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Encryption isn't like transparent walls in my opinion. In the real world, the police can get into anywhere, and get basically any physical object, once they ha

Encryption isn't like transparent walls in my opinion. In the real world, the police can get into anywhere, and get basically any physical object, once they have a warrant. Most people seem to agree that is reasonable -- I don't think there is a big push for an easy way for people to hide physical objects from police.

ptero 7y ago
I do not see it that way. In years past if one did something he thought government might find offensive he could hide the evidence. Which was perfectly fine -- one would not be jailed for refusing to provide self incrimination. "Go search, but I will hide it; I never had it by the way".
kelnos 7y ago
Perhaps a better analogy: we haven't seen legislation that attempts to outlaw physical safes that are capable of destroying the contents in response to an attempt to tamper with or force them open, have we?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Such safes are very uncommon. If some major bank announced that it's going to install destroy-on-tamper on all its safety deposit boxes, I'd definitely expect some reactive legislation about it.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
Consider this: If encryption is suddenly turned off for all communications, and police have access to all of it via warrants, that's like getting a warrant for every home in the US. Obviously if the police had a perpetual warrant to your home, you wouldn't want that, why is it reasonable they have one to your data?
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  And it has been proven many times that not only will the access be abused, the secret backdoor will not remain secret and now every unscrupulous person can potentially have the same access.
m-p-3 7y ago
The physical world is tangible and can be accessed by pure force. The mind and thought, and by extension our intangible data, are not subject to the same rules and are (and hopefully will remain) a safe haven of privacy. There will be no more freedom if we can't keep our thoughts secrets from the authority.
- notduncansmith 7y ago
  I feel like there is a difference between having a thought, and expressing that thought in (entirely tangible, in terms of electromagnetic signals) data over a wire that someone else owns. If you want your thoughts to stay yours, you’re free to keep them to yourself; just don’t transmit them through electromagnetic media that other people currently control by force.
michaelmrose 7y ago
Analogies make shit arguments when we can discuss the matter at hand directly instead. Systems with central access controls are vulnerable to at least 2 separate sorts of attacks. One procedural and one technical end. On the procedural side its trivial to degenerate from * subjects privacy is breached when the lawfully constituted authorities present proof to a judge of reasonable suspicion that subject has engaged in antisocial and immoral acts against society or its members to * it would be be awfully nice if we had access to everyone's personal data so that we could punish anyone we like for anything we like In the United States we have already standardized on breaching everyone's privacy to the greatest degree possible with little or no recourse for the citizenry. Once you have all the information on whom speaks or believes in a certain way acting against them is a relatively smaller step. On the technical side a centralized system is impossible to secure. When not if it is compromised to the victors go the spoils. It is comparatively harder at least to attack millions of clients even if in theory a central node could be used to compromise clients this can in practice trivially be made harder to exploit by just not allowing server to push to clients and not updating every second. Attacks may need to remain undetected for a substantial length of time before a substantial portion of the user base is poisoned and the chance of detection climbs towards 100% the more parties you attack. Furthermore if you become 100% effective at detecting illegal porn shared via whatsapp doesn't it follow that users will use a decentralized means of transmitting illegal information. We would be substantially disadvantaging the population as a whole for little gain.
- ryantgtg 7y ago
  “Illegal porn” isn’t the preferred phrase in this case. It’s “child sexual abuse images.” We’re not talking about pornography here.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    We ARE talking about porn I'm not sure how you can be confused on that point. Nobody is defending the act of abusing kids or scumbags sharing media of same. Both acts are evil. The biggest point is that backdooring everyone's communication will do exactly jack to prevent child abuse. It wont even make it much harder for scumbags to share it even more of them will use just use privacy preserving p2p applications. In fact if you fuck with everyone's sense of privacy you will be liable to push a much much larger portion of the population to use such tech. The greater number of normal people who aren't drug dealers, crypto nerds, or pedos using stuff like TOR the harder it will be to pick out the weirdos. Meanwhile most of the harm to children wont be captured on digital media because it will keep happening when trusted adults abuse minors they ought to be protecting instead of harming. Attacking the sexual abuse problem in America by backdooring communication platforms is about as effective as reducing deaths due to traffic accidents by hanging out in parking lots.
eyegor 7y ago
To make this analogy work, the government is asking everyone to install new front door locks. They have a master key. They will always have a master key. They can stop by whenever they please, if they suspect a crime. If you run a red light, they can search your house (no such thing as a "limited" backdoor -- they can't partially decrypt a hard drive. They just clone the whole thing).
- lozf 7y ago
  Except that it's more like: In addition to the locks that they can access anytime, they're also installing CCTV, microphones and other sensors so they can be sure you're fully compliant at all times.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> In the real world, the police can get into anywhere, and get basically any physical object, once they have a warrant. Objects/documents aren't analogous to walls. If you were required to have transparent walls then the police could put cameras everywhere in the street and use them to record everything that happens in your house. If your walls are opaque then they can't. Even if they get a warrant, there is no way to go back and look at a recording of what happened inside your house the day before, since the opaque walls prevented any such recording from being made. It's well analogous to transport encryption.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
It's reasonable because police forces simply don't have enough resources to abuse this system. As a result, innocent people are generally left alone and don't live in constant anxiety that their homes could be randomly searched by armed operators. That's exactly how things should work. Compare that to remote backdoor access to everyone's encrypted communications. All they have to do is push a button in order to instantly get access to someone's mail, calls, instant messages, social media, phone location history, etc. Abusing this power is a trivial matter and there is little if any oversight. The Five Eyes intercept, decrypt and store even their own citizen's communications as a matter of course and will tip off law enforcement so they can parallel construct a case using means of investigation that are actually legal. Intelligence employees have been known to abuse their powers to spy on their significant others, a practice that became known as LOVEINT. People who are a threat to those in power -- political opposition, whistle blowers, journalists, dissidents -- will probably be targeted despite their rights to privacy. In order to obtain encrypted communications, police forces should have to get a warrant and obtain the physical storage media that contains the messages they want.
- TwoBit 7y ago
  Look no further than the hacking of Bezos' phone.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    You might not be aware that there’s actually no solid evidence that Bezos’s phone was ever actually hacked.
- ComodoHacker 7y ago
  >It's reasonable because police forces simply don't have enough resources to abuse this system. Could this principle be applied to encryption? A cryptosystem for personal communications carefully designed to be crackable using certain amount of resources. So getting access to one person's data would cost you say $1000 of cloud resources. And first you have to obtain an escrowed hash to crack using a warrant. Would this be acceptable to public?

ptero 7y ago

I do not see it that way. In years past if one did something he thought government might find offensive he could hide the evidence. Which was perfectly fine -- one would not be jailed for refusing to provide self incrimination. "Go search, but I will hide it; I never had it by the way".

kelnos 7y ago

Perhaps a better analogy: we haven't seen legislation that attempts to outlaw physical safes that are capable of destroying the contents in response to an attempt to tamper with or force them open, have we?

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Such safes are very uncommon. If some major bank announced that it's going to install destroy-on-tamper on all its safety deposit boxes, I'd definitely expect some reactive legislation about it.

GaryNumanVevo 7y ago

Consider this: If encryption is suddenly turned off for all communications, and police have access to all of it via warrants, that's like getting a warrant for every home in the US. Obviously if the police had a perpetual warrant to your home, you wouldn't want that, why is it reasonable they have one to your data?

bjelkeman-again 7y ago
And it has been proven many times that not only will the access be abused, the secret backdoor will not remain secret and now every unscrupulous person can potentially have the same access.

m-p-3 7y ago

The physical world is tangible and can be accessed by pure force. The mind and thought, and by extension our intangible data, are not subject to the same rules and are (and hopefully will remain) a safe haven of privacy. There will be no more freedom if we can't keep our thoughts secrets from the authority.

notduncansmith 7y ago
I feel like there is a difference between having a thought, and expressing that thought in (entirely tangible, in terms of electromagnetic signals) data over a wire that someone else owns. If you want your thoughts to stay yours, you’re free to keep them to yourself; just don’t transmit them through electromagnetic media that other people currently control by force.

michaelmrose 7y ago

Analogies make shit arguments when we can discuss the matter at hand directly instead. Systems with central access controls are vulnerable to at least 2 separate sorts of attacks. One procedural and one technical end. On the procedural side its trivial to degenerate from * subjects privacy is breached when the lawfully constituted authorities present proof to a judge of reasonable suspicion that subject has engaged in antisocial and immoral acts against society or its members to * it would be be awfully nice if we had access to everyone's personal data so that we could punish anyone we like for anything we like In the United States we have already standardized on breaching everyone's privacy to the greatest degree possible with little or no recourse for the citizenry. Once you have all the information on whom speaks or believes in a certain way acting against them is a relatively smaller step. On the technical side a centralized system is impossible to secure. When not if it is compromised to the victors go the spoils. It is comparatively harder at least to attack millions of clients even if in theory a central node could be used to compromise clients this can in practice trivially be made harder to exploit by just not allowing server to push to clients and not updating every second. Attacks may need to remain undetected for a substantial length of time before a substantial portion of the user base is poisoned and the chance of detection climbs towards 100% the more parties you attack. Furthermore if you become 100% effective at detecting illegal porn shared via whatsapp doesn't it follow that users will use a decentralized means of transmitting illegal information. We would be substantially disadvantaging the population as a whole for little gain.

ryantgtg 7y ago
“Illegal porn” isn’t the preferred phrase in this case. It’s “child sexual abuse images.” We’re not talking about pornography here.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  We ARE talking about porn I'm not sure how you can be confused on that point. Nobody is defending the act of abusing kids or scumbags sharing media of same. Both acts are evil. The biggest point is that backdooring everyone's communication will do exactly jack to prevent child abuse. It wont even make it much harder for scumbags to share it even more of them will use just use privacy preserving p2p applications. In fact if you fuck with everyone's sense of privacy you will be liable to push a much much larger portion of the population to use such tech. The greater number of normal people who aren't drug dealers, crypto nerds, or pedos using stuff like TOR the harder it will be to pick out the weirdos. Meanwhile most of the harm to children wont be captured on digital media because it will keep happening when trusted adults abuse minors they ought to be protecting instead of harming. Attacking the sexual abuse problem in America by backdooring communication platforms is about as effective as reducing deaths due to traffic accidents by hanging out in parking lots.

eyegor 7y ago

To make this analogy work, the government is asking everyone to install new front door locks. They have a master key. They will always have a master key. They can stop by whenever they please, if they suspect a crime. If you run a red light, they can search your house (no such thing as a "limited" backdoor -- they can't partially decrypt a hard drive. They just clone the whole thing).

lozf 7y ago
Except that it's more like: In addition to the locks that they can access anytime, they're also installing CCTV, microphones and other sensors so they can be sure you're fully compliant at all times.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> In the real world, the police can get into anywhere, and get basically any physical object, once they have a warrant. Objects/documents aren't analogous to walls. If you were required to have transparent walls then the police could put cameras everywhere in the street and use them to record everything that happens in your house. If your walls are opaque then they can't. Even if they get a warrant, there is no way to go back and look at a recording of what happened inside your house the day before, since the opaque walls prevented any such recording from being made. It's well analogous to transport encryption.

matheusmoreira 7y ago

It's reasonable because police forces simply don't have enough resources to abuse this system. As a result, innocent people are generally left alone and don't live in constant anxiety that their homes could be randomly searched by armed operators. That's exactly how things should work. Compare that to remote backdoor access to everyone's encrypted communications. All they have to do is push a button in order to instantly get access to someone's mail, calls, instant messages, social media, phone location history, etc. Abusing this power is a trivial matter and there is little if any oversight. The Five Eyes intercept, decrypt and store even their own citizen's communications as a matter of course and will tip off law enforcement so they can parallel construct a case using means of investigation that are actually legal. Intelligence employees have been known to abuse their powers to spy on their significant others, a practice that became known as LOVEINT. People who are a threat to those in power -- political opposition, whistle blowers, journalists, dissidents -- will probably be targeted despite their rights to privacy. In order to obtain encrypted communications, police forces should have to get a warrant and obtain the physical storage media that contains the messages they want.

TwoBit 7y ago
Look no further than the hacking of Bezos' phone.
- zaroth 7y ago
  You might not be aware that there’s actually no solid evidence that Bezos’s phone was ever actually hacked.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
>It's reasonable because police forces simply don't have enough resources to abuse this system. Could this principle be applied to encryption? A cryptosystem for personal communications carefully designed to be crackable using certain amount of resources. So getting access to one person's data would cost you say $1000 of cloud resources. And first you have to obtain an escrowed hash to crack using a warrant. Would this be acceptable to public?