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This meeting was about targeted spying and not bulk collection.
by JoeSmithson 7y ago
This 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.
- taneq 7y agoThe only difference between targeted computerized spying and bulk computerized spying is a for() loop.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoSo why do they need bulk spying capacity for targeted spying? The argument makes no sense.
- nitemice 7y agoThis is the line the Australian anti-encryption bill that past last year was trying to walk with its "no systemic backdoors" clause. The idea/claim was that the bill only allowed targeted spying, and systemic/bulk spying, so it's okay. But that's really only only a small part of it.