4 ms·

Intelligence agencies seem to operate on a very dubious assumption that if mass consumer products weren't offering end to end encryption, terrorists would just

by zmmmmm 11y ago

Intelligence agencies seem to operate on a very dubious assumption that if mass consumer products weren't offering end to end encryption, terrorists would just be chattering away in the clear, rather than trivially switching to one of the plethora of alternatives that do allow secure communication (some of them open source and "unbannable"). Are they really that dumb? Or is this a cynical PR exercise?

mc32 11y ago
It's not that terrorists with good operational procedures would not be able to find more secure means, but migrating to those means would do two things: Fewer operatives would have the rigor to operate securely all the time. You just need one to trip up to give the house away, but with ubiquitous encr. anyone and their nona can encrypt without leaking. Two, switching to alternate means would mean a big slowdown in comms speed and throughput/dissemination and comms can be compromised/altered via interception.
- function_seven 11y ago
  And three: The mere use of banned encryption tools can now be a crime in itself.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Not necessarily, it's what they call a "signal". Just like driving a white van does not mean yours was the one involved in the hold up, but it's a signal: "Look at white vans more suspiciously".
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I drive a white van and I use encryption daily. Maybe I should go and invest in some bullet proof attire?
      - mc32 11y ago
        What do you think, does that sound sensible to you?
- mtgx 11y ago
  One guy managed to get his hands on a freaking rocket launcher. Same with one of the Charlie Hebdo attack guys, who sneaked an assault weapon into a country with strict gun laws. Are you telling me that if they are really committed these guys can't get access to an app they can use for encrypted communications? The problem is there are too many signals, only made worse - not better - by mass surveillance (making the "hay" in which to find the needle bigger and all that). Here's an excerpt from Schneier in 2005: > Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic -- we'll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever -- per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting. > This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots. > This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms. > This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA's eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. 99.9% and 99.9999% accuracy and you still get those huge false positive numbers. Even the drone strike program has much lower accuracy than that (yes, they do kill people based on "mostly assumptions" that they are terrorists, if that's news to anyone). I mean, in the US, they start spying on people if they have a >51% of not being an American (an amazingly low threshold - basically flipping a coin). So - maybe it's time to admit that mass surveillance is actually detrimental to catching these guys and that these spy agencies are hurting national security? https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mining_wont.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mi...
  - mc32 11y ago
- zmmmmm 11y ago
  I feel like encryption is easy enough to do now by so many means that taking it out of consumer grade apps won't have much effect at all. It's pretty much as easy as installing an app to get (close enough to) perfect encryption from open source solutions and once installed they are as easy to use as Whatsapp.
glandium 11y ago
In a world where mass consumer products don't offer end to end encryption, either the terrorists use encryption, and they can be arrested for that, or they don't, and they can be arrested on the basis of their plain-text communication. Or at least, maybe that's their justification...
- danieldk 11y ago
  Of course, that does not take the elephant in the room into account. By using proper steganography, terrorists could use encryption pretty much unnoticed.
  - bostik 11y ago
    But only if you also keep transmitting junk data over the same mediums. There is plenty of research available for detecting the presence of applied steganography by entropy measurements. [0, 1, lots of others] If you only apply steganography when you have real[tm] communication needs, those transmissions will stand out. So, from information theoretic standpoint you need to ensure that transmission is undetectable from steady-state with no payload. Incidentally this is also one part of Pond's threat model. [2] 0: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/ADA586643.xhtml https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta... 1: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-14/materials/Ortiz/Asia-14-Ortiz-Advanced-JPEG-Steganography-And-Detection.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-14/materials/Ortiz/Asia-1... 2: https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
    - danieldk 11y ago
      Definitely, but like cryptography, this is very much a cat-and-mouse game. In some data uniform noise is harder to detect than other data. You also have to exploit streams that are large or expensive to analyze. But I think that there are many stochastic processes with near-uniform properties waiting to be exploited (such as e.g. some word order choices in some languages with free word order). The thing is that with steganography, plausible deniability is much easier than pure cryptography.
    - 11y ago
jakeogh 11y ago
Worse. Terror (fear) is a well tested 'problem' which people are strongly conditioned to demand solutions for. 'Real' or 'Manufactured' the result is usually the same; power brokers proclaim they don't have enough power. It's an emergent effect that power will tend to expand through all means available and fear happens to be the most powerful motivator of human action. If you keep people in this state (the 'strategy of tension') they are more pliable because being in a state of fear impairs decision making.
- junto 11y ago
  Are you suggesting that certain power centres are deliberately turning a blind eye to potential terrorist intelligence in order to maintain the "state of tension", as long as that threat is not directly affecting their own citizens and home country? I.e. the NSA deliberately withholding intelligence from the French in order to bring the French government into the " ignore a basic right to privacy and liberty, we need you to support our bulk surveillance hard-line "? That would be pretty callous and downright Machiavellian.

by zmmmmm 11y ago

mc32 11y ago

It's not that terrorists with good operational procedures would not be able to find more secure means, but migrating to those means would do two things: Fewer operatives would have the rigor to operate securely all the time. You just need one to trip up to give the house away, but with ubiquitous encr. anyone and their nona can encrypt without leaking. Two, switching to alternate means would mean a big slowdown in comms speed and throughput/dissemination and comms can be compromised/altered via interception.

function_seven 11y ago
And three: The mere use of banned encryption tools can now be a crime in itself.
- mc32 11y ago
  Not necessarily, it's what they call a "signal". Just like driving a white van does not mean yours was the one involved in the hold up, but it's a signal: "Look at white vans more suspiciously".
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I drive a white van and I use encryption daily. Maybe I should go and invest in some bullet proof attire?
    - mc32 11y ago
      What do you think, does that sound sensible to you?
mtgx 11y ago
One guy managed to get his hands on a freaking rocket launcher. Same with one of the Charlie Hebdo attack guys, who sneaked an assault weapon into a country with strict gun laws. Are you telling me that if they are really committed these guys can't get access to an app they can use for encrypted communications? The problem is there are too many signals, only made worse - not better - by mass surveillance (making the "hay" in which to find the needle bigger and all that). Here's an excerpt from Schneier in 2005: > Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic -- we'll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever -- per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting. > This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots. > This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms. > This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA's eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm. 99.9% and 99.9999% accuracy and you still get those huge false positive numbers. Even the drone strike program has much lower accuracy than that (yes, they do kill people based on "mostly assumptions" that they are terrorists, if that's news to anyone). I mean, in the US, they start spying on people if they have a >51% of not being an American (an amazingly low threshold - basically flipping a coin). So - maybe it's time to admit that mass surveillance is actually detrimental to catching these guys and that these spy agencies are hurting national security? https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mining_wont.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/03/why_data_mi...
- mc32 11y ago
zmmmmm 11y ago
I feel like encryption is easy enough to do now by so many means that taking it out of consumer grade apps won't have much effect at all. It's pretty much as easy as installing an app to get (close enough to) perfect encryption from open source solutions and once installed they are as easy to use as Whatsapp.

glandium 11y ago

In a world where mass consumer products don't offer end to end encryption, either the terrorists use encryption, and they can be arrested for that, or they don't, and they can be arrested on the basis of their plain-text communication. Or at least, maybe that's their justification...

danieldk 11y ago
Of course, that does not take the elephant in the room into account. By using proper steganography, terrorists could use encryption pretty much unnoticed.
- bostik 11y ago
  But only if you also keep transmitting junk data over the same mediums. There is plenty of research available for detecting the presence of applied steganography by entropy measurements. [0, 1, lots of others] If you only apply steganography when you have real[tm] communication needs, those transmissions will stand out. So, from information theoretic standpoint you need to ensure that transmission is undetectable from steady-state with no payload. Incidentally this is also one part of Pond's threat model. [2] 0: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/ADA586643.xhtml https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta... 1: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-14/materials/Ortiz/Asia-14-Ortiz-Advanced-JPEG-Steganography-And-Detection.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-14/materials/Ortiz/Asia-1... 2: https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
  - danieldk 11y ago
    Definitely, but like cryptography, this is very much a cat-and-mouse game. In some data uniform noise is harder to detect than other data. You also have to exploit streams that are large or expensive to analyze. But I think that there are many stochastic processes with near-uniform properties waiting to be exploited (such as e.g. some word order choices in some languages with free word order). The thing is that with steganography, plausible deniability is much easier than pure cryptography.
  - 11y ago

jakeogh 11y ago

Worse. Terror (fear) is a well tested 'problem' which people are strongly conditioned to demand solutions for. 'Real' or 'Manufactured' the result is usually the same; power brokers proclaim they don't have enough power. It's an emergent effect that power will tend to expand through all means available and fear happens to be the most powerful motivator of human action. If you keep people in this state (the 'strategy of tension') they are more pliable because being in a state of fear impairs decision making.

junto 11y ago
Are you suggesting that certain power centres are deliberately turning a blind eye to potential terrorist intelligence in order to maintain the "state of tension", as long as that threat is not directly affecting their own citizens and home country? I.e. the NSA deliberately withholding intelligence from the French in order to bring the French government into the " ignore a basic right to privacy and liberty, we need you to support our bulk surveillance hard-line "? That would be pretty callous and downright Machiavellian.