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> "However, there is a problem in terms of the growth of end-to-end encryption. "It’s a problem for the security services and for police who are not, under the
by 317070 9y ago
> "However, there is a problem in terms of the growth of end-to-end encryption. "It’s a problem for the security services and for police who are not, under the normal way, under properly warranted paths, able to access that information.”
What surprises me about this argument, is that their stance is that terrorists are accidentally starting to use encryption. So, by consequence, that in the past terrorists simply did not bother with encryption?
In that case, I wonder whether the terrorists have been triggered by the simplicity of current day cryptography, or simply by the knowledge that the governments are always listening in on everything everyone is saying.
It seems to me that someone started an arms-race, be it government or terrorists, and both are willing to cause massive amounts of collateral damage in order to keep one-upping the other.
- rwmj 9y agoThe vast majority of terrorists are clowns who, if they happen to use encryption at all, will mess up infosec in ways that are trivial to compromise. So if the Home Secretary is saying that message encryption is a "problem" then there must be something else going on which has little to do with terrorism.
- sonthonax 9y ago> The vast majority of terrorists are clowns. Perhaps if you're referring to home grown Islamic terrorists. However Britain does have a problem with an experienced group of rather professional terrorists called the IRA.
- discombobulate 9y agoWhen was the last IRA attack, Manchester 1996?
- EliRivers 9y agoIf we fuck up Brexit badly enough, maybe we'll see them back in action.
- ascorbic 9y agoA republican bomb maker was convicted literally yesterday. This isn't ancient history.
- discombobulate 9y agoThat's interesting. Looks like he was a member of the Continuity IRA[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_Irish_Republican_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_Irish_Republican_Ar...
- ascorbic 9y agoI don't know how much of this you know, but there are several "dissident" republican and loyalist terror groups that have remained active since the Good Friday Agreements. The Omagh bombing, with the biggest loss of life of any attack in the Troubles, was carried out by dissident republicans after the agreement. The last republican bombings on British soil (not in Northern Ireland) were by the Real IRA in 2001, but they've continued in Northern Ireland, including in the past few years.
- discombobulate 9y agoI know about the IRA in general from the news & living in the UK. I hadn't realised splinter groups were still at it. I don't tend to read the news -- so haven't heard much about Sinn Fein[0] recently, for example. Looking up SF, I've just learned they are left-wing. I'd assumed they were right-wing nationalists. Guess the answer to how much I know about this subject is, a wee bit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in
- DanBC 9y agohere are the sentencing remarks: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of-mr-justice-sweeney-r-v-ciaran-maxwell/ https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...
- 9y ago
- EvilGrin 9y ago27 March 2017. http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2017/03/27/news/strabane-explosion-claimed-by-ira--978028/ http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2017/03/27...
- pjc50 9y agoAnd the lesson people keep refusing to learn is that the conflict in NI was ended not by military or legal action but by political action, including the establishment of human rights in law there as insurance against arbitrary state actions. The IRA are and were very different from the Islamic terrorists, who are much less organised and more resemble isolated self-radicalised far right extremists.
- marcus_holmes 9y agothanks for the mental image of clown-terrorists :( as if either weren't bad enough on their own. Isn't it obvious? This has got f-all to do with terrorism. The bad guys have always hidden their communication. What's getting the security services all riled up is that ordinary law-abiding citizens are suddenly encrypted. And, of course, there's no way out of this. Either encryption is secure, or it's broken. If it's secure, it's secure for everyone. If it's broken, it's broken for everyone. Now we have open-source encryption methods that are trivial to implement, anyone can build a securely end-to-end encrypted communication system. [1] The cat's out of the bag, spooks. You can't read people's mail any more. You'll have to find other ways of gathering intelligence. [1] within reason - clown-like incompetence will always mess up. Or even just ordinary-coder levels of incompetence. But it's still harder than plaintext.
- stefs 9y agoi'm not even sure about that. i think i remember the story about islamic terrorists in europe last year using plain old SMS to coordinate their attack. didn't make a difference though, their communication was only analyzed after it happened. so for the average imbecile just using whatsapp, signal or a self-hosted service would actually make a difference, but if it'd make a difference for law enforcement is a different matter. having access to billions of messages and actually doing something with them are two different kinds of beasts.
- razakel 9y ago>thanks for the mental image of clown-terrorists Have you not seen Four Lions?
- daemin 9y agoThe way I see it and it have stated before is that it's about control and keeping in power. By being able to listen in on any communication and being able to track who is talking to whom, they are able to catch and suppress leakers and whistleblowers. Thereby making sure that if they themselves do anything wrong it can be covered up easily and indefinitely.
- gutnor 9y agoAll foreign terrorists have lived under some repressive government and privacy is unlikely to be one of their assumption. I wouldn't be surprised if they simply used the existing tools by convenience but with the same assumption the government can access their conversation as with every other medium. Home grown terrorists may be different, but they are already consistently detected by regular police work long before they act.
- marcosdumay 9y agoEverybody is starting to use encryption right now. That's because governments everywhere were caught spying on people, so modern software is written with a "encrypt by default" mindset. This movement was triggered by spying. But it is also because encryption is mostly free nowadays, while a couple of decades ago it was almost too expensive to use anywhere. Thus you can also view the causality starting with technology improvement, and that all the encryption demand was there, latent, with the spying only perturbing things a little and unleashing a chain reaction.