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We've already gone down those paths. Societal expectations and legal precedent have been building for this since the 1880s where registers of telegram metadata

by Khaine 9y ago

We've already gone down those paths. Societal expectations and legal precedent have been building for this since the 1880s where registers of telegram metadata were kept. I don't understand why everyone is so naive with respect to the internet. The Government's main argument is "Why should the internet be different from the 'real world'?" Telephone companies have had to comply with these kinds of government requests since telegrams were around. No-one I have heard has had a good serious argument against this. Saying no-one should have this power is great and all, but its waay to late. These powers to get access to this information with a warrant have been around in some form or another since before WW1.

AJ007 9y ago
Certainly tracking telegrams is a far reach from today. Metadata tracks user's physical moves. Depending on web activity, it can even comes close to reconstructing what they are thinking. Who draws the line of what laws a commercial communication platform must follow and under which jurisdictions? There is no line because complying with the laws of one country your users are in will break the law of another. I believe he problem is the centralization of communication. There is no reason that these platforms can not be distributed networks running open source software. Any government, which does or does not respect basic human rights, would be free to attempt to intercept the communication and anyone else would be free to try to prevent it.
- Khaine 9y ago
  The Australian Government has asked tech companies to support them getting legal access to devices, specifically the Prime Minister called out for the ability to get plaintext versions of WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessages. These are arguably the telegrams of today. Yes, given the centralised nature of these services it is a concern that foreign government's demands could be unreasonable. However, the nature of operating in a country is to comply with their laws and regulations. What the Australian Government has asked for is that these communication methods be treated equally, and for tech companies to get on board with that. If Google and Apple don't want to support the operations of authoritarian governments then perhaps they should actually take a stand and not operate in those countries, and not have their products made in those countries. I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually. I understand that technically it may be very difficult or potentially impossible to provide a secure mechanism to provide that support to the Government, and that is where my greatest concern for these laws come from.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    > I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually. Warning: you are relying on analogies to pre-digital technology to make sense of digital technology. I'll try a lightning round in ten minutes: 1. A physical safe generally must be physically opened by officers coming to your location and opening it. Typically a warrant is served to the person who owns the safe, who then reads it, and can often watch the officers physically enter their property and possibly even watch them open the physical safe using the combination they give to the officers. After the officers leave the person can have the lock changed with a fair amount of certainty that the officers didn't change the physical makeup of the safe in such a way that they can remotely access the contents of the physical safe in the future. 2. Under certain circumstances officers could access the safe without the person present. But, generally, they have to physically enter to the person's dwelling to do that. Neighbors may see them enter because officers are conspicuous physical objects that travel well below the speed of light. 3. Officers can compel people to open the safes under certain circumstances. But some safes are expensive often because their design makes it difficult to open them without the key. I'm unaware of previous situations where law enforcement made a public awareness campaign about the difficulty of opening expensive safes under the rare circumstances that such safes held vital evidence to time-critical investigations. I'd love to read about such a campaign of "Our Safes Going Dark" if you have a reference to such a campaign. 4. Law enforcement cannot outsource the physical opening of safes to an Italian safe-opening company that installs proprietary software at the station that allows the officers to do remote and clandestine opening of many types of physical safes. (Where remote means opening and viewing the contents of the safe without having to dispatch a physical officer to a physical location.) 5. Law enforcement cannot leverage the same type of Italian safe-opening techniques in an automated system that checks the metadata coming across the internet for certain selectors and then automatically and secretly opens certain safes, storing pictures of contents of those safes for later perusal or even changing the substance of the safe so that the safe itself will report certain data back to law enforcement just in case it turns out this safe belongs to someone who turns out to be a criminal. 6. Nation states could not indiscriminately store the data about the sum total of all the places you traveled and people you interacted with on your way to and from the safe, store that data about you, and then redefine the word collection to mean what happens when someone reads one or more of the pieces of data that were collected. Bonus 7. If nation state #1 wants to embarass nation state #2 by releasing some of state 1's secrets, those secrets cannot easily be leveraged to make digital ransomware appear on a large number of safes of nation state #3. Essentially, everything I can think of in ten minutes that is important about digital security/privacy/surveillance is lost when you use analogies to physical pre-digital objects.
DonbunEf7 9y ago
The answer to the government's argument, of course, is that information theory doesn't behave like empirical reality in several significant ways, which add up to the Internet being fundamentally different from the "real world." They would rather not admit this. Or perhaps they don't understand.
- Alyssa3545 9y ago
  I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
lucideer 9y ago
There's two reasons as far as I'm concerned: 1. The internet has very much democratised communication (or at least did around the time of the inception of the web) - this is the reason we have such campaigns for net neutrality. Government intervention into transmission of telegrams was tolerated because the medium was largely out of the direct control of most citizens. Having more control and insight gives a sense of ownership and a greater awareness of civil liberty around the bounds of use. Which I think is largely positive. 2. The efficiency of internet communication and automation thereof makes any intervention in communication channels much much more far reaching with comparatively little resources or effort. And therefore far far more dangerous.
- sbarre 9y ago
  > because the medium was largely out of the direct control of most citizens This is still the case with the Internet. Who do you think subsidized the construction of the physical Internet infrastructure? And most of the major pipes and cables are owned and operated by large megacorps that work closely with governments. It's not like citizens ran the fibre optic cables themselves and now the government wants to come in and take over.
andrewflnr 9y ago
My first response was "technology has changed since then", but then I thought: if I used a Vigenère cipher in the telegram era, whose responsibility was it to make sure the government got a copy of the plaintext? All the modern messaging apps do is make it easier to do the same thing.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by Khaine 9y ago

AJ007 9y ago

Certainly tracking telegrams is a far reach from today. Metadata tracks user's physical moves. Depending on web activity, it can even comes close to reconstructing what they are thinking. Who draws the line of what laws a commercial communication platform must follow and under which jurisdictions? There is no line because complying with the laws of one country your users are in will break the law of another. I believe he problem is the centralization of communication. There is no reason that these platforms can not be distributed networks running open source software. Any government, which does or does not respect basic human rights, would be free to attempt to intercept the communication and anyone else would be free to try to prevent it.

Khaine 9y ago
The Australian Government has asked tech companies to support them getting legal access to devices, specifically the Prime Minister called out for the ability to get plaintext versions of WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessages. These are arguably the telegrams of today. Yes, given the centralised nature of these services it is a concern that foreign government's demands could be unreasonable. However, the nature of operating in a country is to comply with their laws and regulations. What the Australian Government has asked for is that these communication methods be treated equally, and for tech companies to get on board with that. If Google and Apple don't want to support the operations of authoritarian governments then perhaps they should actually take a stand and not operate in those countries, and not have their products made in those countries. I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually. I understand that technically it may be very difficult or potentially impossible to provide a secure mechanism to provide that support to the Government, and that is where my greatest concern for these laws come from.
- jancsika 9y ago
  > I value my privacy and my freedom, but honestly I think that as an Australian the Australian Government does have the right to be able to access my devices during an investigation, provided their are appropriate checks and balances involved. Just like if I had a safe in my house, they have the right to get it opened with a search warrant. If I refuse to open the safe, they have methods and tools that allow opening it. I fail to see what makes iPhones any different from a safe conceptually. Warning: you are relying on analogies to pre-digital technology to make sense of digital technology. I'll try a lightning round in ten minutes: 1. A physical safe generally must be physically opened by officers coming to your location and opening it. Typically a warrant is served to the person who owns the safe, who then reads it, and can often watch the officers physically enter their property and possibly even watch them open the physical safe using the combination they give to the officers. After the officers leave the person can have the lock changed with a fair amount of certainty that the officers didn't change the physical makeup of the safe in such a way that they can remotely access the contents of the physical safe in the future. 2. Under certain circumstances officers could access the safe without the person present. But, generally, they have to physically enter to the person's dwelling to do that. Neighbors may see them enter because officers are conspicuous physical objects that travel well below the speed of light. 3. Officers can compel people to open the safes under certain circumstances. But some safes are expensive often because their design makes it difficult to open them without the key. I'm unaware of previous situations where law enforcement made a public awareness campaign about the difficulty of opening expensive safes under the rare circumstances that such safes held vital evidence to time-critical investigations. I'd love to read about such a campaign of "Our Safes Going Dark" if you have a reference to such a campaign. 4. Law enforcement cannot outsource the physical opening of safes to an Italian safe-opening company that installs proprietary software at the station that allows the officers to do remote and clandestine opening of many types of physical safes. (Where remote means opening and viewing the contents of the safe without having to dispatch a physical officer to a physical location.) 5. Law enforcement cannot leverage the same type of Italian safe-opening techniques in an automated system that checks the metadata coming across the internet for certain selectors and then automatically and secretly opens certain safes, storing pictures of contents of those safes for later perusal or even changing the substance of the safe so that the safe itself will report certain data back to law enforcement just in case it turns out this safe belongs to someone who turns out to be a criminal. 6. Nation states could not indiscriminately store the data about the sum total of all the places you traveled and people you interacted with on your way to and from the safe, store that data about you, and then redefine the word collection to mean what happens when someone reads one or more of the pieces of data that were collected. Bonus 7. If nation state #1 wants to embarass nation state #2 by releasing some of state 1's secrets, those secrets cannot easily be leveraged to make digital ransomware appear on a large number of safes of nation state #3. Essentially, everything I can think of in ten minutes that is important about digital security/privacy/surveillance is lost when you use analogies to physical pre-digital objects.

DonbunEf7 9y ago

The answer to the government's argument, of course, is that information theory doesn't behave like empirical reality in several significant ways, which add up to the Internet being fundamentally different from the "real world." They would rather not admit this. Or perhaps they don't understand.

Alyssa3545 9y ago
I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com

lucideer 9y ago

There's two reasons as far as I'm concerned: 1. The internet has very much democratised communication (or at least did around the time of the inception of the web) - this is the reason we have such campaigns for net neutrality. Government intervention into transmission of telegrams was tolerated because the medium was largely out of the direct control of most citizens. Having more control and insight gives a sense of ownership and a greater awareness of civil liberty around the bounds of use. Which I think is largely positive. 2. The efficiency of internet communication and automation thereof makes any intervention in communication channels much much more far reaching with comparatively little resources or effort. And therefore far far more dangerous.

sbarre 9y ago
> because the medium was largely out of the direct control of most citizens This is still the case with the Internet. Who do you think subsidized the construction of the physical Internet infrastructure? And most of the major pipes and cables are owned and operated by large megacorps that work closely with governments. It's not like citizens ran the fibre optic cables themselves and now the government wants to come in and take over.

andrewflnr 9y ago

My first response was "technology has changed since then", but then I thought: if I used a Vigenère cipher in the telegram era, whose responsibility was it to make sure the government got a copy of the plaintext? All the modern messaging apps do is make it easier to do the same thing.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]