8 ms·

Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan hors

Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.

xvector 5y ago
Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.
- csomar 5y ago
  > but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor. The term useful idiots come to mind. There is no lack of them.
- aforwardslash 5y ago
  Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
  - xvector 5y ago
    Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance, and many are perfect for anonymity (Monero). Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
    - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
      > Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance Mostly Monero. Paying for censored content with Bitcoin can be traced back to you and will get you in jail the same as paying via bank transfer. And Monero is the odd one out here -- most other cryptos don't really help against censorship resistance.
    - secondaryacct 5y ago
      Yeah well as long as the people allow you the internet. Without us all financing the internet, the anarchists using it for anonymous banking might find themselves a bit naked... I find it horribly suspicious crypto, depending on public electricity grids and state-funded internet infrastructure, is being sold as an anti control measure when really, it sounds a lot like a cash grab and a criminal money laundering system. Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
      - xvector 5y ago
        > Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
        aforwardslash 5y ago
        >How can you exchange bank notes electronically? They are called "transfers" and you can do them at a bank or on a licensed broker. The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      No, they don't. They may be a method of censorship resistance, but they weren't designed that way. Audited for backdoors? Wishful thinking. Someone some years ago said they've added (some years before) backdoors to the OpenBSD IPSec implementation. The consensus is "its probably bullshit" and not "no, we checked and we can guarantee there is no backdoor". The lesson (in case you missed it) is that for crypto code, there are a hand full of guys that actually understand what is going on and how to implement and bypass something, and half of them work for the government. OpenBSD is too obscure for someone to care? See the TrueCrypt case.
  - alejoar 5y ago
    > Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      >It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom. You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity Even Monero? > and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government How does it matter if it's open-source?
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      >> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government > How does it matter if it's open-source? You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      > Even Monero? There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed. > How does it matter if it's open-source? OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        Open-source means independent audit is possible, and the developers can't be coerced in the dark to add backdoors. This is in theory of course. In reality, it just makes it much less probable.
  - keewee7 5y ago
    >Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government. That is not a problem for open source that has been audited. We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
    - BelenusMordred 5y ago
      You could argues it is probably quite useful for their overseas intel activities too. A channel that is only used by spooks is a tad conspicuous.
    - HeckFeck 5y ago
      Snowden reported that the CIA use it to anonomynise their research activity. Previously they used proxy servers but spooks would sign into social media or personal email, thus compromising the location as being CIA. Thus, The Onion Router was born. They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise.
      - aforwardslash 5y ago
        > They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise. Their activity. Not yours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-ns... https://edri.org/our-work/secret-documents-reveal-bnd-attacked-tor-and-advises-not-to-use-it/ https://edri.org/our-work/secret-documents-reveal-bnd-attack...
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      > That is not a problem for open source that has been audited. Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors. > We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries. I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
- sebow 5y ago
  That's a small subset of people that's been very vocal and against everything that is related to power. In reality many people are against this,though less and less care to the point of doing anything. Anything that's pretensed upon "protect the children" is a massive red flag.Why? Because obviously nobody wants to harm the f8cking children. Same goes for 9/11, the patriot act, GDPR(which ironically or not, depends on who you're asking, actually facilitates tracking instead of protecting people's privacy), contact-tracing, green passports, crypto regulations, etc. Ultimately people will always find a way because the aspiration for freedom is greatest, but many seem to not care about what happens on the sideways during this journey, which is kind of terrifying.
anticristi 5y ago
I start seeing a pattern in Western societies: The pendulum swings between "for" and "against" mass surveillance with a period of a decade. 2001: Terroist attack, swing towards mass surveillance. 2010: Gov't went too far, surveillance seen as a greater threat than terrorism, swing pendulum back to privacy. 2021: Gang violence increases in Europe, swing pendulum to mass surveillance. Can anyone guess what will happen 2030?
- contravariant 5y ago
  I think you're being very generous by considering anything that happened in the past 10 years a swing towards greater privacy. Sure the EU gave FAANG a slap on the wrist, but I know of now government that rolled back the increased surveillance that terrorist legislation gave them.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Also, as of today, GDPR is not enforced so privacy is more theoretical.
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      False. https://enforcementtracker.com https://enforcementtracker.com
      - snthd 5y ago
        There is some enforcement, but the GDPR is widely flouted, most conspicuously with the cookie "consent" banners - they're supposed to give equal choices (to meet the standard of informed consent and not "consent bundling") but they're riddled with dark patterns. Then there's the Irish who "oversee" Facebook and Google and do SFA. So the GDPR is not enforced [to a level anywhere near what the legislation is supposed to do].
        motives 5y ago
        If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions). [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-national-watchdogs-may-act-against-violations-blow-facebook-2021-06-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-natio...
hulitu 5y ago
Yes. Slowly but sure. Not so suddenly brutal like China. They never learn from the past.
kypro 5y ago
The default state (and almost universal state) of human societies throughout history has been authoritarianism. Authoritarian's universally believe individuals left to themselves make bad decisions either because they're too stupid or too cruel so we need benevolent leaders like themselves to order society. Only in the last few hundred years countries in Western Europe began to reject this and accept while some individuals may make bad decisions the cost of "benevolent" leaders is too great. Today in the West we seem to be forgetting that freedom comes with costs and this can only lead in one direction. We should understand China isn't the exception, they are the norm. It was in fact the West who was always more likely to revert to the mean than for China to embrace freedom. People like Orwell understood this very well. The more freedom individuals have the more likely individuals will say and do things leaders don't like and if our leaders no longer celebrate this disagreement as progress they will seek to restrict freedom. Of course, some actions are almost universally seen as bad and in these cases it's worth carefully restricting freedoms, but this clearly isn't one of those cases. And most attempts to limit freedom of speech also aren't.
- noduerme 5y ago
  No one ever had Facebook or iCloud before, though. The damage an individual could do was somewhat limited. If they wanted to produce child porn, they had to go through a complicated printing process. If they wanted to denounce vaccines or immigrants, they could stand on a box and yell about Jesus or something, but at most they might reach a few hundred people. The framework we have created has given them the ability to reach audiences that they frankly shouldn't be able to reach, because their own intelligence doesn't warrant it. To the degree that we can stripmine those platforms and shut down the bad actors, moderate the fuck out of them, send them into a black hole, I'm all for it. But personal devices? Secure files you maintain for your business? No - this is a move on the part of the 0.1% to enlist the technical priesthood in spying on the 1-5%. It's a means to try to force fear on the functionaries closer to the apex of the system. Like some other reactionary revolutions, it draws support from a lower base, but its targets are exactly the people who carry out the sensitive functions of the state. That's somewhat scary. However, it's also a bit toothless because clearly it will force anyone who needs to keep their communications private to use other channels. Until or unless that becomes prohibited, as in China. Then again, I'd never underestimate the spinelessness of the western bureaucrat when it comes to conforming to rules and regulations.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
In hindsight, it seems that China was ahead of the trend and everyone else is just catching up.
raxxorrax 5y ago
If you look at the current EU commission, this is clearly something where they think the can build a profile. I hoped more people could see this as the insecurity of leadership that it is.

Is it me or is there a clear pattern here. Seems like the major governments in the world are creating China-like surveillance under the guise of the trojan horse called CSAM.

xvector 5y ago

Surprise surprise, the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists were right all along, but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor.

csomar 5y ago
> but you'll still find people that want to ban technologies like cryptocurrencies and Tor. The term useful idiots come to mind. There is no lack of them.
aforwardslash 5y ago
Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity, and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government.
- xvector 5y ago
  Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance, and many are perfect for anonymity (Monero). Tor is open-source and can be audited for government backdoors.
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    > Cryptocurrencies have everything to do with censorship resistance Mostly Monero. Paying for censored content with Bitcoin can be traced back to you and will get you in jail the same as paying via bank transfer. And Monero is the odd one out here -- most other cryptos don't really help against censorship resistance.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    Yeah well as long as the people allow you the internet. Without us all financing the internet, the anarchists using it for anonymous banking might find themselves a bit naked... I find it horribly suspicious crypto, depending on public electricity grids and state-funded internet infrastructure, is being sold as an anti control measure when really, it sounds a lot like a cash grab and a criminal money laundering system. Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending but oh surprise a lot more to control of the cash grab speculative aspect - and hard to carry $600M of them in a hurry after a heist, unlike recent defi exemples.
    - xvector 5y ago
      > Why not use banknotes, they re well less susceptible to government control of spending How can you exchange bank notes electronically?
      - aforwardslash 5y ago
        >How can you exchange bank notes electronically? They are called "transfers" and you can do them at a bank or on a licensed broker. The first question is why would you want to transfer money from A to B electronically without any kind of reasonable guarantee or safeguard? The major use case is to avoid paying taxes. Feel free to add any other usage scenario that isn't skipping taxes directly or indirectly.
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    No, they don't. They may be a method of censorship resistance, but they weren't designed that way. Audited for backdoors? Wishful thinking. Someone some years ago said they've added (some years before) backdoors to the OpenBSD IPSec implementation. The consensus is "its probably bullshit" and not "no, we checked and we can guarantee there is no backdoor". The lesson (in case you missed it) is that for crypto code, there are a hand full of guys that actually understand what is going on and how to implement and bypass something, and half of them work for the government. OpenBSD is too obscure for someone to care? See the TrueCrypt case.
- alejoar 5y ago
  > Surprise surprise, cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom.
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    >It's not about privacy but governmental control and freedom. You say that like its a separate concept from privacy and anonymity. Its not. The government is (should be) just a non-profit corporation. Other than that, those concepts are fundamentally equivalent.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > cryptocurrencies have nothing to do with privacy nor anonymity Even Monero? > and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government How does it matter if it's open-source?
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    >> and Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government > How does it matter if it's open-source? You (and many other respondents) are responding to "Tor is supplied by the government, and therefore is an evil trap". What the OP seems to be saying is "Tor is an anarchist stand against the man, it's actually funded by the man".
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    > Even Monero? There are literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies. The term does not imply anonymity nor privacy, just the concept of a somewhat decentralized ledger that relies on cryptography to ensure the authenticity and integrity of transactions. In those hundreds, certainly there are different goals with different currencies. The question remains though - are those who focus on privacy and anonimity field-tested? Are there cases of demonstrable attacks on the anonymity characteristics of a given implementation that can attest for their robustness? AFAIK no, but feel free to add any independent analysis or incident I may have missed. > How does it matter if it's open-source? OpenSSL is also open-source and every year there is a new vector of bad news. Being open source in some projects - specially crypto projects - means that motivated attackers can identify potential vulnerabilities quite easier, instead of "more people will look at it, ergo it will have fewer bugs". There is a huge potential for planned defects to go unnoticed on a complex cryptography product.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Open-source means independent audit is possible, and the developers can't be coerced in the dark to add backdoors. This is in theory of course. In reality, it just makes it much less probable.
- keewee7 5y ago
  >Tor is a technology actually developed by "the man" with military purposes, and still funded by the US government. That is not a problem for open source that has been audited. We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries.
  - BelenusMordred 5y ago
    You could argues it is probably quite useful for their overseas intel activities too. A channel that is only used by spooks is a tad conspicuous.
  - HeckFeck 5y ago
    Snowden reported that the CIA use it to anonomynise their research activity. Previously they used proxy servers but spooks would sign into social media or personal email, thus compromising the location as being CIA. Thus, The Onion Router was born. They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise.
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      > They prefer that their online activity is lost amidst the noise. Their activity. Not yours. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-ns... https://edri.org/our-work/secret-documents-reveal-bnd-attacked-tor-and-advises-not-to-use-it/ https://edri.org/our-work/secret-documents-reveal-bnd-attack...
  - aforwardslash 5y ago
    > That is not a problem for open source that has been audited. Big leap of faith. You probably won't need both hands to enumerate people capable of correctly audit a piece of modern crypto software in the hole world, and probably half of them work or have worked for governments. Even using those resources, one thing are obvious flaws, other are weakening of the robustness of the protocol in certain conditions. Even with your top 5 (first hand), no one would guarantee the protocol and implementation is free of backdoors. > We also know why the US government supports Tor: It goes against geopolitical adversaries like Iran and Cuba by helping dissidents in their countries. I'm not a tor expert by far, and even I know that if you have enough entry and exit nodes under your control, you can identify both source and target of traffic. It makes sense for the USA to use a communist/Iran(terrorists!) excuse to pursue that goal. So, it makes sense to create a layered secure communication channel that only you can reverse, and pitch it worldwide as a safe means of communication for "dissidents".
sebow 5y ago
That's a small subset of people that's been very vocal and against everything that is related to power. In reality many people are against this,though less and less care to the point of doing anything. Anything that's pretensed upon "protect the children" is a massive red flag.Why? Because obviously nobody wants to harm the f8cking children. Same goes for 9/11, the patriot act, GDPR(which ironically or not, depends on who you're asking, actually facilitates tracking instead of protecting people's privacy), contact-tracing, green passports, crypto regulations, etc. Ultimately people will always find a way because the aspiration for freedom is greatest, but many seem to not care about what happens on the sideways during this journey, which is kind of terrifying.

anticristi 5y ago

I start seeing a pattern in Western societies: The pendulum swings between "for" and "against" mass surveillance with a period of a decade. 2001: Terroist attack, swing towards mass surveillance. 2010: Gov't went too far, surveillance seen as a greater threat than terrorism, swing pendulum back to privacy. 2021: Gang violence increases in Europe, swing pendulum to mass surveillance. Can anyone guess what will happen 2030?

contravariant 5y ago
I think you're being very generous by considering anything that happened in the past 10 years a swing towards greater privacy. Sure the EU gave FAANG a slap on the wrist, but I know of now government that rolled back the increased surveillance that terrorist legislation gave them.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Also, as of today, GDPR is not enforced so privacy is more theoretical.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    False. https://enforcementtracker.com https://enforcementtracker.com
    - snthd 5y ago
      There is some enforcement, but the GDPR is widely flouted, most conspicuously with the cookie "consent" banners - they're supposed to give equal choices (to meet the standard of informed consent and not "consent bundling") but they're riddled with dark patterns. Then there's the Irish who "oversee" Facebook and Google and do SFA. So the GDPR is not enforced [to a level anywhere near what the legislation is supposed to do].
      - motives 5y ago
        If I understand it correctly, the recent CJEU ruling on GDPR [0] should improve the Irish DPC limitations by allowing enforcement in other member states where violations have occurred (under certain specific conditions). [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-national-watchdogs-may-act-against-violations-blow-facebook-2021-06-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/top-eu-court-says-natio...

hulitu 5y ago

Yes. Slowly but sure. Not so suddenly brutal like China. They never learn from the past.

kypro 5y ago

The default state (and almost universal state) of human societies throughout history has been authoritarianism. Authoritarian's universally believe individuals left to themselves make bad decisions either because they're too stupid or too cruel so we need benevolent leaders like themselves to order society. Only in the last few hundred years countries in Western Europe began to reject this and accept while some individuals may make bad decisions the cost of "benevolent" leaders is too great. Today in the West we seem to be forgetting that freedom comes with costs and this can only lead in one direction. We should understand China isn't the exception, they are the norm. It was in fact the West who was always more likely to revert to the mean than for China to embrace freedom. People like Orwell understood this very well. The more freedom individuals have the more likely individuals will say and do things leaders don't like and if our leaders no longer celebrate this disagreement as progress they will seek to restrict freedom. Of course, some actions are almost universally seen as bad and in these cases it's worth carefully restricting freedoms, but this clearly isn't one of those cases. And most attempts to limit freedom of speech also aren't.

noduerme 5y ago
No one ever had Facebook or iCloud before, though. The damage an individual could do was somewhat limited. If they wanted to produce child porn, they had to go through a complicated printing process. If they wanted to denounce vaccines or immigrants, they could stand on a box and yell about Jesus or something, but at most they might reach a few hundred people. The framework we have created has given them the ability to reach audiences that they frankly shouldn't be able to reach, because their own intelligence doesn't warrant it. To the degree that we can stripmine those platforms and shut down the bad actors, moderate the fuck out of them, send them into a black hole, I'm all for it. But personal devices? Secure files you maintain for your business? No - this is a move on the part of the 0.1% to enlist the technical priesthood in spying on the 1-5%. It's a means to try to force fear on the functionaries closer to the apex of the system. Like some other reactionary revolutions, it draws support from a lower base, but its targets are exactly the people who carry out the sensitive functions of the state. That's somewhat scary. However, it's also a bit toothless because clearly it will force anyone who needs to keep their communications private to use other channels. Until or unless that becomes prohibited, as in China. Then again, I'd never underestimate the spinelessness of the western bureaucrat when it comes to conforming to rules and regulations.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

In hindsight, it seems that China was ahead of the trend and everyone else is just catching up.

raxxorrax 5y ago

If you look at the current EU commission, this is clearly something where they think the can build a profile. I hoped more people could see this as the insecurity of leadership that it is.