7 ms·

Why is this an "open letter" instead of being passed as law? I understand that you might write an open letter when you are powerless to change something, but th

by deith 7y ago

Why is this an "open letter" instead of being passed as law? I understand that you might write an open letter when you are powerless to change something, but this is a government...

LatteLazy 7y ago
Because our "leaders" are not smart enough to understand this, they've just been told it's bad. Because they want to pretend it's ok to have zero encryption and that's much harder if facebook and others say it's not. Because passing an actual law to actually ban it would take effort and they're lazy Because there is a non-zero chance they can't really ban it, at least not without banning a lot of other things like e-commerce and online banking, so a gentlemans' agreement to keep 95% vulnerable is much more manageable. Because in at least some of the jurisdictions it might not be legal ("constitutional" in the US, "in accordance with the European convention on human rights" in the UK etc) to force these things by law.
- johnnycab 7y ago
  >Because our "leaders" are not smart enough to understand this, they've just been told it's bad. Your comment is partially correct, it is the Home Secretaries, past and present, who have been routinely told by the civil servants to tow the anti-encryption line, which goes back to RIPA 2000 and even further back. In essence it is GCHQ who are asking and they understand encryption perfectly well; since they can't ask directly, hence the role falls upon the relevant minister in government to do it. This will once again become a hot-button issue as outlined in the Queen's speech. The Tory Party is also switching from Whatsapp to Signal ─ make of that, what you will. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_into_encryption_debate/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_i... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-switch-to-messaging-app-signal-to-curb-whatsapp-leaks?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_reddit_is_fun https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...
  - achamayou 7y ago
    Not the government, who was never using WhatsApp, the Tory Party.
    - johnnycab 7y ago
      Yes, you are correct. edited.
      - LatteLazy 7y ago
        I'll read the link shortly but I thought they moved to signal because of leaks...from members of the group in questions. Not from someone hacking their handset or capturing and de-crypting messages in flight?
        johnnycab 7y ago
        It will be hard to stop the leaks regardless of the platform, as screenshots are a common way to save and share conversations in this community. The reason provided by the Party, as stated in the article, suggests that it is due to group size limits. All other reasons for the switch are open to conjecture. A Conservative spokesperson said the real justification for their MPs to use Signal was operational, rather than for security reasons. With so many Tory MPs elected at the last election, it had become impossible to fit them all in a single WhatsApp group, because they are currently capped at 256 members.
        LatteLazy 7y ago
        I think even that reason is BS to be honest: The tories won 317 seats in 2017. They "lost" about 10 people who were temporarily suspended from the party by Bojo. But I don't think they ever dropped below 256 MPs. I wondered if telegram has some feature where you get an alert if someone screenshots the window (I seem to remember snap chat had this?). Do you know?
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
justinclift 7y ago
Guessing the gov is trying to get people on their side? Good luck with that. /s
- deith 7y ago
  "Would you like the government to be able to read private messages so they can investigate and catch criminals?" Go and ask that, you'd be surprised.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    "Would you like the government to permanently have access to all private messages without a warrant so they can catch terrorists, of which they cannot provide a single example of a terrorist this system has caught?" Look at me, I can write a technically true but biased question too!
    - deith 7y ago
      Why without a warrant? Why "to catch terrorists"? There are lots of crimes and even civil matters for which this is useful.
      - thenewnewguy 7y ago
        Because that's how it works right now (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries for sure), and I'm intentionally writing a question biased in the opposite direction of how yours was.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        Would you prefer it was phrased: government will archive and index everything you ever write, film and record to search for evidence of: Watching illegal movies, Smoking weed, Not paying all your taxes, Antisocial behaviour, crossing a red light?
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Yeah, but you’re not in charge of writing the referendum question, if it comes to that, and the UK doesn’t have a strong pro-personal-liberty party, so the fact you can write an alternative biased in a nice way doesn’t help.
TomMarius 7y ago
Maybe the government is powerless in this issue?
jfindley 7y ago
Writing perfect laws is close to impossible - there's almost always unintended negative consequences. Legislation is a pretty blunt tool, and for this reason there's long history of governments asking various entities to behave nicely so they don't have to try to write legislation they know will be very hard to get right. Please note that I'm not supporting the govts position - just supporting their methodology of not rushing to legislate.
thunderrabbit 7y ago
Because they want the people to be on their side, "thinking of the children" and all that instead of thinking about Big Brother having access to everything.
nashashmi 7y ago
Parliament writes laws. Government is just an exercise.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  In normal operation almost all laws before parliament are drafted by the government of the day. Parliament could in principle do whatever it wants, but ordinarily in the UK the governing party has a majority (often a sizeable one) in parliament like this present Tory government, which it can whip to support its measures, so it would be futile to resist. The remarkable thing about Brexit was that a majority of members were sure that any particular plan was so bad as to be worth overturning the government position, and so Parliamentary sovereignty mattered. By convention governments set aside a small amount of time for measures from individual MPs, most of which will be debated but proceed no further if they're at all controversial. A lot of such business will be scheduled for Friday, this way almost everybody can go home. The Speaker (or whichever deputy has to stay on Friday) will claim to hear dissent after a bill is discussed before it can pass, and because there seems to be dissent the house must be divided in order to count supporters for each side of the matter. In doing so it will be "discovered" that it is inquorate (ie there aren't enough members present) and nothing is done.
tialaramex 7y ago
The British Government hasn't had a good experience with writing criminal laws to stop people saying things it didn't agree with in the past. It turns out that people are OK with your broad generalities, but the thing about criminal law is that it rests on specifics. Justice in one particular case before the courts, not an army of hypothetical "What if?" questions. Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 was an example. The Government had just written a law (in 1959) clearly saying you mustn't publish obscene stuff. As a generality this seemed very supportable. In the specifics it struggled, was this novel obscene merely because it was about fucking? Because it used words that would be familiar to readers, such as "fuck" and "cunt" precisely because they were words about fucking? The government made its case but jurors concluded the publisher was not guilty. If obscenity meant anything, it apparently did not include literature about fucking. The government gave up and no similar trials were conducted. The thing about End-to-end encryption is that you can't see inside. So your test case ends up being we weren't able to see inside this message, we want to know what's inside it. And in the course of the trial the jury are likely to discover that either the contents of the message were in fact mundane and uninteresting or that nobody in fact can prove beyond a reasonable doubt what they were anyway, whereupon all the exciting stories about terrorists or shadowy figures preying on children evaporates and the question is just: Is it right that the government wants to pry into everything you do? And a jury is going to say "No". The idea of an independent judiciary sounded good in the UK, and so they actually built one‡, but they didn't get the memo from America that the independence is supposed to be a thin pretence - so the judiciary actually is independent and they can't trivially unwind that (though leaving the EU will mean at least nobody can tell them not to try any more). ‡ For many years the courts of England & Wales were independent from the British Government but they didn't look it because the ultimate court of appeal actually worked out of the Palace of Westminster where the Parliament is, and its judges were technically "Lords" in the Parliament, so it _looked_ superficially as though there was no separation. All the actual independence was a matter of convention rather than being visible. This appearance was fixed by giving them a new name (the "Supreme Court") and a Supreme Court building, a short distance away from the Palace so now they look as independent as they actually were anyway.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  I think your distinction between generalities and specifics is an insightful one. I have not realised previously that this is a good reason why some laws never enter reality.

by deith 7y ago

Why is this an "open letter" instead of being passed as law? I understand that you might write an open letter when you are powerless to change something, but this is a government...

LatteLazy 7y ago

Because our "leaders" are not smart enough to understand this, they've just been told it's bad. Because they want to pretend it's ok to have zero encryption and that's much harder if facebook and others say it's not. Because passing an actual law to actually ban it would take effort and they're lazy Because there is a non-zero chance they can't really ban it, at least not without banning a lot of other things like e-commerce and online banking, so a gentlemans' agreement to keep 95% vulnerable is much more manageable. Because in at least some of the jurisdictions it might not be legal ("constitutional" in the US, "in accordance with the European convention on human rights" in the UK etc) to force these things by law.

johnnycab 7y ago
>Because our "leaders" are not smart enough to understand this, they've just been told it's bad. Your comment is partially correct, it is the Home Secretaries, past and present, who have been routinely told by the civil servants to tow the anti-encryption line, which goes back to RIPA 2000 and even further back. In essence it is GCHQ who are asking and they understand encryption perfectly well; since they can't ask directly, hence the role falls upon the relevant minister in government to do it. This will once again become a hot-button issue as outlined in the Queen's speech. The Tory Party is also switching from Whatsapp to Signal ─ make of that, what you will. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_into_encryption_debate/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_i... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-switch-to-messaging-app-signal-to-curb-whatsapp-leaks?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_reddit_is_fun https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/17/tories-swit...
- achamayou 7y ago
  Not the government, who was never using WhatsApp, the Tory Party.
  - johnnycab 7y ago
    Yes, you are correct. edited.
    - LatteLazy 7y ago
      I'll read the link shortly but I thought they moved to signal because of leaks...from members of the group in questions. Not from someone hacking their handset or capturing and de-crypting messages in flight?
      - johnnycab 7y ago
        It will be hard to stop the leaks regardless of the platform, as screenshots are a common way to save and share conversations in this community. The reason provided by the Party, as stated in the article, suggests that it is due to group size limits. All other reasons for the switch are open to conjecture. A Conservative spokesperson said the real justification for their MPs to use Signal was operational, rather than for security reasons. With so many Tory MPs elected at the last election, it had become impossible to fit them all in a single WhatsApp group, because they are currently capped at 256 members.
        LatteLazy 7y ago
        I think even that reason is BS to be honest: The tories won 317 seats in 2017. They "lost" about 10 people who were temporarily suspended from the party by Bojo. But I don't think they ever dropped below 256 MPs. I wondered if telegram has some feature where you get an alert if someone screenshots the window (I seem to remember snap chat had this?). Do you know?
- stan_rogers 7y ago

justinclift 7y ago

Guessing the gov is trying to get people on their side? Good luck with that. /s

deith 7y ago
"Would you like the government to be able to read private messages so they can investigate and catch criminals?" Go and ask that, you'd be surprised.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  "Would you like the government to permanently have access to all private messages without a warrant so they can catch terrorists, of which they cannot provide a single example of a terrorist this system has caught?" Look at me, I can write a technically true but biased question too!
  - deith 7y ago
    Why without a warrant? Why "to catch terrorists"? There are lots of crimes and even civil matters for which this is useful.
    - thenewnewguy 7y ago
      Because that's how it works right now (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries for sure), and I'm intentionally writing a question biased in the opposite direction of how yours was.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Would you prefer it was phrased: government will archive and index everything you ever write, film and record to search for evidence of: Watching illegal movies, Smoking weed, Not paying all your taxes, Antisocial behaviour, crossing a red light?
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Yeah, but you’re not in charge of writing the referendum question, if it comes to that, and the UK doesn’t have a strong pro-personal-liberty party, so the fact you can write an alternative biased in a nice way doesn’t help.

TomMarius 7y ago

Maybe the government is powerless in this issue?

jfindley 7y ago

Writing perfect laws is close to impossible - there's almost always unintended negative consequences. Legislation is a pretty blunt tool, and for this reason there's long history of governments asking various entities to behave nicely so they don't have to try to write legislation they know will be very hard to get right. Please note that I'm not supporting the govts position - just supporting their methodology of not rushing to legislate.

thunderrabbit 7y ago

Because they want the people to be on their side, "thinking of the children" and all that instead of thinking about Big Brother having access to everything.

nashashmi 7y ago

Parliament writes laws. Government is just an exercise.

tialaramex 7y ago
In normal operation almost all laws before parliament are drafted by the government of the day. Parliament could in principle do whatever it wants, but ordinarily in the UK the governing party has a majority (often a sizeable one) in parliament like this present Tory government, which it can whip to support its measures, so it would be futile to resist. The remarkable thing about Brexit was that a majority of members were sure that any particular plan was so bad as to be worth overturning the government position, and so Parliamentary sovereignty mattered. By convention governments set aside a small amount of time for measures from individual MPs, most of which will be debated but proceed no further if they're at all controversial. A lot of such business will be scheduled for Friday, this way almost everybody can go home. The Speaker (or whichever deputy has to stay on Friday) will claim to hear dissent after a bill is discussed before it can pass, and because there seems to be dissent the house must be divided in order to count supporters for each side of the matter. In doing so it will be "discovered" that it is inquorate (ie there aren't enough members present) and nothing is done.

tialaramex 7y ago

The British Government hasn't had a good experience with writing criminal laws to stop people saying things it didn't agree with in the past. It turns out that people are OK with your broad generalities, but the thing about criminal law is that it rests on specifics. Justice in one particular case before the courts, not an army of hypothetical "What if?" questions. Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 was an example. The Government had just written a law (in 1959) clearly saying you mustn't publish obscene stuff. As a generality this seemed very supportable. In the specifics it struggled, was this novel obscene merely because it was about fucking? Because it used words that would be familiar to readers, such as "fuck" and "cunt" precisely because they were words about fucking? The government made its case but jurors concluded the publisher was not guilty. If obscenity meant anything, it apparently did not include literature about fucking. The government gave up and no similar trials were conducted. The thing about End-to-end encryption is that you can't see inside. So your test case ends up being we weren't able to see inside this message, we want to know what's inside it. And in the course of the trial the jury are likely to discover that either the contents of the message were in fact mundane and uninteresting or that nobody in fact can prove beyond a reasonable doubt what they were anyway, whereupon all the exciting stories about terrorists or shadowy figures preying on children evaporates and the question is just: Is it right that the government wants to pry into everything you do? And a jury is going to say "No". The idea of an independent judiciary sounded good in the UK, and so they actually built one‡, but they didn't get the memo from America that the independence is supposed to be a thin pretence - so the judiciary actually is independent and they can't trivially unwind that (though leaving the EU will mean at least nobody can tell them not to try any more). ‡ For many years the courts of England & Wales were independent from the British Government but they didn't look it because the ultimate court of appeal actually worked out of the Palace of Westminster where the Parliament is, and its judges were technically "Lords" in the Parliament, so it _looked_ superficially as though there was no separation. All the actual independence was a matter of convention rather than being visible. This appearance was fixed by giving them a new name (the "Supreme Court") and a Supreme Court building, a short distance away from the Palace so now they look as independent as they actually were anyway.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
I think your distinction between generalities and specifics is an insightful one. I have not realised previously that this is a good reason why some laws never enter reality.