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Looking back on this comment now I realize it can be construed as condoning Zoom’s decision here. I was not intending to pass judgement with that comment, but p
by lilyball 6y ago
Looking back on this comment now I realize it can be construed as condoning Zoom’s decision here. I was not intending to pass judgement with that comment, but perhaps I should:
I think Zoom is wrong.
End-to-end encryption should be available to everybody no matter who they are. This means making it available to bad actors too. Expanding the scope of human communication should not be used to justify state surveillance. Privacy is a fundamental human right and one we should not be forced into giving up because it annoys the government.
- rpastuszak 6y agoYup, I was a bit confused about what you were trying to say. Thanks for clarifying.
- Blackstone4 6y agoSpeaking more broadly, surely there is a point between zero privacy and 100% surveillance that we can all move to. If we take the encrypt (E2EE) approach to everything and all aspects of our lives, i.e. we should be able to protect our faces from video recording when walking into banks, then surely the system would be more open to abuse by bad actors. Accountability in society is what drives good behavior....if we take that away then chaos reigns. Therefore there must be a balance which is why the whole 'let's encrypt everything and protect everyone' feels like sometimes it goes too far and borders on zealotry...Yes I feel that personal freedoms are important but so is the state in mantaining peace.
- pydry 6y agoIt'll stop feeling like zealotry as governments develop more and more stasi-like tendencies. The trouble is, by the time they do (and they will, China is halfway there), it will be too late to protest.
- Blackstone4 6y agoFair point with regards to government overeach. I feel like this is both a practical and political question we would need to answer as a society. What level of surveillance would be acceptable? Zero? Some? Maybe when for temporary accounts with no identity attached? Inheritly in society, there was always some form of surveillance. When we left our homes, people around us could see and hear what we are doing and there in report suspicious behavor. Now we are adjusting to a new way of life with new forms of surveillance which are harder to detect. I completely get it and I more for encryption then for not. I guess I am also challenging myself to see both sides and think about a middle ground. While Western governments could be better behaved, I'm feel like comparisons with the stasi are somewhat extreme and out of wack. I live in the UK and generally speaking I'm happy with the government here when it comes to surveillance. Maybe the US has a greater focus on security but they are a long way from stasi.
- partyboat1586 6y agoThey might be long away from stasi now but you don't get there in a big leap you get there slowly, justifiable inch by justifiable inch until the surveillance is enough you don't have to justify it anymore because people are too afraid to protest. If you want to discuss surveillance then yes of course it's a matter of degree. Putting cameras in a bank vs putting cameras in a pub vs putting cameras in your home. As you can tell in the real world it's clearer when it's a step too far. In the digital world we need to be more careful because it's unmapped territory. You need to think hard about why it's an invasion of privacy to put cameras in your home. It may seem obvious but it's not. Once you understand the reasons why that is an invasion of privacy then you can start to draw analogies to the digital world and understand what is going too far and what is not. The problem is people don't have a deeper understanding of the reason we need privacy so they are easily sold security in the form of digital surveillance without understanding the eventual consequence.
- pydry 6y agoI don't think it's practical to focus on the amount of surveillance as it is its nature and whether or not it can justify itself. We already live in a society where widespread aggressive authoritarian surveillance that doesn't justify itself is commonplace. Snowden proved this. Your emails are read. Your naked selfies looked at. Personal data is used frequently to crack down heavily on legitimate dissent. These are unquestionable and it's getting worse and more entrenched, not less and it hasn't caught a single act of terrorism like it was set up (ostensibly) to do. The question is, how do we personally react to the unchecked growth of stasi-friendly surveillance infrastructure? I think arguing that western governments could be better behaved is a fair point. The stasi also could have been better behaved. Frequent appeals to moderation didn't make them behave though and they haven't and won't make western governments behave either, though. Appeals to moderation have a null effect because if the goalposts keep being moved, so does the moderate position. If you want your opinion to never matter at all, always pick the moderate, middle ground opinion.
- tsimionescu 6y agoActually, the government already has, and has always had, stasi-like tendencies, they just happen to mostly target people who are not given a platform to talk about it. Police and other law enforcement are already using legal powers to infiltrate and monitor 'radical' political groups such as Black Lives Matter, just like they have in the past with civil liberties groups. In fact, as we discovered in the COINTELPRO leaks, they were going way beyond the legal limits, having been complicit in the assassination of Malcolm X, and having tried to blackmail MLK into committing suicide. Of course, it could be that such things don't happen anymore. Or, seeing how the police in Minneapolis are actively targeting journalists, it is significantly more likely that we just don't know about it yet. No large state has ever tolerated real dissent to any great extent. The state doesn't have to be as paranoid about dissent as China or the USSR (which almost require(d) enthusiastic support) for police powers to eb abused against the legitimate interests of citizens.
- partyboat1586 6y agoI think it's fine to have cameras in a shop or in a bank or whatever the virtual equivalent becomes because they serve a clear security purpose. The problem with not end to end encrypting private communications is during a lockdown people now have nowhere they can go for a private conversation. If you invite someone over to your house for drinks or for dinner you feel you can talk freely because the government doesn't have cameras in your house, that would be an invasion of privacy. Where is the virtual equivalent of that once zoom is not longer private? Remember your freedom will be taken an inch at a time. Not all at once.
- shafyy 6y agoYou know that Zoom is not the only video chat software, right?
- partyboat1586 6y agoExactly, which makes it worse. Real bad actors will just switch meanwhile normal people get surveillance.
- shafyy 6y agoTrue, and I don't support Zooms decision. You said: > Where is the virtual equivalent of that once zoom is not longer private? What I meant by my comment is that there are good alternatives that are E2E and free, like FaceTime (ok you need an iPhone or Mac), WhatsApp, Signal etc. So people can just use that if they don't want to pay for Zoom (again, I don't think they're making the right decision either).
- partyboat1586 6y agoPeople will choose convenience over privacy when they can't see the threat. Zoom is convenient for video calls because it allows you to see all the people in the call on one screen, you can schedule meetings, the connection quality is good, it supports screen sharing and it's fully cross platform. You already disqualified Facetime because realistically some of your friends and family have Android and Windows. WhatsApp connection quality is flaky, same with Skype. Does signal support group class? If it does maybe it could replace Zoom. Maybe. But all these options existed before lockdown and people still settled on Zoom because it's more convenient. Either some massive scandal has to happen to make the public more privacy conscious or there needs to be e2e encryption by default, as a standard. With or without invisible state surveilled cameras shouldn't factor in to which dining table I buy.
- Arnt 6y agoThat's equivalent to saying that there is a point that provides suitable authentication/privacy/… for me to ask my bank about things and instruct my bank to do stuff on my behalf, and also privides little enough privacy that any criminal goings-on can be surveilled. Since money is key to many crimes and finding out who controls the money is an important way to investigate crimes, this in turn means that that point of agreement has to secure me from surveillance by badguys when I talk to the bank, and permit surveillance of the same badguys when they talk to the same bank in the same way. This might perhaps be possible but the word "surely" seems inappropriate.
- ramraj07 6y agoI think you are wrong. The reason is, people seem to continue extrapolating reasonable privacy laws that were originally meant for the physical world to the virtual world. In the physical world, however, there's always reasonable workarounds to break into these privacy barriers if there's a suspicion of crime. In the virtual world, often, there's no possible way to break strong encryption barriers even if everyone agrees there needs to be a check on what's inside for the public good. As an illustration, if we get reasonable evidence suggesting that someone is growing marijuana in their ranch, we can get a warrant and go inside. There's not too much the owner can do to stop it. However a perfectly encrypted iphone cannot be broken into, no matter if the entire world agrees that there's evidence of crime in it. From what I can see, no one argues against warranted search of personal property in the physical world, except maybe some sovereign citizen crazies. Given this, why can't we strive for a similar system on the virtual world as well? I too agree warrantless or unfettered govt surveillance of technology is bad, but that's a policy failing not a technology one. We should try to focus on how we can hold governments responsible instead of making fully protected crime caves for anyone who cannot whip up a conscience. I agree privacy should be a right, but not at the expense of many people enduring a life of hell in these cordoned spaces for that cause.
- ldng 6y agoYou mean Zoom employees will present a warrant ?
- stiray 6y agoI beg to differ at some point. In physical world two people are talking. If police has suspicion that they are commiting a crime it can request a warrant to install listening device and only then they can listen. In Zoom like scenarios any third party (like technological companies using law as excuse) can listen without warrant (and they will say something like "no one is listening" as training AI is not considered "someone") As such communications should be encrypted with asymetrical cryptography where only warrant giver can decrypt them (not warrant giver giving the private key to law enforcement, but decrypting the symetrical per session key and give that to the law enforcement). And this goes as phones too. And quite frankly I dont care if police with warrant is listening to my conversations. I dont want to any company listen to them as they are not doint it for law enforcement but for profitting on my data (quite possibly against my interest) and this is something completely different. This is the scenario where technology gives people MORE privacy, prevents police illegal wiretaps (without warrent giver consent), prevents technology provider wiretaps and on the other side still allows legal wiretapping based on warrent-giver. But interesting, no one has any interest doing it, guess why?
- headmelted 6y agoI so want to be on the same side of this discussion but the argument is nuanced. The reason "think of the kids" works so well to justify blocking E2E all the time is because child abuse happens literally all the time. When someone solves this problem, and I don't think any of us really believe it to be solvable, we can move on. I don't want the government in my private conversations, but I don't want my kids in someone elses either. To extend this - we recognise a duty of care to our users and their privacy when we build these systems, but if those users plan and carry out an act of terrorism did we not also have a duty of care to their victims to not aid their killers in planning their murder? We can't shunt this responsibility forever, the public will not take our side down the road - because we are ignoring the counter-argument even if we wedge our fingers in our ears.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoChild abuse, terrorism, drug trafficking and professional crime in general is a needle in a haystack compared to boring petty crime let alone normal communication. Law enforcement entities that try to prosecute these kinds of crimes doesn't do it by building haystacks of data and then combing through looking for needles because that's a waste of their resources relative to the amount of results obtained. They do it by attacking the endpoints where the abuse or terrorism, or other professional crime has to actually happen. They find a terrorist, or a child abuser or a drug trafficker or they find evidence of their handiwork and then work from there. They see where they get their money, their bombs, their drugs, etc, etc and follow the links as much as they can. When law enforcement is actually trying to target crime they don't go fishing, digitally or in meatspace because that's not an efficient way to obtain results if the goal is to go after some genre of professional/organized crime. Running a mass operation with no specific target (like speed traps in meat-space or dragnet operations in the digital world) is great for padding stats because you can say "look, we got X pounds of meth off the street" or whatever but it doesn't actually do much to target the professional crime because professional criminals take steps to avoid being caught in lowest common denominator type policing. Neutering encryption (so that cops can continue to run surveillance dragnets) doesn't do anything to help the cops catch real criminals, that's just a talking point made up by the people who want the government to have the ability to put any arbitrary person under a microscope.
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoThe point of view depends on the experience. When you actually see the horrors of abuse, helped by internet and you realize that there are voluntary walls to protect these people (encryption for instance, but others too) you may have a different position. I would willingly give up that just to see children (or whoever) saved. You may not, that's a choice. I would just like to know whether you have seen what actually happens in these circles before making a decision. Also, I live in a normal country where this concern (state surveillance) is less of an issue.
- HappyDreamer 6y agoSounds as if you could also say that all photos people ever take, should be accessible to the government and police, to protect the children. And things people say in their homes, need to be accessible to the police, to maybe rescue kidnapped children. > When you actually see the horrors of ... I heard about someone working as a nurse, in an emergency room, and because of witnessing injuries from traffic accidents, she decide to never be in a car again. I can understand that, I think that decision makes sense. But not handing over people's communication to people like Trump and Putin etc and their men.
- amachefe 6y agoIf you had read all the tweet, you will come accross to this https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1268199863054811136 https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1268199863054811136 2) None of the major players offer E2E by default (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, BlueJeans). WebEx has an E2E option for enterprise users only, and it requires you to run the PKI and won't work with outsiders. Any E2E shipping in Zoom will be groundbreaking.
- lilyball 6y agoThe tweet you linked is newer than this discussion. And it's also misleading. The major players in the business world aren't E2EE today, so Zoom is breaking ground in that way, but as far as free offerings go FaceTime is E2EE and that's certainly not a niche service. WhatsApp is also E2EE. And there's a platform called Wire which I'm not particular familiar with but claims to be E2EE. And it's also a paid service, which suggests it's targeting businesses. I guess it just doesn't count as a "major player".
- lilyball 6y agoI forgot, there’s also Google Duo which is E2EE as well.
- holigot 6y agoWrong. Cisco WebEx does have E2EE for free users!