5 ms·
> Dealing with the challenge faced by increasingly effective encryption They weren't able to spy in bulk when communication was primarily offline, and they won
by deogeo 7y ago
> Dealing with the challenge faced by increasingly effective encryption
They weren't able to spy in bulk when communication was primarily offline, and they won't when it's primarily encrypted.
Don't let them frame the brief, anomalous period when they could listen in on everyone, as 'normal'.
- tuxxy 7y agoThis. That entire period should be examined as a lapse in judgement, not a time when things were better. Because of our state-of-the-art security, we're now able to do more things online in less secure environments. A secure, distributed internet is normal. One that is insecure by design is not.
- m-p-3 7y agoEven HTTPS was costly in terms of resources back then, thankfully hardware acceleration and better algorithms came and there are no valid reasons anymore not to encrypt communications now.
- xster 7y agoThey brought it up themselves too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xozVBAWo8XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xozVBAWo8XI (not dubbed unfortunately) where their users would accuse them of being antiquated for not doing any server sync'ed messages but it's all by intent.
- OrgNet 7y agoproper security has always been "state-of-the-art"
- dmix 7y agoEven burner phones were a technically state-of-the-art which was a story which underpinned an entire season of a TV show's plotline (and title). Cellphones became so cheap and widely available you could buy and throw them away efficiently to not get easily tapped and still make enough money, even as a low level drug dealer living in low income neighbourhoods. That wouldn't have been possible years prior.
- OrgNet 7y agoBurner phones are good for anonymity (if you buy them anonymously), but I don't think that they add any security
- sanbor 7y agoSmart speakers and IoT might make the future a lot worse in terms of privacy.
- torified 7y agoAlso those Ring doorbell cameras that are being watched by over 200 police departments.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JoeSmithson 7y agoWhat does this have to do with "in bulk"? Seems like you're the one misrepresenting the situation.
- deogeo 7y agoIn bulk, as opposed to targeted spying - you can send an agent to hide behind the bushes, or plant a microphone, or infiltrate a group. Which was possible for a long time before computers or electronics (minus the microphone example), but it's not possible to do it at scale - you can spy on a few hundred people this way, but not on a few million.
- JoeSmithson 7y agoThis meeting was about targeted spying and not bulk collection.
- est31 7y agoHow will people know it's not done in bulk? The only thing that the public sees is the client binary. A client binary with a backdoor looks the same whether the backdoor is used one time in a million or thousand times, or a million times. The companies might publish reports on how often they got asked to access the backdoor but they might be compelled to lie or even be hacked and not notice it, or they might even use the backdoor themselves to extract more revenue. When surveillance is being rolled out, it's always just about a few single cases here and there. And then gradually, silently, the number increases.
- deogeo 7y agoThey don't need backdoors for targeted spying - they can plant hardware bugs or hidden cameras to watch the target type in messages and passwords. So the only reason they'd want them is to use them on scales where targeted spying is infeasible.
- jMyles 7y agoThe pretext of the meeting (and others like it) notwithstanding, it's not unfair to say that strong encryption renders communication to a state closer to the pre-digital era in terms of the amount of work required to perform individual surveillance. I think that was the point deogeo was making, and it seems like a sound one to me.
- foxylad 7y agoReally good point. I'm amazed we don't hear this argument more, and also the related one that we always used to have an anonymous payment system (cash) so why is a digital equivalent unthinkable?
- thaumasiotes 7y agoHistorically, intelligence services did routinely open and read physical letters sent through the mail, on bulk scales.
- mafm 7y agoYeah, but that happened in places like the USSR, not in the free world.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIt happened in premodern Europe, in places like Switzerland. It's not a 20th-century phenomenon by any means.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoIn the inter-war years and through WW2 there was a GPO Special Investigations Unit in every sorting office. They were steaming open, photographing mail, then sending them on, and the photos to MI5. They were also responsible for recording phone calls so had presence in major exchanges. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-on-the-flypaper https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n07/frances-stonorsaunders/stuck-o...
- OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y agoCurrently the US scans and saves an image of the front and back of every single piece of postal mail.
- closeparen 7y agoThe historical norm also included pretty overbearing social surveillance of movements and contacts. I think you'd have an easier time getting a conspiracy past the NSA than getting it past the town elders.