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We need to establish the use of encryption as a basic human right. I'm so tired of this cropping up every couple years.

scrollaway 6y ago
First step is finding a way to educate the mainstream (including politicians) on the dangers of master keys and backdoors. It is too easy for many politicians and security agencies to think that their master keys and backdoors won't ever fall into the wrong hands, that they're careful, etc. And if you point out the problem, they'll tell you they'll be even more careful. Think about it from a non-techie perspective. I don't think most people even understand the concept that a message that goes from sender to recipient in WhatsApp can't be decrypted by Facebook, let alone by anyone else. I don't even know if there is a common analogue-world comparison you can draw, this is an utterly new concept for people who don't understand encryption.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The mainstream doesn't care about human rights, they will always fall for the children/terrorism traps
- emteycz 6y ago
  Non-techies most certainly understand what encryption is and if you describe what 'end' in the WhatsApp notice about end to end encryption means, it's very clear to them.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    No, non-techies do not "understand what encryption is". They'll understand if you explain it to them, but if you ask someone off the street what encryption is, the closest to a correct description they may give you is "it's garbled text you can decrypt". It's hard enough to explain the easy, obvious stuff like tax brackets. You think people have a native understanding of encryption?
    - withinboredom 6y ago
      > You think people have a native understanding of encryption? It’s easy. Tell people they’re speaking English to one other person who also speaks English at a dinner table. No one else in the world speaks English. You can look and sound like you’re talking about how excellent the food is, but really you’re saying how terrible it is... and no one on earth will ever know, other than the one person who understands you.
      - scrollaway 6y ago
        This is not a good way to explain encryption to people. Explaining the concept of a "key" is essential to explain why this doesn't work. - In your example, the contents can be deduced from the "encrypted" data, without the key. Indeed, there is no key, but rather a complex dictionary transformation. - A "backdoor" is merely teaching GCHQ to speak English. Sounds perfectly reasonable in your example. I'd argue the exact problem is that politicians have the particular understanding of encryption that you just gave. You need to communicate two things: 1) Why backdooring safe encryption irreversibly breaks it for everybody 2) Why that's a bad thing
        emteycz 6y ago
        Guys, both of you are behaving like non-tech people are idiots. They are as smart as you. They often have college degrees. Even children understand perfectly well what encryption is. Boy/girl scouts go out of their way to teach it, etc.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  E2E encryption is scary. I'm also in the "you can't ban math, why try" camp. But I can't see authorities/politicians give up the idea of getting access to decrypted communications after court orders, in a 100 years, even if everyone completely understood the topic. It's just not happening.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    I mean, if you put it that way, assumption of innocence is also a scary concept; being the police and having to let someone you know is a murderer or terrorist go because you can't prove what they did is routinely touted as a genuinely terrifying prospect in plenty of TV shows. Privacy is a human right in Europe. I don't think it's a pipe dream to give encryption some good PR, especially when it powers the internet, keeps your payments safe, protects you from bad guys, etc. Pushing hard on the concept that Encryption == Privacy is very important. We should not call intentionally-backdoored crypto "Encryption", but something obviously bad such as "Open-Door Fake Encryption", or whatever actually speaks to people.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      We expect privacy in "unencrypted" phone calls, but seem happy that law enforcement can eavesdrop on 4G when they have to. Not sure how much more privacy people expect. If you explain to people how much privacy they give up just clicking a random facebook questionnaire - they nod and then still do. Privacy and integrity is important but it will never match e.g. "terrorism" or "safety" on the list of important issues I think.
      - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
        That's why you explain that it's about personal and organizational safety. The ability to lock doors. Make sure the terrorists can't find and research targets. Make sure child molesters can't get at your kids. Make sure bank robbers can't get at banks. Make sure organized crime can't spy on the police and thwart police actions. Etc etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569484
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  WhatsApp is closed source, isn't it? What kind of assurance do we have that these messages still aren't regularly sent to Facebook, unencrypted ?
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Even a closed-source app is never really closed. In the end it's all machine code which is basically source code as well. There's many tools to analyse binaries, like IDA Pro. It's just difficult and often steps are taken to obfuscate what it's doing. Having the higher-level source code just makes it a lot easier. But if WhatsApp did this, it would probably be noticed pretty quickly by experts. But like I said above, Whatsapp's achilles heel isn't really the E2E encryption. It's the cloud backups.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Would it? This kind of transmission of messages could be hidden alongside legitimate looking traffic like updates...
      - m4rtink 6y ago
        Also wven if it does not exhilarated user data now, it's one update from doing that tomorrow. Quite possible even via a targeted update on some specific people "not in favor". If it was open source there is some chance a backdoor would be spotted (eq. by Linux distropackage msintainers), but not when a company is pushing obfuscated binary blobs preatty much directly to users.
        floatboth 6y ago
        Well, not directly, for most people that would be via Apple/Google stores. And of course these stores could have secret functionality for shipping targeted updates. But if it exists, this means that 1) none of the developers working on the store backend decided to leak info about it and 2) none of the targets have had an expert look at their device to find an unusual update that wasn't seen by anyone else. Over time, the probability of either of those things happening would be going up…
3jckd 6y ago
I fully subscribe to this point. It comes up, then it either gets voted out or doesn't even come that far. What baffles me though is that such blatant power-grabs are being introduced, and that anyone thinks that anything would be better off afterwards. Surveillance is going to get more difficult, not easier unless you want to spy on middle-aged people talking about fishing or sour dough recipes.
BuildTheRobots 6y ago
> Article 8: Right to privacy - Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. - There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. (I'm not feeling bright enough to comment but this seems extremely relevant) [0] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-8-respect-your-private-and-family-life https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/arti...
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  Good find, but it has enough caveats and loopholes to render it useless. Prevention of not just crime, but also disorder? The economic well-being of the country? Protection of health or morals? I suppose it's better to pay lip service to Right to Privacy, instead of completely ignoring it altogether. But this is not a human right.
  - sjy 6y ago
    You're going to be very disappointed by the other human rights then. They're all about proportionality. Even the right to life can give way "when a public authority (such as the police) uses necessary force to … stop a riot or uprising." https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-2-right-life https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/arti...
- boomlinde 6y ago
  Rather toothless point considering "morals" and "economic well-being of the country" are valid grounds for interference.
- mritun 6y ago
  “Everyone has right to privacy ... except for ... protection of economic interest, keeping of morals, preventing disorder ...” That sounds more like declaration of “human rights” by China than by EU shakes head
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It pretty much is, section 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. I mean wearing my programmer goggles it doesn't state privacy AND correspondence but OR, but still. Not having your personal conversations get intercepted is not too much to ask for, is it? I mean I get it, if they have a reasonable suspicion they CAN intercept your communications (listening devices, intercepting the phone conversations), but this is not a right they can claim on anyone, and they shouldn't be able to force companies to allow them to listen in. Not arbitrarily anyway (see: Snowden revelations, where it was proven that the NSA just hoovers up anything and retroactively checks if there's anything wrong in there)
- cle 6y ago
  The problem is that you can’t leave any room for interpretation, because governments generally interpret things as liberally as they can in their favor, to the brink of absurdity. In other words, “encryption” needs to be listed there as a right, to remove any room for interpretation. Or explicitly listed as an example of a more general right, like the right to private speech (or whatever you want to call it).
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    The EU ministers do want us to have a right to encryption. They just want to be able to decrypt it.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      That is not encrypted then.
      - vntok 6y ago
        You might be confusing hashed with encrypted.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The EU doesn't see free speech as a basic human right. They are of the opinion that some ideas are dangerous in and of themselves, even without a call to violence. It is doubtful that it will see something like encryption that allows speech and communication at a distance without government knowledge or control as a basic human right. After all, if some speech is so dangerous that it cannot be posted online, then we should make sure it is not spreading to who knows what kinds of people without government knowledge.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  There is no logical connection between your first sentence and encryption. (By the way, it's incorrect, we call it the right to freedom of expression over here; sometimes also referred to as the freedom of opinion)
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  > The EU doesn't see free speech as a basic human right Of course it is, it's called freedom of opinion, simply some opinions are considered crimes by the EU law system. Removing a post that incites someone to commit suicide or to kill someone can save the poster from being prosecuted. That's it. Private communications are excempted though, unless they need to be used in a trial after a judge authorized it.
  - djbebs 6y ago
    Try going to berlin waving a nazi flag and saying they should have killed more jews back then to see how that goes
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      I'm Italian, it's a crime here too, I don't have to go to Berlin to see how it goes, when my father's home was raided by Nazis and he had to run and hide in the woods where he lived for two years, till the end of the war He was 4 years old. If you read again what I wrote it's already there: free of opinion doesn't mean that all opinions are permitted, because some of them are crimes. Anyway, if you know Berlin you should also know that there have been a spree of neo-nazi violence lately and the police is not doing much to stop it (I lived in Berlin for a few years) https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-admits-failures-over-far-right-crime-spree-in-neuk%C3%B6lln/a-55084116 https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-admits-failures-over-far...
ReptileMan 6y ago
You and what army?
dheera 6y ago
I wonder if we can make an encryption protocol that cryptographically securely encrypts an arbitrary English sentence into an English passage that sounds like it makes sense but is unrelated to the ciphertext.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Normal_gaussian 6y ago
  I have seen a few hacky implementations of this, many years back. Essentially you use a dumb secrecy technique (every second letter of every third word). Then put your (secyrely) encrypted message as the payload. The question of interest is "how to generate sentences that allow the most dense insertion of data?". The best two I saw were: * Used a copy paste (with link) of tweets / jokes / song lyrics with trite comments around them. * Used an html formatted email with images embedded. The images were fiddled to hold the bulk of the payload and the surrounding sentences were just to describe the image to give it authenticity. The funniest was a dirty poem generator based on an oracled (to inject the payload) monte carlo sim. It ised historic dirty letters and all sorts of poem formats. This was at a hackathon in Hampshire (uk) ~2014
- ben_w 6y ago
  Yes. 1. Encrypt as normal. 2. Given a language model which can generate a choice of multiple possible next-symbols given what has already been written, use bytes from the cypher text to choose between the available options. For example, using the predictive text options on my iPhone, and treating 0=left 1=right, the cypher text 011100 and the starting symbol “Hi”, I get: “Hi I have heard from the other” (Note: I’m fairly sure the iPhone predictive text system is personalised and therefore time-variable, but the general idea still applies if you are in full control of the system). 3. If the other party knows the model and the initial word, they can use an equivalent process to recover the cypher text and put that into the normal decryption routine.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    This is the correct answer, although it's worth thinking about what the threat model is. If the government is just going to force specific companies to add backdoors, then the process above isn't really necessary, you just need a way to install a client that isn't backdoored. If, however, the government is banning the sending of encrypted messages, then you have to hope that a jury doesn't see your long pointless messages as strong evidence of using encryption. To improve slightly upon the language model example given above, though, I suggest something like this: https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html
bserge 6y ago
It seems governments would rather make mind reading a thing.
adrian_b 6y ago
I completely agree with that. I was born and raised in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know very well how unbelievably horrific it was to live under continuous surveillance. Despite the many Western fiction works, either movies or novels, which attempted to describe how life was in the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, I have not seen any that succeeded to really convey how awful that was, because it is very difficult to imagine it when you have not experienced it. After 1990 there was a short time when things seemed to be improving in the world, about the human rights, but that did not last for long. After 2000, the Western countries began to resemble more and more every year with the communist countries they were formerly criticizing. This sad evolution concerns not only the continuous attempts to restrict the basic human rights but also the continuous reduction in competition in the economy, by more and more mergers and acquisitions. Despite what some say, the socialist economies were not really different from the capitalist economies, but they were identical to the extreme form of a capitalist economy, where, in the absence of regulation, everything is produced by monopolies. Now, with the exception of few domains where there is still vigorous competition, even the American economy is so much dominated by quasi-monopolies, that it resembles more to the old Russian economy than to the American economy of 30 years ago. Twenty years ago, when I designed some electronics hardware, I could search the Internet for the datasheets and manuals of possible components and I had many possible choices for each of them. Now, for many key components, I have only one possible source. Moreover, for many important components that I might use, I cannot really determine whether they could be used, because their technical documentation is provided only after signing an NDA and only if you intend to buy really large quantities. Such changes were very gradual, so for those who did not live enough to span several decades of experience, the way things are done now may seem normal, but they are not and they are definitely worse than before. Now it is far more difficult to innovate. Regarding surveillance and encryption, most Western people, who have not yet experienced the extreme abuses towards which the current legislation slowly evolves, are very naive and they do not understand how dangerous this really is. The irony is that now the Western countries are trying to make lawful things that not even the communists had the courage to introduce in their laws. Even in the communist constitution that was valid when I was a child there were constitutional rights for the secrecy both of the phone conversations and of the mail messages. Obviously, like the NSA, the secret police did not care about what is lawful and what is not, so they intercepted any mail message or phone conversation they desired, but at least there was no doubt that their activities are illegal. Fortunately, they did not have the technical abilities to intercept all the phone & mail communications, like today. Otherwise I would be still living in a communist country. Because of my experience, no matter what abusive laws might be introduced in the future by corrupt politicians and no matter which would be the consequences, I would never recognize that any other human being has the right to command me to not encrypt any information that belongs to me. Equivalently with being against the interdiction of encryption, I would also never accept that any human being has the right to demand that I must answer to any question, if I do not want to answer. Of course, if that question had been in the context of a legal investigation, refusing to answer some question may be considered as evidence supporting the supposition that the questioned person might have done something wrong. Therefore that person might be punished for what he/she is supposed to have been done, if being guilty is considered certain enough. However, punishing the person just for refusing to answer a question, without any evidence strong enough that the person has committed any other crime, as it is frequent now in the USA, this is something that I consider to be an unacceptable abuse and a breach of the most basic human right.
andromeduck 6y ago
IMO the right to encryption naturally follows form the fundamental right to speech but yes the right to practice math and science including should be additionally protected.

First step is finding a way to educate the mainstream (including politicians) on the dangers of master keys and backdoors. It is too easy for many politicians and security agencies to think that their master keys and backdoors won't ever fall into the wrong hands, that they're careful, etc. And if you point out the problem, they'll tell you they'll be even more careful. Think about it from a non-techie perspective. I don't think most people even understand the concept that a message that goes from sender to recipient in WhatsApp can't be decrypted by Facebook, let alone by anyone else. I don't even know if there is a common analogue-world comparison you can draw, this is an utterly new concept for people who don't understand encryption.

cblconfederate 6y ago
The mainstream doesn't care about human rights, they will always fall for the children/terrorism traps
emteycz 6y ago
Non-techies most certainly understand what encryption is and if you describe what 'end' in the WhatsApp notice about end to end encryption means, it's very clear to them.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  No, non-techies do not "understand what encryption is". They'll understand if you explain it to them, but if you ask someone off the street what encryption is, the closest to a correct description they may give you is "it's garbled text you can decrypt". It's hard enough to explain the easy, obvious stuff like tax brackets. You think people have a native understanding of encryption?
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    > You think people have a native understanding of encryption? It’s easy. Tell people they’re speaking English to one other person who also speaks English at a dinner table. No one else in the world speaks English. You can look and sound like you’re talking about how excellent the food is, but really you’re saying how terrible it is... and no one on earth will ever know, other than the one person who understands you.
    - scrollaway 6y ago
      This is not a good way to explain encryption to people. Explaining the concept of a "key" is essential to explain why this doesn't work. - In your example, the contents can be deduced from the "encrypted" data, without the key. Indeed, there is no key, but rather a complex dictionary transformation. - A "backdoor" is merely teaching GCHQ to speak English. Sounds perfectly reasonable in your example. I'd argue the exact problem is that politicians have the particular understanding of encryption that you just gave. You need to communicate two things: 1) Why backdooring safe encryption irreversibly breaks it for everybody 2) Why that's a bad thing
      - emteycz 6y ago
        Guys, both of you are behaving like non-tech people are idiots. They are as smart as you. They often have college degrees. Even children understand perfectly well what encryption is. Boy/girl scouts go out of their way to teach it, etc.
alkonaut 6y ago
E2E encryption is scary. I'm also in the "you can't ban math, why try" camp. But I can't see authorities/politicians give up the idea of getting access to decrypted communications after court orders, in a 100 years, even if everyone completely understood the topic. It's just not happening.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I mean, if you put it that way, assumption of innocence is also a scary concept; being the police and having to let someone you know is a murderer or terrorist go because you can't prove what they did is routinely touted as a genuinely terrifying prospect in plenty of TV shows. Privacy is a human right in Europe. I don't think it's a pipe dream to give encryption some good PR, especially when it powers the internet, keeps your payments safe, protects you from bad guys, etc. Pushing hard on the concept that Encryption == Privacy is very important. We should not call intentionally-backdoored crypto "Encryption", but something obviously bad such as "Open-Door Fake Encryption", or whatever actually speaks to people.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    We expect privacy in "unencrypted" phone calls, but seem happy that law enforcement can eavesdrop on 4G when they have to. Not sure how much more privacy people expect. If you explain to people how much privacy they give up just clicking a random facebook questionnaire - they nod and then still do. Privacy and integrity is important but it will never match e.g. "terrorism" or "safety" on the list of important issues I think.
    - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
      That's why you explain that it's about personal and organizational safety. The ability to lock doors. Make sure the terrorists can't find and research targets. Make sure child molesters can't get at your kids. Make sure bank robbers can't get at banks. Make sure organized crime can't spy on the police and thwart police actions. Etc etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24569484
BlueTemplar 6y ago
WhatsApp is closed source, isn't it? What kind of assurance do we have that these messages still aren't regularly sent to Facebook, unencrypted ?
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Even a closed-source app is never really closed. In the end it's all machine code which is basically source code as well. There's many tools to analyse binaries, like IDA Pro. It's just difficult and often steps are taken to obfuscate what it's doing. Having the higher-level source code just makes it a lot easier. But if WhatsApp did this, it would probably be noticed pretty quickly by experts. But like I said above, Whatsapp's achilles heel isn't really the E2E encryption. It's the cloud backups.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Would it? This kind of transmission of messages could be hidden alongside legitimate looking traffic like updates...
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Also wven if it does not exhilarated user data now, it's one update from doing that tomorrow. Quite possible even via a targeted update on some specific people "not in favor". If it was open source there is some chance a backdoor would be spotted (eq. by Linux distropackage msintainers), but not when a company is pushing obfuscated binary blobs preatty much directly to users.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        Well, not directly, for most people that would be via Apple/Google stores. And of course these stores could have secret functionality for shipping targeted updates. But if it exists, this means that 1) none of the developers working on the store backend decided to leak info about it and 2) none of the targets have had an expert look at their device to find an unusual update that wasn't seen by anyone else. Over time, the probability of either of those things happening would be going up…

3jckd 6y ago

I fully subscribe to this point. It comes up, then it either gets voted out or doesn't even come that far. What baffles me though is that such blatant power-grabs are being introduced, and that anyone thinks that anything would be better off afterwards. Surveillance is going to get more difficult, not easier unless you want to spy on middle-aged people talking about fishing or sour dough recipes.

BuildTheRobots 6y ago

> Article 8: Right to privacy - Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. - There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. (I'm not feeling bright enough to comment but this seems extremely relevant) [0] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-8-respect-your-private-and-family-life https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/arti...

SkyMarshal 6y ago
Good find, but it has enough caveats and loopholes to render it useless. Prevention of not just crime, but also disorder? The economic well-being of the country? Protection of health or morals? I suppose it's better to pay lip service to Right to Privacy, instead of completely ignoring it altogether. But this is not a human right.
- sjy 6y ago
  You're going to be very disappointed by the other human rights then. They're all about proportionality. Even the right to life can give way "when a public authority (such as the police) uses necessary force to … stop a riot or uprising." https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-2-right-life https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/arti...
boomlinde 6y ago
Rather toothless point considering "morals" and "economic well-being of the country" are valid grounds for interference.
mritun 6y ago
“Everyone has right to privacy ... except for ... protection of economic interest, keeping of morals, preventing disorder ...” That sounds more like declaration of “human rights” by China than by EU shakes head

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

It pretty much is, section 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. I mean wearing my programmer goggles it doesn't state privacy AND correspondence but OR, but still. Not having your personal conversations get intercepted is not too much to ask for, is it? I mean I get it, if they have a reasonable suspicion they CAN intercept your communications (listening devices, intercepting the phone conversations), but this is not a right they can claim on anyone, and they shouldn't be able to force companies to allow them to listen in. Not arbitrarily anyway (see: Snowden revelations, where it was proven that the NSA just hoovers up anything and retroactively checks if there's anything wrong in there)

cle 6y ago
The problem is that you can’t leave any room for interpretation, because governments generally interpret things as liberally as they can in their favor, to the brink of absurdity. In other words, “encryption” needs to be listed there as a right, to remove any room for interpretation. Or explicitly listed as an example of a more general right, like the right to private speech (or whatever you want to call it).
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  The EU ministers do want us to have a right to encryption. They just want to be able to decrypt it.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    That is not encrypted then.
    - vntok 6y ago
      You might be confusing hashed with encrypted.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

The EU doesn't see free speech as a basic human right. They are of the opinion that some ideas are dangerous in and of themselves, even without a call to violence. It is doubtful that it will see something like encryption that allows speech and communication at a distance without government knowledge or control as a basic human right. After all, if some speech is so dangerous that it cannot be posted online, then we should make sure it is not spreading to who knows what kinds of people without government knowledge.

scrollaway 6y ago
There is no logical connection between your first sentence and encryption. (By the way, it's incorrect, we call it the right to freedom of expression over here; sometimes also referred to as the freedom of opinion)
romanoderoma 6y ago
> The EU doesn't see free speech as a basic human right Of course it is, it's called freedom of opinion, simply some opinions are considered crimes by the EU law system. Removing a post that incites someone to commit suicide or to kill someone can save the poster from being prosecuted. That's it. Private communications are excempted though, unless they need to be used in a trial after a judge authorized it.
- djbebs 6y ago
  Try going to berlin waving a nazi flag and saying they should have killed more jews back then to see how that goes
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    I'm Italian, it's a crime here too, I don't have to go to Berlin to see how it goes, when my father's home was raided by Nazis and he had to run and hide in the woods where he lived for two years, till the end of the war He was 4 years old. If you read again what I wrote it's already there: free of opinion doesn't mean that all opinions are permitted, because some of them are crimes. Anyway, if you know Berlin you should also know that there have been a spree of neo-nazi violence lately and the police is not doing much to stop it (I lived in Berlin for a few years) https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-admits-failures-over-far-right-crime-spree-in-neuk%C3%B6lln/a-55084116 https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-police-admits-failures-over-far...

ReptileMan 6y ago

You and what army?

dheera 6y ago

I wonder if we can make an encryption protocol that cryptographically securely encrypts an arbitrary English sentence into an English passage that sounds like it makes sense but is unrelated to the ciphertext.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Normal_gaussian 6y ago
I have seen a few hacky implementations of this, many years back. Essentially you use a dumb secrecy technique (every second letter of every third word). Then put your (secyrely) encrypted message as the payload. The question of interest is "how to generate sentences that allow the most dense insertion of data?". The best two I saw were: * Used a copy paste (with link) of tweets / jokes / song lyrics with trite comments around them. * Used an html formatted email with images embedded. The images were fiddled to hold the bulk of the payload and the surrounding sentences were just to describe the image to give it authenticity. The funniest was a dirty poem generator based on an oracled (to inject the payload) monte carlo sim. It ised historic dirty letters and all sorts of poem formats. This was at a hackathon in Hampshire (uk) ~2014
ben_w 6y ago
Yes. 1. Encrypt as normal. 2. Given a language model which can generate a choice of multiple possible next-symbols given what has already been written, use bytes from the cypher text to choose between the available options. For example, using the predictive text options on my iPhone, and treating 0=left 1=right, the cypher text 011100 and the starting symbol “Hi”, I get: “Hi I have heard from the other” (Note: I’m fairly sure the iPhone predictive text system is personalised and therefore time-variable, but the general idea still applies if you are in full control of the system). 3. If the other party knows the model and the initial word, they can use an equivalent process to recover the cypher text and put that into the normal decryption routine.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  This is the correct answer, although it's worth thinking about what the threat model is. If the government is just going to force specific companies to add backdoors, then the process above isn't really necessary, you just need a way to install a client that isn't backdoored. If, however, the government is banning the sending of encrypted messages, then you have to hope that a jury doesn't see your long pointless messages as strong evidence of using encryption. To improve slightly upon the language model example given above, though, I suggest something like this: https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html https://bellard.org/textsynth/sms.html

bserge 6y ago

It seems governments would rather make mind reading a thing.

adrian_b 6y ago

I completely agree with that. I was born and raised in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know very well how unbelievably horrific it was to live under continuous surveillance. Despite the many Western fiction works, either movies or novels, which attempted to describe how life was in the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, I have not seen any that succeeded to really convey how awful that was, because it is very difficult to imagine it when you have not experienced it. After 1990 there was a short time when things seemed to be improving in the world, about the human rights, but that did not last for long. After 2000, the Western countries began to resemble more and more every year with the communist countries they were formerly criticizing. This sad evolution concerns not only the continuous attempts to restrict the basic human rights but also the continuous reduction in competition in the economy, by more and more mergers and acquisitions. Despite what some say, the socialist economies were not really different from the capitalist economies, but they were identical to the extreme form of a capitalist economy, where, in the absence of regulation, everything is produced by monopolies. Now, with the exception of few domains where there is still vigorous competition, even the American economy is so much dominated by quasi-monopolies, that it resembles more to the old Russian economy than to the American economy of 30 years ago. Twenty years ago, when I designed some electronics hardware, I could search the Internet for the datasheets and manuals of possible components and I had many possible choices for each of them. Now, for many key components, I have only one possible source. Moreover, for many important components that I might use, I cannot really determine whether they could be used, because their technical documentation is provided only after signing an NDA and only if you intend to buy really large quantities. Such changes were very gradual, so for those who did not live enough to span several decades of experience, the way things are done now may seem normal, but they are not and they are definitely worse than before. Now it is far more difficult to innovate. Regarding surveillance and encryption, most Western people, who have not yet experienced the extreme abuses towards which the current legislation slowly evolves, are very naive and they do not understand how dangerous this really is. The irony is that now the Western countries are trying to make lawful things that not even the communists had the courage to introduce in their laws. Even in the communist constitution that was valid when I was a child there were constitutional rights for the secrecy both of the phone conversations and of the mail messages. Obviously, like the NSA, the secret police did not care about what is lawful and what is not, so they intercepted any mail message or phone conversation they desired, but at least there was no doubt that their activities are illegal. Fortunately, they did not have the technical abilities to intercept all the phone & mail communications, like today. Otherwise I would be still living in a communist country. Because of my experience, no matter what abusive laws might be introduced in the future by corrupt politicians and no matter which would be the consequences, I would never recognize that any other human being has the right to command me to not encrypt any information that belongs to me. Equivalently with being against the interdiction of encryption, I would also never accept that any human being has the right to demand that I must answer to any question, if I do not want to answer. Of course, if that question had been in the context of a legal investigation, refusing to answer some question may be considered as evidence supporting the supposition that the questioned person might have done something wrong. Therefore that person might be punished for what he/she is supposed to have been done, if being guilty is considered certain enough. However, punishing the person just for refusing to answer a question, without any evidence strong enough that the person has committed any other crime, as it is frequent now in the USA, this is something that I consider to be an unacceptable abuse and a breach of the most basic human right.

andromeduck 6y ago

IMO the right to encryption naturally follows form the fundamental right to speech but yes the right to practice math and science including should be additionally protected.