10 ms·

1. The police are either lazy or incompetent if they say they cannot trace criminals because of E2E secure chat. 2. You don't need to know the contents of a ch

by mikece 7y ago

1. The police are either lazy or incompetent if they say they cannot trace criminals because of E2E secure chat. 2. You don't need to know the contents of a chat to glean massive amounts of metadata. FB Messenger and WhatsApp going truly E2E encrypted will still put FB (and anyone serving them with warrants) to know in real time who is talking to whom, what their IP addresses are, and possibly real location (if they are using the app on their phone). This can be used to created a Signature profile... many Pakistanis and Yemeni have died from a Hellfire missile strike because they matched a pattern of activity. Google "signature strike" for more info. 3. The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr, etc. Saying that this is "for the children" or "for our safety" is complete bullshit and anyone saying otherwise needs to prove it.

blfr 7y ago
Perhaps I'm not hip enough but I'm pretty sure there is nothing more sophisticated than Signal.
- mikece 7y ago
  Session -- it just doesn't have as many features. BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. If you're savvy you realize this can be a Twilio number you control making your account immune from SIM hijacking. However, unless you override a bunch of defaults Signal is not immune to other attack vectors like attempting to unfurl a URL sent in a message -- which can expose your true IP address -- or generate a thumbnail of a video -- which can launch a malware attack -- which is the method of attack alleged to have been used by Saudi intelligence to hijack Jeff Bezos' phone (via an E2E encrypted WhatsApp message no less). A more sophisticated messenger system would turn off lots of "convenience" features by default and let me pick a random username and NOT make me enter a phone number or email address. People who care about security don't need a way to reset their randomly generated 128 character passwords.
  - rsync 7y ago
    "BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. If you're savvy you realize this can be a Twilio number you control making your account immune from SIM hijacking." Does Signal not ever send messages from, or otherwise use, SMS shortcodes ? I ask because no twilio number can receive an SMS shortcode (because no twilio number is classified as a "mobile" number). Genuinely curious.
    - phaer 7y ago
      The do it once for the initial setup. But iirc, one can also get an automated call for the pin.
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    > BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. This isn't a weakness, it is a tradeoff. You use phone numbers (downside) but the server does not have to store any information about who is talking to who (upside). Other tools reverse this choice and don't use phone numbers but do need to maintain the communication metadata.
    - baybal2 7y ago
      It's not a tradeoff, it's a weakness by design. All features you mention are 100% doable without a phone number
      - nebulous1 7y ago
        I believe it is both a weakness and a trade-off
      - maqp 7y ago
        Sure, and Signal is already working on usernames. Here's the kink: When you have low latency (video) calls, you can't route via Tor. When you can't route via Tor, you leak your IP to the server. When you leak your IP you're not anonymous, and when you're not anonymous, the server having the hash of your phone number isn't adding too much data to them. When the server knows who you are, the app can use your existing contact list to discover contacts. This means unlike e.g. Telegram, Signal server doesn't store your contact list. I e.g. constantly see people whose phone number I've already deleted appear on my Telegram contact list "X joined Telegram". Telegram knows I had the number at some point. This would never happen with Signal.
- mikece 7y ago
  To be fair, "Signal the App" and "Signal the Protocol" are two different things. If you were talking about the later then your statement is quite possibly correct.
- uoaei 7y ago
  Why not Keybase? https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
  - QUFB 7y ago
    The lack of PFS is a big negative about keybase.
    - cristoperb 7y ago
      You can set messages to expire in keybase: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages
      - majewsky 7y ago
        That looks completely orthogonal to Perfect Forward Secrecy.
        oconnor663 7y ago
        It's based on an ephemeral key schedule underneath. Here's the design doc: https://keybase.io/docs/chat/ephemeral https://keybase.io/docs/chat/ephemeral
    - brobinson 7y ago
      I was just looking into keybase, and.... deleted. Thanks for the heads up.
    - urxvtcd 7y ago
      I was under the impression it's the same for Signal. Quick duckduckgo led me here: https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ The more you know!
    - maqp 7y ago
      There's also a targeted attack that allows arbitrary keys to be linked to your keyring to DoS you.
- upofadown 7y ago
  Signal is all about making good cryptography usable for the general public. If you actually use the "safety numbers" to verify the identity of who you are communicating with then you have real guaranteed end to end encryption. Unfortunately not everyone does that. People that really really need to be sure probably use something super simple like PGP after they take the time to learn how.
the8472 7y ago
> anyone saying otherwise needs to prove it Sorry pal, that's top secret intel. Just Trust Us™.
strictnein 7y ago
I multihop VPN through service A. My criminal friends multihop VPN through service B, C, etc. All hops are through non-US friendly countries We then communicate over a secure messaging platform like Signal, Telegram, etc. Knowing just that I communicated with one or more people, how you would conduct your investigation to "trace" the participants in this conversation? The feds would be really put up to unravel this (and are on a daily basis), let alone the police.
- chatmasta 7y ago
  Why are the feds watching these conversations in the first place? Has a crime been committed? If they’re investigating a crime, surely there are more avenues of investigation than Facebook chats that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Whatever happened to good old fashioned police work? Seems like they just expect everyone’s chats to be handed to them on a silver platter when they ask for it.
  - strictnein 7y ago
    I'm responding to this statement and showing how it is rather ignorant: 1. The police are either lazy or incompetent if they say they cannot trace criminals because of E2E secure chat. As for the rest of your comments: The feds are watching criminals online because lots of crime is committed online. I do not think weakening encryption will help them in this pursuit.
  - DeathArrow 7y ago
    >Whatever happened to good old fashioned police work? That implies effort and people are lazy. "Hey, Mr Criminal, can you be so nice to use App X when you plan to commit your crime so our automated system can mail us when you are going to break the law and also set up an event in our calendar so we can come and arrest you. Please be nice, we can make each other lives easier if we work together. "
lonelappde 7y ago
> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication Terrorism is mostly opportunistic radicals communicating via YouTube and Twitter and Fox News, or national / quasinational governments that are brazen and flagrant and don't need to worry about being noticed.
- cvwright 7y ago
  Sometimes these idiots have posted on Facebook about their planned attacks. And we still did not manage to stop them.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    They're just in it for the fame. Or the lulz.
formercoder 7y ago
Yep, we know the CIA makes kill decisions based on metadata.
oconnor663 7y ago
> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication The "most dangerous" part is doing a lot of work there. Just like I think law enforcement needs to admit what they can and cannot do (e.g. they cannot protect a golden key), I think we need to admit some things too. A lot of dangerous criminals are stupid. Maybe not the most dangerous ones, sure. But if law enforcement has a tactic that lets them catch, say, the stupidest 30% of terrorists, that's an extremely valuable tactic that probably saves a lot of lives in practice. It would be wrong to claim that society loses nothing by engineering away that tactic. I think this sort of thing leads to a lot of frustration on both sides. As a programmer, I find it very frustrating that law enforcement and the media consistently get some of the most basic details wrong about how communication and encryption work, and about the negative side effects of the new laws they're proposing. But I assume that law enforcement folks also feel frustrated about how people like me have no idea how they actually get their jobs done day-to-day, or the negative side effects of the technologies we're building.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  The stupidest 30% are walking around with phones that are already easily tracked.
  - throwaway17_17 7y ago
    Anecdotally, I can assure that upwards of 70% of criminal defendants have some form of tracking capable phone on them when a crime happens, I don’t think this makes them stupid, just a general reflection of society that such tracking doesn’t happen or isn’t something anyone can see.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      It makes them at least careless, and that borders on stupid.
- tootie 7y ago
  The 1993 WTC bombers got caught when they tried to recoup the deposit on the rented van they blew up. OTOH, we tapped bin Laden's sat phone.
mywittyname 7y ago
> far more sophisticated means of communication Or far more simple means. It's trivial, really, to write your own app for encrypted communication or signaling. I bet I could build one in a day. Even without programming skills, you could set up a shared drive containing only a keepass file. Download the file, use your key and password to open it, then read the message. Monitor the last updated timestamp to see if there have been any changes. Securing your communications is not hard.
ravenstine 7y ago
Maybe the terrorists. Anyone who's seen "to catch a predator" knows that most pedophiles are borderline mentally handicapped and are way more likely to get caught by their own incompetence; no extra laws necessary. But you're otherwise right that people running CP rings are probably using more sophisticated means that can't be stopped by conventional means.
- tortasaur 7y ago
  >Anyone who's seen "to catch a predator" knows that most pedophiles are borderline mentally handicapped and are way more likely to get caught by their own incompetence; no extra laws necessary. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that pedophilia correlates with lower intelligence, but a more accurate conclusion to arrive at after watcing TCAP is that most people who fall for a fairly obvious sting operation (in some cases, after having watched the show themselves) are borderline mentally handicapped.
andai 7y ago
> far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr Like better apps, or something homebrewed?
jacquesm 7y ago
> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr You'd be surprised how poor their opsec can be. Regular file transfer services for instance see this traffic, entirely in the clear, not even the slightest attempt at encryption is made.
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
> You don't need to know the contents of a chat to glean massive amounts of metadata. Signal is actually working on fixing that (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/).
searchableguy 7y ago
Aren't most child sexual abusers (90%+) close to the victim and half of them are from family? Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most.
- api 7y ago
  It's a bad faith argument. They don't care about pedophiles. You're right. It's usually a teacher, neighbor, pastor, uncle, etc. "Stranger danger" is mostly BS unless you live in a really dangerous neighborhood, and there the risk is more likely to be simple robbery with incidental harm to the child. Child sex abuse is also under-prosecuted and under-sentenced. Your average child rapist serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs. It's really bad if the abuser is wealthy and can really put up a fight. Google Jeffrey Epstein's original indictment and the non-punishment he received. If they really cared about child abusers they'd prosecute them more aggressively and sentence them more severely.
  - swixmix 7y ago
    > [...] serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs. Did you mean to compare this to racial biased drug sentencing?
- Melting_Harps 7y ago
  > Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most. No, its totally consistent with the State's MO; using the 'Helen Lovejoy' argument [1] is entirely specious reasoning when even the most superficial analysis on the perpetrators of said crime is done... but its not meant to appeal to reason, rather its meant to create a knee-jerk reaction when someone tries to refute it before being coaxed down the collectivize population's throat. It's so easy and simple to say 'what, do you want pedophiles to use this tech now?' and end any semblance of coherent logical discourse on the matter: and that's the aim, to end any discussion or counter arguments before its enacted and further erode privacy and civil liberties. When I really started to delve into the 'why and hows' of cryptocurency I came to the conclusion that after Wikileaks/Assange got cut off from the legacy system in 2010 that we were already in the 2nd Crypto War (Julian is a key target and is shows [2] as he's been treated like a POW) that followed after Zimmerman's PgP project succeeded and ended the 1st. I'm a Signal user and I'm not entirely sure what that 'dumping the US Market' would entail, will they pull Signal from an app store? Meaning I could just compile it while accessing it from a VPN, or compiling it myself on PC? 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg 2: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/australian-parliamentarians-ask-uk-to-release-juli/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/australian-p...
anigbrowl 7y ago
On 3, I don't know about pedophiles but terrorists do indeed use consumer apps; they're 'good enough' and the traffic doesn't stand out. Many (most?) cases are broken open because law enforcement turns a human source or manages to place someone undercover. Of course, those apps are not all that they use. There are definite advantages to things like encrypted digital radio vs IP communications, and concomitant downsides such as standing out like a sore thumb in the RF spectrum or being more vulnerable to zero-days against niche platforms.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  The problem with the idea that if all consumer apps played ball with law enforcement (and as always, I would like to point out that it isn't clear which nation's law enforcement agencies are supposed to get access) then suddenly there would be no choice but to roll your own encryption tools is naive. It is born from a type of politician's mindset where communication between people is done via an 'app', and an 'app' means that there is a large company that invariably wants to deal with the US or the EU that can be pressured into building a backdoor. And for 99% of today's messaging apps they are right (which is a nice mess we're in by the way). But anyone can use OpenPGP (or any other tool) today, and anyone can tomorrow, even if such a project stops completely. The source is out there, and so is the source for hundreds of other related tools. There will also be people with — subjectively, depending on whom and where you ask — non-nefarious reasons to have their communications end-to-end encrypted who will find ways to provide such software in a decentralised manner without the point of failure that laws like EARN-IT target.
DeathArrow 7y ago
It's hard to collect metadata if the traffic is inside Tor, I2P or behind some clever tunneling. But government programs have other means of collecting data: OS level backdoors, flawed random number generators like DUAL_EC_DRBG, "unintended hardware bugs" in Intel's CPUs. I guess they mostly rely on these alternative means. These "let's forbid strong encryption" might be just dust in the eyes to make their targets feel secure if they use apps with "strong encryption".
qznc 7y ago
I agree with number 3. Laws are introduced "against terrorism and pedophiles" and then used against drug dealers and activists.
- suizi 7y ago
  The term "extremist" is used for certain activists whose views skew too far outside of the usual range, although one man's "extremist" are another's "unorthodox" view. Depending on the era, a view may be perfectly reasonable or ridiculous, compare the idea of "protecting the environment" in the past. Some countries do (or have) crack down on really outlandish views for a time. One country's views may also differ from another. As a matter of principle, I don't much like terrorists as they operate under the goal of spreading terror. I have strong doubts cracking down on encryption would stop them, as they operate perfectly fine with fairly mundane tools and the "mass-surveillance" machine loses them in the noise.
mayankkaizen 7y ago
What are those sophisticated means of communications?
snarf21 7y ago
Exactly. So they never caught any criminals before 1998? They investigated and got probable cause and then got warrants. Nothing needs to change now.

by mikece 7y ago

blfr 7y ago

Perhaps I'm not hip enough but I'm pretty sure there is nothing more sophisticated than Signal.

mikece 7y ago
Session -- it just doesn't have as many features. BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. If you're savvy you realize this can be a Twilio number you control making your account immune from SIM hijacking. However, unless you override a bunch of defaults Signal is not immune to other attack vectors like attempting to unfurl a URL sent in a message -- which can expose your true IP address -- or generate a thumbnail of a video -- which can launch a malware attack -- which is the method of attack alleged to have been used by Saudi intelligence to hijack Jeff Bezos' phone (via an E2E encrypted WhatsApp message no less). A more sophisticated messenger system would turn off lots of "convenience" features by default and let me pick a random username and NOT make me enter a phone number or email address. People who care about security don't need a way to reset their randomly generated 128 character passwords.
- rsync 7y ago
  "BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. If you're savvy you realize this can be a Twilio number you control making your account immune from SIM hijacking." Does Signal not ever send messages from, or otherwise use, SMS shortcodes ? I ask because no twilio number can receive an SMS shortcode (because no twilio number is classified as a "mobile" number). Genuinely curious.
  - phaer 7y ago
    The do it once for the initial setup. But iirc, one can also get an automated call for the pin.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  > BTW, one of Signal's weaknesses is that you MUST use a phone number with it. This isn't a weakness, it is a tradeoff. You use phone numbers (downside) but the server does not have to store any information about who is talking to who (upside). Other tools reverse this choice and don't use phone numbers but do need to maintain the communication metadata.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    It's not a tradeoff, it's a weakness by design. All features you mention are 100% doable without a phone number
    - nebulous1 7y ago
      I believe it is both a weakness and a trade-off
    - maqp 7y ago
      Sure, and Signal is already working on usernames. Here's the kink: When you have low latency (video) calls, you can't route via Tor. When you can't route via Tor, you leak your IP to the server. When you leak your IP you're not anonymous, and when you're not anonymous, the server having the hash of your phone number isn't adding too much data to them. When the server knows who you are, the app can use your existing contact list to discover contacts. This means unlike e.g. Telegram, Signal server doesn't store your contact list. I e.g. constantly see people whose phone number I've already deleted appear on my Telegram contact list "X joined Telegram". Telegram knows I had the number at some point. This would never happen with Signal.
mikece 7y ago
To be fair, "Signal the App" and "Signal the Protocol" are two different things. If you were talking about the later then your statement is quite possibly correct.
uoaei 7y ago
Why not Keybase? https://keybase.io/ https://keybase.io/
- QUFB 7y ago
  The lack of PFS is a big negative about keybase.
  - cristoperb 7y ago
    You can set messages to expire in keybase: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages
    - majewsky 7y ago
      That looks completely orthogonal to Perfect Forward Secrecy.
      - oconnor663 7y ago
        It's based on an ephemeral key schedule underneath. Here's the design doc: https://keybase.io/docs/chat/ephemeral https://keybase.io/docs/chat/ephemeral
  - brobinson 7y ago
    I was just looking into keybase, and.... deleted. Thanks for the heads up.
  - urxvtcd 7y ago
    I was under the impression it's the same for Signal. Quick duckduckgo led me here: https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ The more you know!
  - maqp 7y ago
    There's also a targeted attack that allows arbitrary keys to be linked to your keyring to DoS you.
upofadown 7y ago
Signal is all about making good cryptography usable for the general public. If you actually use the "safety numbers" to verify the identity of who you are communicating with then you have real guaranteed end to end encryption. Unfortunately not everyone does that. People that really really need to be sure probably use something super simple like PGP after they take the time to learn how.

the8472 7y ago

> anyone saying otherwise needs to prove it Sorry pal, that's top secret intel. Just Trust Us™.

strictnein 7y ago

I multihop VPN through service A. My criminal friends multihop VPN through service B, C, etc. All hops are through non-US friendly countries We then communicate over a secure messaging platform like Signal, Telegram, etc. Knowing just that I communicated with one or more people, how you would conduct your investigation to "trace" the participants in this conversation? The feds would be really put up to unravel this (and are on a daily basis), let alone the police.

chatmasta 7y ago
Why are the feds watching these conversations in the first place? Has a crime been committed? If they’re investigating a crime, surely there are more avenues of investigation than Facebook chats that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Whatever happened to good old fashioned police work? Seems like they just expect everyone’s chats to be handed to them on a silver platter when they ask for it.
- strictnein 7y ago
  I'm responding to this statement and showing how it is rather ignorant: 1. The police are either lazy or incompetent if they say they cannot trace criminals because of E2E secure chat. As for the rest of your comments: The feds are watching criminals online because lots of crime is committed online. I do not think weakening encryption will help them in this pursuit.
- DeathArrow 7y ago
  >Whatever happened to good old fashioned police work? That implies effort and people are lazy. "Hey, Mr Criminal, can you be so nice to use App X when you plan to commit your crime so our automated system can mail us when you are going to break the law and also set up an event in our calendar so we can come and arrest you. Please be nice, we can make each other lives easier if we work together. "

lonelappde 7y ago

> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication Terrorism is mostly opportunistic radicals communicating via YouTube and Twitter and Fox News, or national / quasinational governments that are brazen and flagrant and don't need to worry about being noticed.

cvwright 7y ago
Sometimes these idiots have posted on Facebook about their planned attacks. And we still did not manage to stop them.
- mirimir 7y ago
  They're just in it for the fame. Or the lulz.

formercoder 7y ago

Yep, we know the CIA makes kill decisions based on metadata.

oconnor663 7y ago

> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication The "most dangerous" part is doing a lot of work there. Just like I think law enforcement needs to admit what they can and cannot do (e.g. they cannot protect a golden key), I think we need to admit some things too. A lot of dangerous criminals are stupid. Maybe not the most dangerous ones, sure. But if law enforcement has a tactic that lets them catch, say, the stupidest 30% of terrorists, that's an extremely valuable tactic that probably saves a lot of lives in practice. It would be wrong to claim that society loses nothing by engineering away that tactic. I think this sort of thing leads to a lot of frustration on both sides. As a programmer, I find it very frustrating that law enforcement and the media consistently get some of the most basic details wrong about how communication and encryption work, and about the negative side effects of the new laws they're proposing. But I assume that law enforcement folks also feel frustrated about how people like me have no idea how they actually get their jobs done day-to-day, or the negative side effects of the technologies we're building.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
The stupidest 30% are walking around with phones that are already easily tracked.
- throwaway17_17 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I can assure that upwards of 70% of criminal defendants have some form of tracking capable phone on them when a crime happens, I don’t think this makes them stupid, just a general reflection of society that such tracking doesn’t happen or isn’t something anyone can see.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    It makes them at least careless, and that borders on stupid.
tootie 7y ago
The 1993 WTC bombers got caught when they tried to recoup the deposit on the rented van they blew up. OTOH, we tapped bin Laden's sat phone.

mywittyname 7y ago

> far more sophisticated means of communication Or far more simple means. It's trivial, really, to write your own app for encrypted communication or signaling. I bet I could build one in a day. Even without programming skills, you could set up a shared drive containing only a keepass file. Download the file, use your key and password to open it, then read the message. Monitor the last updated timestamp to see if there have been any changes. Securing your communications is not hard.

ravenstine 7y ago

Maybe the terrorists. Anyone who's seen "to catch a predator" knows that most pedophiles are borderline mentally handicapped and are way more likely to get caught by their own incompetence; no extra laws necessary. But you're otherwise right that people running CP rings are probably using more sophisticated means that can't be stopped by conventional means.

tortasaur 7y ago
>Anyone who's seen "to catch a predator" knows that most pedophiles are borderline mentally handicapped and are way more likely to get caught by their own incompetence; no extra laws necessary. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that pedophilia correlates with lower intelligence, but a more accurate conclusion to arrive at after watcing TCAP is that most people who fall for a fairly obvious sting operation (in some cases, after having watched the show themselves) are borderline mentally handicapped.

andai 7y ago

> far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr Like better apps, or something homebrewed?

jacquesm 7y ago

> The terrorists and pedophiles that are the most dangerous are using far more sophisticated means of communication than Wire, Signal, WhatsApp, Wickr You'd be surprised how poor their opsec can be. Regular file transfer services for instance see this traffic, entirely in the clear, not even the slightest attempt at encryption is made.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago

> You don't need to know the contents of a chat to glean massive amounts of metadata. Signal is actually working on fixing that (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/).

searchableguy 7y ago

Aren't most child sexual abusers (90%+) close to the victim and half of them are from family? Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most.

api 7y ago
It's a bad faith argument. They don't care about pedophiles. You're right. It's usually a teacher, neighbor, pastor, uncle, etc. "Stranger danger" is mostly BS unless you live in a really dangerous neighborhood, and there the risk is more likely to be simple robbery with incidental harm to the child. Child sex abuse is also under-prosecuted and under-sentenced. Your average child rapist serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs. It's really bad if the abuser is wealthy and can really put up a fight. Google Jeffrey Epstein's original indictment and the non-punishment he received. If they really cared about child abusers they'd prosecute them more aggressively and sentence them more severely.
- swixmix 7y ago
  > [...] serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs. Did you mean to compare this to racial biased drug sentencing?
Melting_Harps 7y ago
> Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most. No, its totally consistent with the State's MO; using the 'Helen Lovejoy' argument [1] is entirely specious reasoning when even the most superficial analysis on the perpetrators of said crime is done... but its not meant to appeal to reason, rather its meant to create a knee-jerk reaction when someone tries to refute it before being coaxed down the collectivize population's throat. It's so easy and simple to say 'what, do you want pedophiles to use this tech now?' and end any semblance of coherent logical discourse on the matter: and that's the aim, to end any discussion or counter arguments before its enacted and further erode privacy and civil liberties. When I really started to delve into the 'why and hows' of cryptocurency I came to the conclusion that after Wikileaks/Assange got cut off from the legacy system in 2010 that we were already in the 2nd Crypto War (Julian is a key target and is shows [2] as he's been treated like a POW) that followed after Zimmerman's PgP project succeeded and ended the 1st. I'm a Signal user and I'm not entirely sure what that 'dumping the US Market' would entail, will they pull Signal from an app store? Meaning I could just compile it while accessing it from a VPN, or compiling it myself on PC? 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg 2: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/australian-parliamentarians-ask-uk-to-release-juli/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/australian-p...

anigbrowl 7y ago

On 3, I don't know about pedophiles but terrorists do indeed use consumer apps; they're 'good enough' and the traffic doesn't stand out. Many (most?) cases are broken open because law enforcement turns a human source or manages to place someone undercover. Of course, those apps are not all that they use. There are definite advantages to things like encrypted digital radio vs IP communications, and concomitant downsides such as standing out like a sore thumb in the RF spectrum or being more vulnerable to zero-days against niche platforms.

Freak_NL 7y ago
The problem with the idea that if all consumer apps played ball with law enforcement (and as always, I would like to point out that it isn't clear which nation's law enforcement agencies are supposed to get access) then suddenly there would be no choice but to roll your own encryption tools is naive. It is born from a type of politician's mindset where communication between people is done via an 'app', and an 'app' means that there is a large company that invariably wants to deal with the US or the EU that can be pressured into building a backdoor. And for 99% of today's messaging apps they are right (which is a nice mess we're in by the way). But anyone can use OpenPGP (or any other tool) today, and anyone can tomorrow, even if such a project stops completely. The source is out there, and so is the source for hundreds of other related tools. There will also be people with — subjectively, depending on whom and where you ask — non-nefarious reasons to have their communications end-to-end encrypted who will find ways to provide such software in a decentralised manner without the point of failure that laws like EARN-IT target.

DeathArrow 7y ago

It's hard to collect metadata if the traffic is inside Tor, I2P or behind some clever tunneling. But government programs have other means of collecting data: OS level backdoors, flawed random number generators like DUAL_EC_DRBG, "unintended hardware bugs" in Intel's CPUs. I guess they mostly rely on these alternative means. These "let's forbid strong encryption" might be just dust in the eyes to make their targets feel secure if they use apps with "strong encryption".

qznc 7y ago

I agree with number 3. Laws are introduced "against terrorism and pedophiles" and then used against drug dealers and activists.

suizi 7y ago
The term "extremist" is used for certain activists whose views skew too far outside of the usual range, although one man's "extremist" are another's "unorthodox" view. Depending on the era, a view may be perfectly reasonable or ridiculous, compare the idea of "protecting the environment" in the past. Some countries do (or have) crack down on really outlandish views for a time. One country's views may also differ from another. As a matter of principle, I don't much like terrorists as they operate under the goal of spreading terror. I have strong doubts cracking down on encryption would stop them, as they operate perfectly fine with fairly mundane tools and the "mass-surveillance" machine loses them in the noise.

mayankkaizen 7y ago

What are those sophisticated means of communications?

snarf21 7y ago

Exactly. So they never caught any criminals before 1998? They investigated and got probable cause and then got warrants. Nothing needs to change now.