5 ms·

It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.

by malka 7y ago

aplacelikethis 7y ago
What about /dev/random? You're gonna ban PRNG's while we're at it? And HTTPS?
saagarjha 7y ago
> Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. Right, so by using Hacker News you're falling afoul of your own rules. > You can't hide the existence of the message. You totally can: properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise.
- malka 7y ago
  These are not my rules. The parent poster said that the government CANNOT ban encryption. It can. No message can be totally hiden from a motivated enough opponent. The random noise IS the point. you cannot hide its very existence, and a government agent might not want to believe you if you said that it's just random data.
salawat 7y ago
Great. Might as well just jack up the consequences to the point that perpetrators realize they have everything to lose and guarantee there is no low-hanging fruit, and that whatever you do end up having to infiltrate will have a "like-your-life-depends-on-it" security posture. This is how cures become worse than the disease. Life isn't black and white, nor do things tend to be doable without gratuitous unintended consequences. Encryption is not, nor has it ever been the be all end all to child predation. Effective investigation techniques have been the issue, and awareness have been the problem, because of the ephemerality of any distribution system once its existence is outed to hostiles in the non-pedophilia community at large. If you want to take these people down, you have to map the logistics. If you want to map the logistics, you have to consume content; once you have the content, you need to analyze the crap out of it for every possible clue you can about how and where it was made in order to try to make some reasonable guesses about how the production industry works, then you have to double down and go deep to figure out what these production rings look like, whether they know each other, and how do they work. I'm talking picking apart the audio for environmental noise that might clue you in, or developing profiles of certain quirks of equipment. Analyzing the medium of exchange to see if you can exploit the financial traceability aspect, etc... All of which can also be sanitized once the opponent knows you look for it by the way. Proper OPSEC on their part will leave as few breadcrumbs as possible for you to find, and the closer you get to the heart of the op, the more heinous the infiltration will likely get. All of that has zilch to do with e2e encryption. That's all meatspace work. Ugly work, but work that'll need to happen nevertheless.
Zak 7y ago
Of course you can hide the existence of the message. The art and science of doing so is called steganography. Some forms of steganography are intended to be completely undetectable, while others merely offer plausible deniability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
- malka 7y ago
  from your very own link: > Generally though, there are many techniques known to be able to hide messages in data using steganographic techniques. None are, by definition, obvious when users employ standard applications, but some can be detected by specialist tools. Others, however, are resistant to detection - or rather it is not possible to reliably distinguish data containing a hidden message from data containing just noise - You cant hide the existence of the data. You can pretend that it's just random bits. But they are still here, and an opponent can see them.

It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.

by malka 7y ago

It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.

aplacelikethis 7y ago

What about /dev/random? You're gonna ban PRNG's while we're at it? And HTTPS?

saagarjha 7y ago

> Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. Right, so by using Hacker News you're falling afoul of your own rules. > You can't hide the existence of the message. You totally can: properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise.

malka 7y ago
These are not my rules. The parent poster said that the government CANNOT ban encryption. It can. No message can be totally hiden from a motivated enough opponent. The random noise IS the point. you cannot hide its very existence, and a government agent might not want to believe you if you said that it's just random data.

salawat 7y ago

Great. Might as well just jack up the consequences to the point that perpetrators realize they have everything to lose and guarantee there is no low-hanging fruit, and that whatever you do end up having to infiltrate will have a "like-your-life-depends-on-it" security posture. This is how cures become worse than the disease. Life isn't black and white, nor do things tend to be doable without gratuitous unintended consequences. Encryption is not, nor has it ever been the be all end all to child predation. Effective investigation techniques have been the issue, and awareness have been the problem, because of the ephemerality of any distribution system once its existence is outed to hostiles in the non-pedophilia community at large. If you want to take these people down, you have to map the logistics. If you want to map the logistics, you have to consume content; once you have the content, you need to analyze the crap out of it for every possible clue you can about how and where it was made in order to try to make some reasonable guesses about how the production industry works, then you have to double down and go deep to figure out what these production rings look like, whether they know each other, and how do they work. I'm talking picking apart the audio for environmental noise that might clue you in, or developing profiles of certain quirks of equipment. Analyzing the medium of exchange to see if you can exploit the financial traceability aspect, etc... All of which can also be sanitized once the opponent knows you look for it by the way. Proper OPSEC on their part will leave as few breadcrumbs as possible for you to find, and the closer you get to the heart of the op, the more heinous the infiltration will likely get. All of that has zilch to do with e2e encryption. That's all meatspace work. Ugly work, but work that'll need to happen nevertheless.

Zak 7y ago

Of course you can hide the existence of the message. The art and science of doing so is called steganography. Some forms of steganography are intended to be completely undetectable, while others merely offer plausible deniability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

malka 7y ago
from your very own link: > Generally though, there are many techniques known to be able to hide messages in data using steganographic techniques. None are, by definition, obvious when users employ standard applications, but some can be detected by specialist tools. Others, however, are resistant to detection - or rather it is not possible to reliably distinguish data containing a hidden message from data containing just noise - You cant hide the existence of the data. You can pretend that it's just random bits. But they are still here, and an opponent can see them.