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Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office? The so

Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office? The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony. Encryption does nothing to change the availability of information through testimony. Previously, remote conspirators could collaborate through the post, and their conversations could only be accessed with a warrant specifically targeting those communicators. End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation; it just means it's a little more difficult to access the information than entering a phone number into XKeyscore. Investigators can install malware on the device, or microphones and video cameras in the suspect's home to hear or see what is being communicated. Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible to the government.

hashkb 7y ago
Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos is a new kind of crime, which whispering would not have aided.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  Why should anyone give a shit? Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I for one am not willing to give up any freedoms in order to prevent the sharing of such vile material. Perhaps the creation, but not the sharing.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I'm sure some of the kids in those videos would have something to say about that.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      Do you regularly run into child porn on the internet? I don't. I don't see those kids getting hurt any further unless they happen to be the sort of people that go out of their way to seek out child abuse material. It's hard to imagine anyone ever accidentally running into images of themselves being abused. You can't possibly be re-victimized if you don't know. I don't mean to sound heartless, obviously these are horrific acts which hurt people deeply. I simply don't think banning encryption or otherwise eroding our rights to go after distributors and consumers is really going to have much practical effect on how the victims end up feeling. E: HN doesn't let me reply to selectodude below >the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with I absolutely agree with this. I just know that nobody can ever go tell the victim that now those pictures are forever gone off the internet.
      - selectodude 7y ago
        I don't disagree. We catch child pornographers all the time and they are on the bleeding edge of encryption. There's no practical benefit to banning encryption. The .gov just doesn't feel like going through the effort and would rather enjoy, say, the ancillary benefits to being able to read all of our messages forever. But yes, the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Maybe not the best direction to go in when arguing.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        If you don't see a reply link below on the main comments page try clicking their comment link which looks like "7 seconds ago" and you should find a reply to link there. I think hacker news is designed to make it harder to have a quick back and forth discussion for some reason.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      How many thousands of people would you kill to save your own child? For many people the answer might well be all of them. Turns out emotional response isn't a reasonable way to come to a logical conclusion for how we ought to order society. I'm sympathetic to those people's plight but ultimately I place a very high valuation on not only my privacy but everyone's privacy, A much lessor but still very great valuation on preventing such evil happening to the victims, and only a small valuation on preventing the ultimate sharing of those images between perverts except insofar as it serves to lead us to people doing the wrong. I believe that via a substantial effort we can work to reduce the abuse of children, I think we can via a lot of work take down the groups of people sharing such data by infiltrating such groups and taking down the people participating. I believe that outright stopping all such sharing is probably impossible and I'm unwilling to implement 1984 to try.
  - hashkb 7y ago
    The sharing creates demand. Producers increase supply. You should read more about this issue. NYT just did a bunch of great articles that will give you perspective.
    - concordDance 7y ago
      Sharing only creates demand if money or other videos (or other things of interest to the original perpetrator) are given in exchange. And honestly, I expect the vast majority of abusers to be doing it either for fun (so they'd stop sharing videos, but keep raping) or for the money. Sometimes I wonder if what people really want is just to stop the transmission of child porn so they can go back to pretending it doesn't exist... Child porn piracy is an essentially victimless crime. Note: In the above I am considering the generic example of "child porn" to be broadcasting the forcible rape of prepubescents, not 17 year olds sending each other naughty pictures, which is what most content matching the US legal definition is (the UK one is just stupid as it includes drawings).
      - claudiawerner 7y ago
        >And honestly, I expect the vast majority of abusers to be doing it either for fun (so they'd stop sharing videos, but keep raping) or for the money. This runs contrary to the fact that people share things not just for monetary profit, but for other videos/pictures in exchange, and voyeuristic/exhibitionist reasons.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. This is contradicted by the evidence we have to the contrary, in particular the model of supply and demand identified in child porn markets.
godelski 7y ago
I think your point is very important. Forbidding e2e encryption only enables mass surveillance. It does not affect traditional investigative work. There are other existing tools for the job. Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? Other tools exist to do targeted surveillance and targeted attacks. Only authoritarians want mass surveillance.
- crummy 7y ago
  > Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? To be fair, Apple is working to ensure FBI won't be able to do that next time.
  - godelski 7y ago
    I'm not saying anything bad about Apple here... I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'm actually saying (as an anti-Apple person) "good job Apple".
MadWombat 7y ago
"The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph was invented. And even before that people used security measures, such as wax seals on letters to prevent tampering or at least have an ability to detect whether or not the message has been tampered with. You seem to think of messaging systems as if they were spoken conversations in private. They are not. Just because you are chatting with someone from the privacy of your own home, doesn't negate the fact that your words are traveling through a lot of wires and boxes belonging to all sorts of private and public entities. During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? I am not saying we should not have end to end encryption. I am saying that government spying on citizens is nothing new, it is not something that was ever limited to totalitarian dictatorships and it should not be surprising to anyone that the government is trying to fight it. The news is not that the government wants to keep an option to read your communications. The news is that first time in history there is a chance people might want to and be able to stop them.
- Animats 7y ago
  During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? It wasn't done that way. Envelopes were opened, and stamped "Opened by Censor". Material was cut out of letters. Censorship was not concealed at all.[1][2] [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/mail-censorship-in-world-war-two-1.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m... [2] https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    I never said they were secretive about it. I said they opened, read and edited people's letters and the public was completely OK with it.
Animats 7y ago
* Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office?* "Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - 1984 The day will come when not having an Amazon Echo or Google Speaker will be considered probably cause for a search.
sjy 7y ago
> End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation A secure E2EE system must resist even targeted, legally authorised attacks. Are you suggesting that secure, practical E2EE systems do not currently exist? Would a world in which law enforcement must install physical listening devices and exploit unpublished software vulnerabilities to surveil suspects be more private than our current world, where E2EE is available but often disabled by default, and trusted intermediaries like Facebook and Google can be legally compelled to disclose non-E2EE messages? > Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible That is not (publicly acknowledged to be) the case today, even though non-E2EE platforms like Facebook are widely used. While Facebook could currently comply with laws authorising mass surveillance, and implementing secure E2EE would prevent them from doing so, the warrants under which they currently hand over non-E2EE messages are at least somewhat targeted. This controversy is not about a proposal to relax the need for warrants, it's about asking Facebook to preserve their ability to comply with them.

hashkb 7y ago

Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos is a new kind of crime, which whispering would not have aided.

ryanlol 7y ago
Why should anyone give a shit? Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I for one am not willing to give up any freedoms in order to prevent the sharing of such vile material. Perhaps the creation, but not the sharing.
- selectodude 7y ago
  >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I'm sure some of the kids in those videos would have something to say about that.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    Do you regularly run into child porn on the internet? I don't. I don't see those kids getting hurt any further unless they happen to be the sort of people that go out of their way to seek out child abuse material. It's hard to imagine anyone ever accidentally running into images of themselves being abused. You can't possibly be re-victimized if you don't know. I don't mean to sound heartless, obviously these are horrific acts which hurt people deeply. I simply don't think banning encryption or otherwise eroding our rights to go after distributors and consumers is really going to have much practical effect on how the victims end up feeling. E: HN doesn't let me reply to selectodude below >the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with I absolutely agree with this. I just know that nobody can ever go tell the victim that now those pictures are forever gone off the internet.
    - selectodude 7y ago
      I don't disagree. We catch child pornographers all the time and they are on the bleeding edge of encryption. There's no practical benefit to banning encryption. The .gov just doesn't feel like going through the effort and would rather enjoy, say, the ancillary benefits to being able to read all of our messages forever. But yes, the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Maybe not the best direction to go in when arguing.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      If you don't see a reply link below on the main comments page try clicking their comment link which looks like "7 seconds ago" and you should find a reply to link there. I think hacker news is designed to make it harder to have a quick back and forth discussion for some reason.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    How many thousands of people would you kill to save your own child? For many people the answer might well be all of them. Turns out emotional response isn't a reasonable way to come to a logical conclusion for how we ought to order society. I'm sympathetic to those people's plight but ultimately I place a very high valuation on not only my privacy but everyone's privacy, A much lessor but still very great valuation on preventing such evil happening to the victims, and only a small valuation on preventing the ultimate sharing of those images between perverts except insofar as it serves to lead us to people doing the wrong. I believe that via a substantial effort we can work to reduce the abuse of children, I think we can via a lot of work take down the groups of people sharing such data by infiltrating such groups and taking down the people participating. I believe that outright stopping all such sharing is probably impossible and I'm unwilling to implement 1984 to try.
- hashkb 7y ago
  The sharing creates demand. Producers increase supply. You should read more about this issue. NYT just did a bunch of great articles that will give you perspective.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    Sharing only creates demand if money or other videos (or other things of interest to the original perpetrator) are given in exchange. And honestly, I expect the vast majority of abusers to be doing it either for fun (so they'd stop sharing videos, but keep raping) or for the money. Sometimes I wonder if what people really want is just to stop the transmission of child porn so they can go back to pretending it doesn't exist... Child porn piracy is an essentially victimless crime. Note: In the above I am considering the generic example of "child porn" to be broadcasting the forcible rape of prepubescents, not 17 year olds sending each other naughty pictures, which is what most content matching the US legal definition is (the UK one is just stupid as it includes drawings).
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      >And honestly, I expect the vast majority of abusers to be doing it either for fun (so they'd stop sharing videos, but keep raping) or for the money. This runs contrary to the fact that people share things not just for monetary profit, but for other videos/pictures in exchange, and voyeuristic/exhibitionist reasons.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. This is contradicted by the evidence we have to the contrary, in particular the model of supply and demand identified in child porn markets.

godelski 7y ago

I think your point is very important. Forbidding e2e encryption only enables mass surveillance. It does not affect traditional investigative work. There are other existing tools for the job. Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? Other tools exist to do targeted surveillance and targeted attacks. Only authoritarians want mass surveillance.

crummy 7y ago
> Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? To be fair, Apple is working to ensure FBI won't be able to do that next time.
- godelski 7y ago
  I'm not saying anything bad about Apple here... I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'm actually saying (as an anti-Apple person) "good job Apple".

MadWombat 7y ago

"The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph was invented. And even before that people used security measures, such as wax seals on letters to prevent tampering or at least have an ability to detect whether or not the message has been tampered with. You seem to think of messaging systems as if they were spoken conversations in private. They are not. Just because you are chatting with someone from the privacy of your own home, doesn't negate the fact that your words are traveling through a lot of wires and boxes belonging to all sorts of private and public entities. During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? I am not saying we should not have end to end encryption. I am saying that government spying on citizens is nothing new, it is not something that was ever limited to totalitarian dictatorships and it should not be surprising to anyone that the government is trying to fight it. The news is not that the government wants to keep an option to read your communications. The news is that first time in history there is a chance people might want to and be able to stop them.

Animats 7y ago
During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? It wasn't done that way. Envelopes were opened, and stamped "Opened by Censor". Material was cut out of letters. Censorship was not concealed at all.[1][2] [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/mail-censorship-in-world-war-two-1.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m... [2] https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg
- MadWombat 7y ago
  I never said they were secretive about it. I said they opened, read and edited people's letters and the public was completely OK with it.

Animats 7y ago

* Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office?* "Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - 1984 The day will come when not having an Amazon Echo or Google Speaker will be considered probably cause for a search.

sjy 7y ago

> End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation A secure E2EE system must resist even targeted, legally authorised attacks. Are you suggesting that secure, practical E2EE systems do not currently exist? Would a world in which law enforcement must install physical listening devices and exploit unpublished software vulnerabilities to surveil suspects be more private than our current world, where E2EE is available but often disabled by default, and trusted intermediaries like Facebook and Google can be legally compelled to disclose non-E2EE messages? > Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible That is not (publicly acknowledged to be) the case today, even though non-E2EE platforms like Facebook are widely used. While Facebook could currently comply with laws authorising mass surveillance, and implementing secure E2EE would prevent them from doing so, the warrants under which they currently hand over non-E2EE messages are at least somewhat targeted. This controversy is not about a proposal to relax the need for warrants, it's about asking Facebook to preserve their ability to comply with them.