy as them.
It takes too much to reply: "Tell you what, I'm going to educate you better instead". Because you can educate all you want, you will not have results that helps your re-election 4-5 years down the road.
The scary thing is that the difference between the UK and the kind of place we might describe using words like "totalitarian state" is now more about how our laws are used in practice than what the laws actually say. The government and its agents already have very broad powers, our courts have already taken surprisingly illiberal positions when some of those powers have been challenged, and we lack the constitutional checks and balances often found elsewhere, more so if the government uses Brexit as a mechanism to remove those deriving from Europe without replacing them. We're basically just trusting that the government and its agents will be decent people and use the powers they have responsibly at this point, but as we've seen with the likes of Trump, that's a dangerous strategy when you don't know who the government will be in the future.
For example, Australia's Lindt Cafe siege - the guy was already under "24 hour surveillance" by ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence) - which did nothing to prevent the attack. Despite this, AFAIK there was not much blame placed on ASIO. I'm sure there are many other examples. I'm not saying it's an easy problem to solve, just that more surveillance is probably not the answer.
Sure, the attacker is the real culprit, but adding more laws and surveillance will not prevent crazies from doing crazy stuff.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said authorities already had "huge powers". There had to be a balance between the "right to know" and "the right to privacy", he said. [1]
Unfortunately when it came to actually doing something he provided practically no opposition to the Investigatory Powers Act.
Please don't attribute homicidal political views to insanity. These people don't have schizophrenia, and people with schizophrenia aren't terrorists.
If I need a communication to be secret, I will encrypt it, and I don't need special software.
I think the work of security services have never been easier as it is now thanks to the massive use of social networks and mobile phones, CCTVs everywhere, GEOINT, etc. At least for the Five Eyes.
This too will fail spectacularly.
I hope you're right, but I don't think so.
The next time there is an attack, I don't think there will be an outcry that the all-pervasive surveillance has failed us, only an outcry against the terrorists (who, let's face it, are the real offenders).
One might counter that the scenario I lay out above is not possible. However I would posit that technology enables our capacities to create/preserve and to destroy. However, perhaps stemming from thr laws of thermodynamics, it does seem that our capacities to destroy is always outpacing our capacities to create or preserve, and eventually the gap between these capacities will unsettle the center which cannot hold.
Survival is not a value. Survival is a prerequisite for a lot of other values, but it's not a value in and of itself.
As many people have difficulty grasping what living in a world without privacy would be like, let me propose a different solution: We'll put everyone into solitary confinement, to ensure everyone's survival, as I do not see the value of freedom of movement trumping survival.
Would you agree with that as well? If not, why not?
Also, you might want to realize that surveillance does not ensure that your set of values gets enforced. It's the values of whoever manages to obtain that power, and whose power as a result of the surveillance might be impossible to challenge. The idea that you could create such a power structure and then guarantee that it's going to be used exclusively to prevent that bio weapon from being built and used is extremely naive. You would instead most likely find yourself alive, living in a world that makes you constantly wish for being dead, but thanks to the surveillance unable to kill yourself.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, are you saying we need more surveillance to protect us because weapons are becoming easier to produce?
"We need to make sure that our intelligence services have the ability to get into situations like encrypted Whatsapp."
She has said she is "calling in" technology companies this week to try to "deliver a solution".
Marr asks if they refuse to do that, will you legislate to force them to change? She's not drawn on that.
Interview is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08l62r7/the-andrew-mar... [from 45:18]
I understood that UK IP Bill already mean that she already has the ability to e.g. demand a backdoored version of Whatsapp be sent to a target device, but that's not covered in the interview.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/investigatory_power...
It's absurd to think this can be resolved through legislation or cajoling companies into cooperation. But what really bothers me about this whole issue is that we already have laws in place that handle this situation, at least in the USA. In the USA, if you refuse to hand over an encryption key (or can't) and are being compelled to by a court, you can and will be held in contempt of court, and possibly convicted of destruction of evidence. The only thing that forcing people to backdoor their crypto does is allow government entities to investigate people without having sufficient evidence to compel them to give up their keys, and destroy the marketability of large scale, centralized end-to-end encryption solutions.
I mean, you could make the argument that end-to-end encryption restricts the ability to wiretap people, sure, but a wiretap warrant should require a decent amount of evidence, and at that point, there are most likely other options.
Amber Rudd seems hell bent on destroying their only chance.
I'm so sick of getting "this is an adult resource and you can't view it" anytime I search for information about a drug (pharmaceutical, not just "weed LSD and lols").
Great fucking way to encourage your future chemists. Maybe ban keywords like JavaScript, PHP and SQL while at it, them's the powerful drugs maaan.
"The Hindi-speaking handler guiding the men in Hyderabad also insisted on using a kaleidoscope of encrypted messaging applications, with Mr. Yazdani instructed to hop between apps so that even if one message history was discovered and cracked, it would reveal only a portion of their handiwork."
"the handler taught Mr. Yazdani how to use the Tails operating system, which is contained on a USB stick and allows a user to boot up a computer from the external device and use it without leaving a trace on the hard drive."
Even if the British government is successful with WhatsApp, can they do much against free, open source tools?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/asia/isis-messaging...
Why would they care about open source tools and niche use of encryption? Of course they don't. They are after mass surveillance and use fear of terrorism to push for it. It's very logical of them.
So they'll never run out of reasons to push further. Hooray.
For a corollary see the paucity of coverage on the mass demonstration in London yesterday.
Do we think they know our online banking software uses the same kind of encryption? Probably not. Andrew Marr not knowing this is annoying. But an entire government being ignorant of it is deeply worrying.
For me it seems to be more in a direction of so called "Big Brother" than real counter-terrorism.
Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?
This is incredibly dangerous for our society, no-one should have that much power. That power isn't about terrorism (or even very useful against terrorism), but about subverting governments, judiciary and businesses.
Don't forget that while they were talking to the IRA politicians were saying in public "we don't talk to terrorists".
It's basically impossible. One can also use steganography to hide messages in lolcat pictures, or music files. The only way to prevent this, I think, is to start a totalitarian surveillance state where using Free or custom software or hardware is punishable by death. Even then, I'm not sure this will be enough.
What they really need is to invent time travel, and murder Ada Lovelace.
They can't. The US tried it in the 90's when SSL sites could not use strong encryption outside the US and you'd need a license to "export" PGP... That went well! :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Install a device on one's head?
I expect it's quite likely this one was using WhatsApp because that's what he used; not because he read about its end-to-end encryption.
Don't think we can "tech" our way out of this.
It's actually easier than ever to ban encryption for messaging.
Would that stop determined people? No, but it's never been about that anyway. Just make the pool small enough and it becomes too difficult to use. (See PGP / email).
Also, if you genuinely legislate against encrypted messaging then it's easy to pick up on the relative handful of people who go outside the app stores to get encrypted messaging applications.
And it shouldn't come to technical solutions, we should have people challenge the notion that two people should never be allowed to share a private message, because that's why Rudd and the government is suggesting.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is enforceable.
Then there's how you use it. They could mandate all of X businesses could only use encryption that could be inspected by the state, so either weak encryption, or PKI where you send the government your site's private key or use the state's CA or something. They can also mandate backdoors in encryption used in certain ways. And they can mandate that weak encryption be used outside their country's borders.
All of these are real parts of US laws on cryptography from WWII to 2000 to prevent "export" of "strong encryption", because of course evildoers around the world might make use of these "munitions". US law still regulates how we can use or distribute cryptography around the world. It is illegal in the US to release open source crypto on the internet without notifying the Bureau of Industry and Security. And 41 other countries (including the UK) have similar laws.
The one thing the US has going for it is the 1st Amendment, which makes it illegal for the US to prevent its citizens from making or using crypto within the US.
That's not an issue. Writing solid encryption software is very difficult on its own. You will hear "do not roll your own crypto" all the time from security experts. We don't live in a James Bond universe and it's beyond the reach of terrorist organisations.
Beyound the reach of the terrorist organisations? We have already seen pretty sophisticated operations by relatively small crime organizations (like exploiting pseudorandom generators in casino slot machines). There's an established black market for exploits. I think writing an end-to-end encryption app is not much more difficult compared to this. What's more, it will even be perfectly legal in many countries, meaning you could legally hire professionals to do the job. Terrorist organisations won't need to esablish a development office in SV to write the app, they will only need to know how to use Tor and wire money to the app producer. Which isn't such a huge competence to ask for.
Sure that can go wrong as anything can, but it's far from rolling your own crypto and makes things a lot easier.
It's not. You can use existing software, reuse existing protocols, and stick to safe languages as much as possible. Even implementing your own crypto isn't all that difficult¹. I have written my own crypto library², and I can almost recommend it for production use.
[1]: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/rolling-your-own-crypto
Are you suggesting gpg has been backdoored? A simple wrapper around gpg is not-beyond terrorist organisations.
Of course it's utterly trivial to make a one-time-pad cryptosystem, and more practical in 2017 than ever. So what if the keylength must match the message length, my phone has a 32gb uSD. That's a lot of text messages.
Sure, but what's to prevent someone from building something on top of OpenSSL or PGP or whatever? Can't be that hard.
Also, we were shocked to discover that virtually ALL criminals rely on something called Oxygen to perform their work so this is now a controlled substance that will be heavily regulated.
We were then terrified to learn that after banning forks, terrorists were able to successfully eat with spoons or even their hands.
/s
Seriously, you cannot ban tools. Lawmakers have to approach this with a firm grounding in statistics (how LIKELY is a risk, relative to the magnitude of the measures to prevent it?). They also have to realize that some things are just necessary for society to function. Stop being paranoid.
If you're ok with encryption back doors you should also be ok with govt master keys for all your stuff (house, car, bank account, etc)
TBH I am surprised attackers do not better destroy their electronic equipment just before they carry out their attack. Pop your phone and SSD/flash drives in the microwave on high for a few minutes is pretty much going to destroy all evidence on them, and if not then chances are you are dead anyway so whatever data they might be able to get off will most likely be useless to them anyway.
Terrorists just use something else while the populace feels gradually more oppressed/controlled/...
In a way they get something for nothing.
Wow, that sentence got away from me.
(Then again, a 4 Lions moment where an intrepid terrorist slits his own throat with a molten SSD wouldn't be the worst thing in the world...)
Thats it guys. Mommy says no more maths.
Agreed. I'm terrorized when I hear gov representatives talking like that. Who's the terrorist, I wonder.
I'm not in the US. I have actually been very impressed by the outspoken actions of anti-Trump people in the US, with the massive protests and constant (well-deserved) media scrutiny. Also I never knew I could have so much respect for Hawaiian judges.
Why they didn't bother to vote is beyond me, though. Trump is a buffoon, but he was able to successfully motivate other buffoons to actually vote.
I did hear the description of their vote as being force to choose "between a disaster and a catastrophe" though, so that might go some way to explaining it.
Attacks of the past have shown that terrorists don't have a need to resort to encryption. The people involved in the Berlin attack last year, for instance, were monitored. Authorities knew they would strike but they didn't have sufficient incriminating evidence that would count in court to lock those guys up.
Even if encryption on messaging services were forbidden (which would make millions of law abiding people vulnerable in some way), terrorists could use throwaway email accounts from internet cafés and wrap their messages in password protected attachments.
The latter her and the precious home secretary (now PM) have been banging on about how under threat we are from the terrorist hoards for years now - all so they can erode freedoms and increase mass surveillance under the guise of 'keeping Britain safe'.
The idea that banning encryption of private conversations will prevent these few crazy people from causing damage is of course ridiculous.
They must know enough to know that this won't actually fix the problem, so I would have to surmise that they are just trying to do something and stay somehow relevant before their term comes to an end.
"Never mind the collateral damage, I'll be retired on a government pension by then."
If people knew the damage these idiots do, they would be in the streets.
Oh wait, they already are in the streets...
> That is my view - it is completely unacceptable
You know what else is completely unacceptable? Technologically illiterate, authoritarian jobsworths capitalising on tragedy to push through their agendas. But that's just my view.
Home Office always seems to attract the nastiest and dumbest of politicians, but this is a whole new level of dumb, and sadly will only gain her more support, because the general public either have no idea about the implications of backdoored crypto, or simply don't have any expectation of privacy and are happy to give up what little they have left in order to feel safe.
Then some genius will come up with what's essentially an "encryption is illegal for terrorists" bill and we'll have the best of both worlds: full use of encryption where we need it, whilst the terrorists can't use it because it's illegal!!
It is our duty, as the public, to continuously say "no".
Disregarding any negative consequences, their motivations are pretty transparent - there's little doubt that being able to read everyone's private messages will enable the intelligence services to better do their jobs. However, as Edward Snowden and others have already shown to us many times over the last few years, the UK government can't be trusted with this responsibility - and that this is probably the thin end of the wedge. Britain is already the closest thing that Europe has to a surveillance state, and the number of people killed in the UK by terrorism is vanishingly small - we are hundreds of times more likely to die in a car accident. Is it really worth giving up the last vestiges of our privacy for a little bit more security?
On the contrary. The Home Secretary is literally the holder of the ministerial authority that is required for police and security services to use a lot of the powers they have, and is supposed to be providing oversight and ensuring that those powers are used responsibly.
Unfortunately, that means the Home Secretary spends several hours every day just looking at cases presumably involving some very nasty people. You have to wonder how anyone could keep a balanced perpsective if they're doing that for 20, 30, 40 hours every week for months or years. Everyone who becomes HS in the UK turns into a severe authoritarian within a few months of taking the job, regardless of their prior political views or how reasonable they might be about other matters.
[citation needed]
Seriously, this argument is FUD. I'm sorry for picking on this quote, as I agree with the rest of your post, but allow me to go on a short rant..
We've seen this argument used many times over. It was used to introduce surveillance cameras on every UK street. What has it achieved? Less parking lot crimes[1].
The EU used it when introducing the data retention directive. Which was "nullified" eight years later due to violating fundamental human rights[2]. Of course, the infrastructure is still in place, and everyone is still using it. What has it achieved? AFAICT nothing except a blatant danger to society. The ability to know everything about anyone and actively take over their private devices is not something that should be taken lightly.
The GCHQ even admitted that the London terrorist was "on their radar". Well duh, who isn't. If that's not admitting mass surveillance is ineffective, I don't know what is.
It is impossible to prevent all crime before it occurs. The world isn't NP complete. Get over it. Or, to paraphrase Gödel: "I would rather live in a world that is inconsistent, than one that is incomplete"[3].
The intelligence agencies are just bored. They have no wars, except drugs and "terror". They use this "downtime" to get more data sources by influencing politicians.
Guess what, gathering more of the same shit data won't increase your signal.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file708_35775...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
[3] Not an actual quote, but I'm sure he would agree.
Now, private conversation is illegal.
I guess it leads to "ownlife".
Our Government is an absolute disgrace; and unfortunately, one to which there is currently no credible, strong opposition.
(from https://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewchampion/necessary-hashtags)
Labour were supporters of the recent IP Bill (it actually applied restrictions to some of the crazy powers the last Labour government gave to the police, which gives you an indication of their general position on these things). Labour have had authoritarian positions on crime and policing issues since Blair became shadow Home Secretary (1992). It has been part of their 'tough on crime' strategy of attacking the Conservatives from the right since that point and was a core part of the New Labour strategy.
The only thing a "stronger" Labour opposition would get you in this situation is a parliament even more united in support for restrictions on encryption.
Because that's where we're at currently.
Since the current prime minister supports her, I doubt it. It's an absurd position, but not without support in the current administration, just like her outspoken views on immigration.
And, I'm sorry to say, a large chunk of the public, who have for years been force fed rubbish from politicians and the media alike about the huge terrorist threat that threatens to destroy our country (when in reality just about anything else you can think of is more of a threat than the odd crazy with a knife and car...)
They can track his purchases via his debit card, his movements via CCTV + cell tower records, intercept his emails... but there's one bit of his digital life that's inaccessible and we're "going dark?"
We are burning bright with data. More data does not necessarily mean less terrorism.
The English might be better served by posting some armed officers in high value areas. The French do this at major train stations and tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower. This doesn't stop terrorism, but vastly reduces the body count.
Frankly, I think it's laughable that countries which resisted the Nazis will let 10 people dying make them consider rolling back civil liberties.
For most of history, governments have not had the ability to easily monitor the communications of their citizens. Widely available, user friendly encryption tools are just returning us to normal. Well, except for the massive trail of metadata everyone now leaves.
However, can't they already find out who the message was sent to? Whatsapp obviously has to have that information, and it appears they will give it to law enforcement:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whats...
I'm not sure that knowing the contents of that message will really help more than knowing the person who it was sent to.
It seems that they had this guy on their radar a few years ago, but didn't think he was worth keeping an eye on, so even if they could decrypt whatsapp messages it wouldn't really have helped them.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/uk-police-arrests-west...
* The UK government leads the "free world" in ignoring its own warrant process, and pursuing a "collect it all" strategy for commsec. UK citizens have no reason to trust that their government, given such access, would not abuse it. They've abused all their other access thus far.
* Privacy and Security help normal citizens and criminals alike. This is as true for a locked front door as it is for an encrypted message. We grant governments the ability to violate privacy under warrant - they may snoop, spy, enter our homes, and read our mail. We do not grant them the ability to violate security, however. They still have to pick the lock, steam the envelope, and crack the safe. These are important distinctions. We do not engineer a backdoor into all encrypted messages, for the same reason we don't mandate a government master key for all doors.
* The idea that you can legislate math out of existence is a joke.
There is one reason to cry at her position.
* They will eventually legislate this way anyway.
Yes, and then he went and did something stupid with easily accessible tools and acted alone.
You might have an argument if he was part of a coordinated attack against something but lone-wolf terrorism has always been defined as unpreventable by security services such as SIS. Once radicalised it's impossible to prevent individuals doing stupid stuff.
The only thing she has revealed his the conservative parties desire for totalitarian control. :(
No.
Even ignoring the erosion of privacy angle, this just doesn't work. Outlaw encryption, and only outlaws will use encryption. Provide government backdoors into the popular commercial messaging apps, and people coordinating terror attacks will just use custom, unknown, private encrypted messaging apps.
But you _can_ make the argument that if only outlaws use encryption then they're painting a target on their back, which leads to greater scrutiny by security services.
This is reasonably achieved by the current dragnet surveillance systems in place, along with ISP's logging everything.
I don't agree with it, of course I don't, but that's probably an angle people could take- But the angle Amber Rudd took is even more starved of sense.
It's like she didn't ask the appropriate question: "What could we have done to prevent this attack" and the follow up "If we had direct access to his phone and all of his communication information, what could we have caught" and the answer is _nothing_. He used tools commonly available to him, acted alone, probably told nobody.
Anyway, tell the bad guys you're watching the comms and they'll figure out how to talk, they're motivated and smart.
Well, if only outlaws used encryption and you sent a non-plaintext message then the police would knock on your door at 04:00 the next morning. That's what happens in Morocco if you like something related to terrorism on Facebook. A bit extreme, yes, but that's how some countries do it.
Sure, technically sophisticated enemies know not to like things on Facebook and know to use steganography, but most don't know and those that learn it through terrorist networks have a long vulnerable period where they are malicious but before they become sophisticated.
Obviously privacy is something that HN holds very close to its heart. But I'm interested in what do people here have to say about the privacy features are used by terrible people to do terrible things.
And I want to share something that I think is one of the best arguments for privacy, complete privacy. I do agree with this completely: https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
Regardless of what delusional politicians want, encryption is here to stay. It's just a matter of how much people are willing to give up to feel safe.
So we have to live with some level of crime. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be tough on criminals, but we have to accept that it is not possible in a free society to reach zero criminality.
I think the paradox is that people are reasonably relaxed with some level of criminality but are absolutely intolerant to any form of terrorism. And this intolerance is a new phenomenon. Terrorism isn't new. There isn't more terrorism in Europe than 20 or 40 years ago. In fact a few months ago I compiled the number of incidents and victims from a wikipedia page [1]:
https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Deads.png
https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Injured.png
https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Incidents.png
As you can tell, the 70s and 80s were rather more brutal, with far-left, IRA and Palestinian terrorism. And our democracies resisted much better the temptation to introduce more surveillance.
Now why have we become intolerant to terrorism? There are literally tens of thousands of knife attacks every year just in London. Most don't even make it to the local news. Why would this particular incident be treated as a state affair? Terrorism is the buzz of a mosquito. In itself pretty much harmless. But most people will not sleep in a room where they can hear the buzz. I don't have a good explanation. The only thing I can think of is the 24h news cycle where the media will make a big deal of anything that can push the audience up. But that doesn't explain everything. They do the same with plane crashes, but still repeat over and over that though spectacular, plane crashes are extremely rare and flying is extremely safe. Whereas when there is a terrorist attack, the message is "this could happen to YOU!"
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIuf1V1FhpY
(Tom Scott's "Oversight" from 2013)
I have to ask, what's up with the domain name? Is that some sort of public windows share folder?
As the saying goes, "insecurity is freedom." I've always found it somewhat disturbing that people have welcomed the walled-garden ecosystems popular today, which are essentially the cyber-equivalent.
One difference is that airlines advertise in mass media, terrorist organizations don't.
Baxter and Clarke: The Light of Other Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
People should be careful what they wish for.
However, this is the real world, and I'd want the serious trust issues fixed first. Surveillance of journalists. Invasion of privacy by journalists with the complicity of corrupt police. Surveillance of peaceful left-wing and environmentalist groups.
Let's not be ignorant of history either, of secret prisons and unaccountable courts. Let Martin McGuinness' death remind us of H block and the Maze. Who here is old enough to remember the bizarre compromise where Gerry Adams appeared on TV with his words read by an actor, because he was deemed too dangerous to listen to?
Then there is the business of foreign intelligence agencies. If some communication isn't completely private, can it be compromised by the Russians? Remember the US election?
We need to have a conversation about radicalisation, but much of it happens in public or verbally, and it's not at all limited to Islamic fundamentalism. It needs to include the far-right too.
The expectations you have are something I'd agree with too, but many other don't. So how do you reconcile this? Again the reconciliation process you will come up with is perfect according to you but most likely not according to others.
No one can ever win I guess.
A hammer, a knife or a government can be pretty useful, or pretty violent - depending on how you use it. This alone does not imply that a hammer, a knife or a government should not exist or be banned.
edit: words
Well, that's a very evasive argument in my opinion. It's absolutely true that objects are neutral, but you can't make a blanket argument with topics like these. That argument has been made lots of times by many (including me).
But it eventually breaks down. You can't give a child a gun and when the kid shoots someone say it was the kid's fault. Whose fault is it? I'm guessing you're going to say the adult responsible for putting the gun within the reach of a child. You're still taking away an object from the kid. In this case it was a kid who didn't know better.
Now this isn't a narrow argument. This becomes interesting when you get to powerful things, like say nuclear weapons. They aren't inherently evil too. But if you look around, UN is trying to ban them[1]. Shouldn't UN ban them?
What I'm trying to get at is that you can't always but the blame on people. Just like you can't blame a child for not knowing better, you can't blame a person for knowing better (although people do). Sometimes you just have to take the gun (or nuclear weapons or encryption) away.
I was with you up until 'government'. I regard states as exercising unjust authority over people and defenders of private property which is why I'm an anarcho-Communist. The way in which the modern world is divided up means that one must be a subject of some state, which I believe makes there no way to provide proper consent to be governed.
You can flip this for privacy too. The more governments can spy on everyone, well sure we may catch more terrorists and terrorism might even decrease. But at what cost? Totalitarianism? Shudder.
As always it's a trade off, some people loose the right to arm themselves at home but that means other people may not loose their life to a shooting.
Giving up such a valuable right to possibly stop attacks which, in the grand scheme of things actually harm very few people, is idiotic. Terrorism is obviously awful but the number of people in the UK actually affected by it is far, far too small to consider forgoing such an important right. And IMO, once you do that, the terrorists have won.
Take the attack in London last week for example. It doesn't require planning. Anyone could get in a car and mow down a lot of people in seconds. It doesn't need discussion on WhatsApp. It doesn't require purchase of weapons. It doesn't require you to do anything shady that could give you away more than a second before you do it. No amount of intelligence gathering could figure it out. You could force every citizen to wear a mic and body cam and you still wouldn't be able to stop it.
How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge.
Nice post. I agree almost entirely with you, but you can't put a bollard everywhere, and even if you could, bad people would find a way around or between the bollards, or simply another way to hurt people. It would be like playing a futile game of whack-a-mole.
At the end of the day, there are people who are so mean-spirited that they want to hurt innocent people for no reason, and they will find a way to do that no matter what we do. Honestly I think a lot of it is mental health more than anything we can really protect against.
It's not possible to wrap everyone in cotton wool, and in order to have some freedom we risk a small percentage of harm. There is no way around that. Without that freedom, there's also the IMO much larger risk of harm from the authorities themselves.
There's no way around it, living in the world involves some risk. It's unrealistic to not accept that risk and fantasize that all outcomes are preventable.
Like another comment mentioned, there are literally tens of thousands of stabbings in the UK every year. Why are we even talking about removing fundamental freedoms (the right to privacy) in order to probably not prevent a few unfortunate deaths per year? The payoff is so small and the cost is much too great.
Although we should have mechanism to protect from mass random surveillance.
Saudi Arabia punishes rape victims. We should help with that?
China punishes people who try to air grievances about government abuse and corruption. Again, we should enable them to be more effective in their invasive prying into those individuals than they already are?
In North Korea, your entire family can be punished if you dare be disobedient to the government.
In the US, we recently elected Donald Trump.
Etc. etc... why do you think governments can be trusted with this power?
On top of all that, once the technical means exist, they will also be discovered, cracked, and used by fraudsters, extortionists, and anyone else who can figure out a way to abuse the information.
They have the means to break, degrade or bypass the encryption and they emit statements like these so people remain confident that they're not being spied on.
This routinely happens after leaks reveal that certain type of traffic is being targeted. In this particular case, Wikileaks.
In the past after all the PRISM collusion was revealed, all the PRISM partners started their PR campaigns showing their "commitment to privacy", and the soap opera with law enforcement agencies claiming they couldn't decrypt devices. In reality they have many tricks they have used for years now, like setting up a fake cell antenna, impersonate a phone carrier to take over a device.
people have very short memory, it seems.
Stories like this fill me with a slight bit of hope that encryption works
Comments are about how stupid, or ill informed the Home Secretary and advisors are, or that they are being blackmailed by the intelligence services. Seriously? These kinds of comments are not going to get the broader public to support your ideals.
I think you misunderstand why she (and law enforcement) believe that they should have access to the messages. If the terrorist called someone they can get a warrant for the metadata and see who he called and whether it is relevant to the investigation. If the terrorist sent an SMS they can get a warrant for it. However, if the terrorist sends a WhatsApp message what can they get? Why should a WhatsApp message be treated different from an SMS?
That is what we as the tech community need to explain, why backdoors, weak encryption, and escrow are not a solution.
I value my privacy. I want my messages to be secure. But if the tech community keep acting like most of the comments on this, we will lose.
Also: Will breaking encryption stop a man grabbing a knife and jumping into his car? No.
Except, like, with a warrant, they can already open our mail. That's a pre-existing power.
The difference is under the current legislation a warrant doesn't get them the ability to read WhatsApp conversations; that's the point of contention here, and the difference with the above is perceived to be the problem.
Seriously who voted these idiots.
Evolution should be banned too and all those books about biology or astronomy. God made it all!
complete and utter bollocks.
So a blanket violation of law abiding citizens rights is more important than actually keeping tabs on known threats more closely and effectively. Pedophiles are viewed with less disdain than terrorists it seems. And the threat of terrorism is trumpeted to the heavens while pedophilia is apparently more rampant is UK society...
It is quite illogical that law abiding people suddenly snap and decide to drive their cars into groups of tourists. How prevalent are the actual potential terrorists - i.e. those with a history of violence, trouble with the law, radicalization, etc? If I knew those stats, then I personally would be better able to judge the claims of the authorities. But I don't have those stats and so the logical assumption is that their claims are exaggerated shite designed to drum up fear and etc etc. Meanwhile idiotic claims that all encryption must be banned or tapped, even for law abiding businesses (does no one remember Cameron's proposals?) are floated... nothing but Band-aids all the way down.
I could move back to America, but at this point, that is like jumping out of the frying pan. I really need to learn a second language, preferably Mongolian.
Also, designing a secure general purpose messaging system is much harder that designing a system tailored for a specific use case.
Banning encryption by law is like demanding, loudly, that people not talk behind your back. Some will listen, and some will not. Only legitimate users and use cases will suffer.
Of course they would need to intercept all other communication services, including home-made ones.
It's nice to know WhatsApp can help people break the law in places where the law itself is immoral.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7030096.stm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook#Legalit...
This is great news, actually. It means that WhatsApp's encryption works, and stonewalls the efforts of state actors (or at least, hers) to break it.
That said, we don't know if she's lying about this, or not.
All they need to do is to pressure Apple and Google to keep some backdoors open, which is more than realistic, as Snowden's revelations have shown a couple of years ago.
My intuition says that they stand to lose more than they could possibly gain, but I'm curious to hear a more knowledgeable perspective.
Of course, one runs the risk of the existence of false positives being forgotten, TLA/government pressure to reduce the false positive rate, and so on. But I think this is a slightly interesting way to (partially) preserve privacy while satisfying lawmakers who demand that there be some way for them to listen in on (what should ideally be completely private) data. (This is, of course, only possible once one drops the axiom of privacy being an absolute right: I don't personally support doing this at all.)
After all, we can't allow corrupt politicians ANYWHERE TO HIDE. ;)
It is feasible. The backdoor should be at a very low level (not say a sandboxed application) from which basically nothing can hide on the device.
I am sure a ban on encryption would work.
Hey, guys, I just had a great idea. Let's ban bombs, knifes, and driving into people. That would fix the terrorism problem. Once it is illegal, no terrorist would dare do it!!!
I'm wondering why Churchill didn't think to ban the Enigma machine. If only England was led by smart people like the British interior minister...
It was recognised that it's impossible to enforce, ie. PGP is there, in general tech is just available to anyone and what about research papers and academia? Treat them as criminals? Even if banned in UK, it's available in the rest of the world.
It would be nice if politicians were banned from saying stupid things.
They started banning guns almost a century ago. While it did probably reduce the number of gun murders, it certainly didn't make terrorist organisation like the IRA any less effective — and it probably made non-gun crime worse.
Possessing encryption tools, lockpicks, knives, guns &c. is a fundamental human right of free men.
Come to think of it...
Sorry, he is a she.
Update: One solution of 'make sure' is the source code of the monitoring software must be reviewed by independent and trusted software engineers/experts.
PS. Downvoting my post doesn't solve any problem. If you have any better idea, welcome to post it out. Thanks
See that's the problem everyone is talking about. The thing, is, turns out you can't. That's was the ENTIRE point of the Snowden revelations.
No sane person is okay with terrorism, but at what point are you going to stop relinquishing your rights?
First, texts with Whatsapp. Then your phone calls. Then your bags and notes when you go through airport security. Then bugs in your house. All of these will help curb terrorism. But where will you stop? Will you lose all your private life in the name of law?
Unfortunately maths doesn't work that way, there is not much in the way of a spectrum when it comes to encryption, there is a very steep cliff from secure to insecure.
So then you are faced with a very stark contrast; the security afforded by a surveillance state, or freedom with the possibility of terrorism. Personally I prefer the latter.
The trick is there is no spoon, just like there is no control; only influence.
Two questions for you.
>One solution of 'make sure' is the source code of the monitoring software must be reviewed by independent and trusted software engineers/experts.
What does that help with? (Because trusted expert aren't perfect, right?)
And second question, what if the police and government are evil, then how does your plan help?
> Of course, we need to make sure it is used for anti-terrorism only Hah, not likely in the UK - if sweeping powers exist, there will be a creeping escalation of their use by different government bodies, and for purposes not related to terrorism.
