6 ms·

The scariest line was this: "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection." The fact that in the public eye they're going to be claimi

The scariest line was this: "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection." The fact that in the public eye they're going to be claiming they are doing this under terrorism, will give a lot of weight with non-technical people.

iamben 10y ago
Right. It makes no sense. "Let's bring in a law that logs everyone not seeking to avoid detection." Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN, disposable phones with end to end encrypted messaging, or pen and paper. Any criminal/terrorist that doesn't take these measures shouldn't be a problem to prevent in the firstplace.
- noja 10y ago
  So where is the conversation about that? If this measure will not catch the very people it is intending to catch, what is its purpose?
  - hashtagMERKY 10y ago
    I can't work out the purpose. It feels scary and Orwellian but I don't know why they want to collect all this data. Who benefits? In a totalitarian regime it makes sense because you can use it to prevent political opposition. But in this case, it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. It doesn't help anyone cling to power. Maybe I'm over-thinking, but I can't work out the point.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      >it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected. >It doesn't help anyone cling to power. On the contrary, it is human nature to do so.
      - schlowmo 10y ago
        > The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected. Exactly what I was going to reply. There is no need for any conspiracy theories to acknowledge that in almost any democratic states of these days "states within a state" exist when it comes to surveilance and intelligence services. While political function owners come and go with each election, those organisations seem to be more structural conservative following agendas which reach beyond any legislative period.
    - laumars 10y ago
      The point is the legislations are written by people who are often technologically inept and from a political culture of placing their own opinions above the advice of the experts. You also see the same nonsensical policies on other topics like global warming, gun control (in the US), the war on drugs, and weird alternative treatments available on the NHS.
    - Xophmeister 10y ago
      A publicity stunt so, come the next election, said government can leverage what the masses might see as a good/harmless idea. The minority of people who know better won't be statistically significant when it comes to the polls.
    - Kepler-125c 10y ago
      Democracies can fail, for example the recent rise of Erdogan. Asshats in power want democracy to fail because when it does they will be the ones in power.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Even if only for tactical reasons, it's better to treat this as a well-intentioned mistake, and not as a vast conspiracy to round up dissenters etc. Taking that point of view, the argument is that there's a subset of criminals that are stupid, or make mistakes. For people who've bought into the "nothing-to-hide" mindset, even a tiny chance to catch a few criminals is enough, because there's precisely zero on the other side. So the task is: a clearly articulated argument for why privacy is important. I'm not saying someone should leak all the porn-URLs visited from Parliament, but it wouldn't hurt. Although some PG13 reasons may be even more helpful with the conservative crowd: "Prime witness in mafia trial killed after location revealed in log leak"... The "rounding up dissenters" argument should still be in there – as "we're creating tools that a less benevolent government could exploit." C.f.: Trump/muslims, the Dutch (Danish?) burning their register of Jews
  - stevetrewick 10y ago
    To make you censor yourself so they don't have to. Same deal with the porn one. There was a piece by Alec Muffet not so long ago discussing the consultation process for age verification. All those involved knew that the headline group (teenagers) the law was supposed to protect were by far the most likely to circumvent the measures, so any such system is essentially not fit for its stated purpose. Even if the intent is to play well with the authoritarian and/or socially conservative portions of the electorate, the effect will still be self censorship. My SO and I both have to undergo enhanced disclosure and barring service checks on a regular basis for our jobs, one of which is in education. The UK Department of Education just effectively prevented Milo from speaking at his old school 'because extremism'. So how should I be feeling right now about following links from Reddit or other forums discussing US electoral politics that might lead to Breitbart? What if there's another situation like Sad Puppies vs the Hugos and I'm trying to get a picture of what's going on and I click on a link to find a Vox Day equivalent? Did I just endanger one of our prospects for future employment? Hard to say. Will using a VPN service get us tagged as 'something to hide' and affect our eligibility to work with children and vulnerable adults? Don't know. Worth betting someone's career on?
  - Kepler-125c 10y ago
    They're not looking for actual terrorists or criminals. They're looking for people like Occupy Wall Street protesters, who actually pose a threat (ie. redistribution of wealth) to those in power. Then as soon as they do something like pirate a movie, they can be thrown in jail (ie politically neutered).
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  something about this reminds me of "common-sense firearm safety laws"
- josephg 10y ago
  Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it. I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime. Think about it - any criminal can learn lockpicking today via the internet, but few do. Why? Because if you're capable of investing time and energy into honing a skill, you may as well do something above board. Don't break and enter - become a locksmith instead. Don't manage a team of criminals - become a manager at a company. It pays better. Its less risky. There's more services and social support available. You won't go to jail. You can have friends who aren't criminals. And because of that the people who are left committing the vast majority of crime do so in part because they're not good at long term planning. Which is something law enforcement takes complete advantage of. So, almost no petty criminals are going to know about VPNs. They aren't going to commit to a monthly subscription to a VPN provider. They won't set up a PP2P tunnel on their phone and laptop. Why? Again because if they knew to do that sort of stuff they could probably hold down a stable job in low level tech support. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but the bread and butter of law enforcement isn't bank heists. Its someone who's drunk. Its someone who smashed a window and stole some money because they want to get high. Or stole a phone out of someone's hand and ran off with it. Or went out with the boys to beat someone up "who had it coming". When the (then) Australian minister for communication introduced record keeping laws for ISPs he told people they can bypass it a number of ways. Lots of people were confused by that - but it makes sense. The aim isn't to record data from us, or from our community. They don't care about taxpayers who are gainfully employed. The point is to make it easier to catch that asshole who beat up his girlfriend then bragged about it to his friends on facebook. And as a result, probably the most annoying thing we can do for law enforcement is introduce apps like Signal and the TOR browser. Stuff that makes it dead simple for anyone to maintain their privacy - you just have to use a different messenger. (Edit: Re-watched the interview where Turnbull described how to bypass the retention bill and he wasn't as enthusiastic as I remember.)
  - CPLX 10y ago
    > I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime. This is an odd comment. Clearly the mechanism you describe is correct, but there's literally nothing accidental about it at all. The entire stated purpose of the criminal justice system is to create a set of incentives sufficient to ensure this calculus applies.
- csydas 10y ago
  Well, if memory serves, for the most part haven't most terrorist attacks been coordinated over either completely open channels or over non-technical channels? If I remember correctly, the Bin Laden operations were orchestrated via sneakernet, the more recent attacks in France were orchestrated with check-out aisle cell phones. The technical difficulties law enforcement faces with terrorism and crime isn't that criminals are upping the ante with complex and difficult to penetrate technology; it's that they're methods are a needle in a haystack, ubiquitous devices and protocols that apparently law enforcement is just having difficulty filtering. Remembering back to a lecture I attended from an officer explaining the technological issues used in modern harassment and abuse cases, often times stalking would be achieved by purchasing a check-out aisle cellphone with a cheap plan, registering it with family tracking from the provider, then putting the phone into Do Not Disturb and hiding it in the victim's car or day bag, using the tracking to get an idea of where the victim went. Sneakernets and system abuses like this are clever enough certainly, but they're not high-tech solutions for criminal activities. Most of the time just looking at a person's facebook account is enough to get the information you need to do something malicious to them or their property, and terrorists seem well aware of the ease by which they can operate in plaintext or on just normal phone calls. I don't recall any stories about terrorists using an IRC channel, for example, they're just using what they'd normally use. Most of the surveillance security actions strike me as purely theatre - there's a difficult problem and a convenient scape goat, so rather than do the hard work, law enforcement and governments rely on a scapegoat. Unscrupulous tech vendors abuse law enforcement/government's lack of knowledge and pressure from the public to sell security snake-oil, promising them the answer to keep the people safe. There probably is a good future where technology does help stop terrorists and criminals, but right now, they're not doing anything special or unique, just different than we're expecting, and apparently that's more than enough.
  - iamatworknow 10y ago
    I remember after the Paris attacks hearing about how messages could be sent via game console networks, or even non-verbally in the online multiplayer games themselves. http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-paris-isis-terrorists-used-ps4-to-plan-attacks/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-pa...
- da1 10y ago
  > Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN Or just plain old stenography in very public forums. Basically impossible to detect.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    This is correct. Every serious criminal won't use a VPN or other obvious crypto, because this paints a big target on your back signalling you want to hide something. A serious adversary will, as you say, use a pre-arranged innocent vocabulary that is virtually impossible to detect, or just communicate face-to-face or via written notes delivered by a messenger. Oh and by the way, remember to buy lettuce today ;) ;)
    - da1 10y ago
      > Oh and by the way, remember to buy lettuce today ;) Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I' ve ever known...
- SixSigma 10y ago
  I guess that is true to a first approximation but exceptions perhaps prove the rule https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind
userbinator 10y ago
Drugs, child porn (sometimes even adult porn), and terrorism seem to be the most-used arguments for authoritarianism. Unfortunately they are also quite convincing in the "you have nothing to hide" sense.
- manarth 10y ago
  "sometimes even adult porn" Which is also currently up for discussion: "UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/censor-non-conventional-sex-acts-online-internet-pornography https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/censor-no...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
ptero 10y ago
To me, even bigger problem is a general fact that a large majority of people easily agree to restrict liberties (some of them hard won) because "terrorists can also do this". A more defensible argument would be "outlaw X if a fraction of law abiding citizens snagged would be tiny". I would be curious though how big a majority would still support the logic that "we should restrict/track any X if X helps terrorists", if the question were to be posed cleanly (i.e., without scaremongering examples on the same page). If the problem is presentation, not internal beliefs the pendulum may swing back sooner rather than later.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Terrorists also have mothers, and eat apple pie. This is not about terrorists; this is about frustrated law enforcement who seek to break privacy to facilitate their efforts. When we see it that way, we see the emotional rhetoric for what it is - scaremongering to make enforcement simpler.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 10y ago
That's true, but on the other hand their assertion is also true - terrorists (both political and paramilitary) do attempt to exploit the infrastructure of an open society, and government (qua public agency) does have a legitimate interest in frustrating some kinds of criminal traffic. You try running a government and explaining to people that the price of liberty is putting up with a certain level of terrorism and child porn every year. You won't stay in power long if you do. (Mind, I'm not endorsing this new law, which I think is awful. I'm just taking issue with your objection to the political reasoning, and saying that it's self-defeating.)

iamben 10y ago

Right. It makes no sense. "Let's bring in a law that logs everyone not seeking to avoid detection." Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN, disposable phones with end to end encrypted messaging, or pen and paper. Any criminal/terrorist that doesn't take these measures shouldn't be a problem to prevent in the firstplace.

noja 10y ago
So where is the conversation about that? If this measure will not catch the very people it is intending to catch, what is its purpose?
- hashtagMERKY 10y ago
  I can't work out the purpose. It feels scary and Orwellian but I don't know why they want to collect all this data. Who benefits? In a totalitarian regime it makes sense because you can use it to prevent political opposition. But in this case, it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. It doesn't help anyone cling to power. Maybe I'm over-thinking, but I can't work out the point.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    >it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected. >It doesn't help anyone cling to power. On the contrary, it is human nature to do so.
    - schlowmo 10y ago
      > The group of individuals handling this data are more than likely to be bureaucratically appointed rather than democratically elected. Exactly what I was going to reply. There is no need for any conspiracy theories to acknowledge that in almost any democratic states of these days "states within a state" exist when it comes to surveilance and intelligence services. While political function owners come and go with each election, those organisations seem to be more structural conservative following agendas which reach beyond any legislative period.
  - laumars 10y ago
    The point is the legislations are written by people who are often technologically inept and from a political culture of placing their own opinions above the advice of the experts. You also see the same nonsensical policies on other topics like global warming, gun control (in the US), the war on drugs, and weird alternative treatments available on the NHS.
  - Xophmeister 10y ago
    A publicity stunt so, come the next election, said government can leverage what the masses might see as a good/harmless idea. The minority of people who know better won't be statistically significant when it comes to the polls.
  - Kepler-125c 10y ago
    Democracies can fail, for example the recent rise of Erdogan. Asshats in power want democracy to fail because when it does they will be the ones in power.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Even if only for tactical reasons, it's better to treat this as a well-intentioned mistake, and not as a vast conspiracy to round up dissenters etc. Taking that point of view, the argument is that there's a subset of criminals that are stupid, or make mistakes. For people who've bought into the "nothing-to-hide" mindset, even a tiny chance to catch a few criminals is enough, because there's precisely zero on the other side. So the task is: a clearly articulated argument for why privacy is important. I'm not saying someone should leak all the porn-URLs visited from Parliament, but it wouldn't hurt. Although some PG13 reasons may be even more helpful with the conservative crowd: "Prime witness in mafia trial killed after location revealed in log leak"... The "rounding up dissenters" argument should still be in there – as "we're creating tools that a less benevolent government could exploit." C.f.: Trump/muslims, the Dutch (Danish?) burning their register of Jews
- stevetrewick 10y ago
  To make you censor yourself so they don't have to. Same deal with the porn one. There was a piece by Alec Muffet not so long ago discussing the consultation process for age verification. All those involved knew that the headline group (teenagers) the law was supposed to protect were by far the most likely to circumvent the measures, so any such system is essentially not fit for its stated purpose. Even if the intent is to play well with the authoritarian and/or socially conservative portions of the electorate, the effect will still be self censorship. My SO and I both have to undergo enhanced disclosure and barring service checks on a regular basis for our jobs, one of which is in education. The UK Department of Education just effectively prevented Milo from speaking at his old school 'because extremism'. So how should I be feeling right now about following links from Reddit or other forums discussing US electoral politics that might lead to Breitbart? What if there's another situation like Sad Puppies vs the Hugos and I'm trying to get a picture of what's going on and I click on a link to find a Vox Day equivalent? Did I just endanger one of our prospects for future employment? Hard to say. Will using a VPN service get us tagged as 'something to hide' and affect our eligibility to work with children and vulnerable adults? Don't know. Worth betting someone's career on?
- Kepler-125c 10y ago
  They're not looking for actual terrorists or criminals. They're looking for people like Occupy Wall Street protesters, who actually pose a threat (ie. redistribution of wealth) to those in power. Then as soon as they do something like pirate a movie, they can be thrown in jail (ie politically neutered).
cobbzilla 10y ago
something about this reminds me of "common-sense firearm safety laws"
josephg 10y ago
Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it. I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime. Think about it - any criminal can learn lockpicking today via the internet, but few do. Why? Because if you're capable of investing time and energy into honing a skill, you may as well do something above board. Don't break and enter - become a locksmith instead. Don't manage a team of criminals - become a manager at a company. It pays better. Its less risky. There's more services and social support available. You won't go to jail. You can have friends who aren't criminals. And because of that the people who are left committing the vast majority of crime do so in part because they're not good at long term planning. Which is something law enforcement takes complete advantage of. So, almost no petty criminals are going to know about VPNs. They aren't going to commit to a monthly subscription to a VPN provider. They won't set up a PP2P tunnel on their phone and laptop. Why? Again because if they knew to do that sort of stuff they could probably hold down a stable job in low level tech support. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but the bread and butter of law enforcement isn't bank heists. Its someone who's drunk. Its someone who smashed a window and stole some money because they want to get high. Or stole a phone out of someone's hand and ran off with it. Or went out with the boys to beat someone up "who had it coming". When the (then) Australian minister for communication introduced record keeping laws for ISPs he told people they can bypass it a number of ways. Lots of people were confused by that - but it makes sense. The aim isn't to record data from us, or from our community. They don't care about taxpayers who are gainfully employed. The point is to make it easier to catch that asshole who beat up his girlfriend then bragged about it to his friends on facebook. And as a result, probably the most annoying thing we can do for law enforcement is introduce apps like Signal and the TOR browser. Stuff that makes it dead simple for anyone to maintain their privacy - you just have to use a different messenger. (Edit: Re-watched the interview where Turnbull described how to bypass the retention bill and he wasn't as enthusiastic as I remember.)
- CPLX 10y ago
  > I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime. This is an odd comment. Clearly the mechanism you describe is correct, but there's literally nothing accidental about it at all. The entire stated purpose of the criminal justice system is to create a set of incentives sufficient to ensure this calculus applies.
csydas 10y ago
Well, if memory serves, for the most part haven't most terrorist attacks been coordinated over either completely open channels or over non-technical channels? If I remember correctly, the Bin Laden operations were orchestrated via sneakernet, the more recent attacks in France were orchestrated with check-out aisle cell phones. The technical difficulties law enforcement faces with terrorism and crime isn't that criminals are upping the ante with complex and difficult to penetrate technology; it's that they're methods are a needle in a haystack, ubiquitous devices and protocols that apparently law enforcement is just having difficulty filtering. Remembering back to a lecture I attended from an officer explaining the technological issues used in modern harassment and abuse cases, often times stalking would be achieved by purchasing a check-out aisle cellphone with a cheap plan, registering it with family tracking from the provider, then putting the phone into Do Not Disturb and hiding it in the victim's car or day bag, using the tracking to get an idea of where the victim went. Sneakernets and system abuses like this are clever enough certainly, but they're not high-tech solutions for criminal activities. Most of the time just looking at a person's facebook account is enough to get the information you need to do something malicious to them or their property, and terrorists seem well aware of the ease by which they can operate in plaintext or on just normal phone calls. I don't recall any stories about terrorists using an IRC channel, for example, they're just using what they'd normally use. Most of the surveillance security actions strike me as purely theatre - there's a difficult problem and a convenient scape goat, so rather than do the hard work, law enforcement and governments rely on a scapegoat. Unscrupulous tech vendors abuse law enforcement/government's lack of knowledge and pressure from the public to sell security snake-oil, promising them the answer to keep the people safe. There probably is a good future where technology does help stop terrorists and criminals, but right now, they're not doing anything special or unique, just different than we're expecting, and apparently that's more than enough.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  I remember after the Paris attacks hearing about how messages could be sent via game console networks, or even non-verbally in the online multiplayer games themselves. http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-paris-isis-terrorists-used-ps4-to-plan-attacks/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-pa...
da1 10y ago
> Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN Or just plain old stenography in very public forums. Basically impossible to detect.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  This is correct. Every serious criminal won't use a VPN or other obvious crypto, because this paints a big target on your back signalling you want to hide something. A serious adversary will, as you say, use a pre-arranged innocent vocabulary that is virtually impossible to detect, or just communicate face-to-face or via written notes delivered by a messenger. Oh and by the way, remember to buy lettuce today ;) ;)
  - da1 10y ago
    > Oh and by the way, remember to buy lettuce today ;) Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I' ve ever known...
SixSigma 10y ago
I guess that is true to a first approximation but exceptions perhaps prove the rule https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

userbinator 10y ago

Drugs, child porn (sometimes even adult porn), and terrorism seem to be the most-used arguments for authoritarianism. Unfortunately they are also quite convincing in the "you have nothing to hide" sense.

manarth 10y ago
"sometimes even adult porn" Which is also currently up for discussion: "UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/censor-non-conventional-sex-acts-online-internet-pornography https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/censor-no...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

ptero 10y ago

To me, even bigger problem is a general fact that a large majority of people easily agree to restrict liberties (some of them hard won) because "terrorists can also do this". A more defensible argument would be "outlaw X if a fraction of law abiding citizens snagged would be tiny". I would be curious though how big a majority would still support the logic that "we should restrict/track any X if X helps terrorists", if the question were to be posed cleanly (i.e., without scaremongering examples on the same page). If the problem is presentation, not internal beliefs the pendulum may swing back sooner rather than later.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Terrorists also have mothers, and eat apple pie. This is not about terrorists; this is about frustrated law enforcement who seek to break privacy to facilitate their efforts. When we see it that way, we see the emotional rhetoric for what it is - scaremongering to make enforcement simpler.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 10y ago

That's true, but on the other hand their assertion is also true - terrorists (both political and paramilitary) do attempt to exploit the infrastructure of an open society, and government (qua public agency) does have a legitimate interest in frustrating some kinds of criminal traffic. You try running a government and explaining to people that the price of liberty is putting up with a certain level of terrorism and child porn every year. You won't stay in power long if you do. (Mind, I'm not endorsing this new law, which I think is awful. I'm just taking issue with your objection to the political reasoning, and saying that it's self-defeating.)