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UK launches “No Place To Hide” propaganda campaign to ban E2EE
- outloudvi 5y agoSure. No place to hide. Everyone. Probably several careless criminals and definitely every well-being citizen.
- VVVExobyte 5y agoMore on this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/no_place_hide_campaign_anti_e2ee_ukgov/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/no_place_hide_campaig...
- heavenlyblue 5y agoWhy is 500K of public money being spent on this? Any one with more context? Is there anyone I could speak to against this?
- mhh__ 5y agoCorruption. I'm going to make a wild guess and say that the website has been contracted out to some senior politicians husband's (our corruption is now done by women and minorities, too, progress!) company or something to that effect. Edit: Downvoters, it's pretty well documented at this point that the group of tories in power like giving gov. money to friends and family https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/slides/my-little-crony/ https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/slides/my-little-crony/ Just recently they wrote of billions of pounds in COVID procurements that in large part went to very strange new companies and delivered nothing.
- Traubenfuchs 5y agoClearly. Thinly veiled nonsense meant for no one doing nothing. It's simply a way to launder government money into private hands.
- avianlyric 5y agoI would recommend talking to your MP as a starting point: https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP
- rsynnott 5y agoI mean, given the timing, I would assume to distract from Brexit, Number 10 parties, etc. This (pull out a perennial policy interest and suddenly promote it weirdly eagerly, to distract from the government's scandals) is at this point such a trope of British politics that people make sitcoms about it (half the storylines in the Thick of It were basically this).
- bsenftner 5y agoWhen is "but the children!!!" going to be recognized as overt manipulation?
- lm28469 5y agoIt is to whoever has a bit of culture, but propaganda is not aimed at this demographic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
- NextHendrix 5y agoNot a web person, but isn't https end-to-end encryption
- k__ 5y agoTheoretically, yes. But the owner of the domain can decide at which point they terminate. Could be that your connection is just encrypted until a proxy that's inbetween.
- emteycz 5y agoYes, it can be. SSH too.
- moreira 5y agoYes, but only in the sense that it's encryption between you and the server you're talking to. That's not what people are referring to when they talk about end-to-end encryption, though. What people are talking about there is that when I send you a message, it leaves my device encrypted, and can only be decrypted by you, on your device. Whatever servers it goes through, in order to get to you, cannot decrypt it at all. Law enforcement, third-party companies, doesn't matter, they can't see it, only you and I can.
- monocasa 5y agoOnly in the sense that Zoom got lambasted for calling their original setup E2EE. "Well technically our servers that log everything are a end of the communication". At least in the states they faced legal penalties for such a claim (albeit a slap on the wrist).
- RHSeeger 5y agoIf the other "end" you are talking to is their server, then it's end-to-end encryption. If the other end is another person's computer, and their server is only one jump on the way there, then it's not end-to-end. Clearly, with Slack, "their server" was not the other "end" in anyone's mind; so they were being disingenuous. But for many cases (banking), their server _is_ the other end.
- agd 5y agoWhilst the messaging here is chilling, I don’t think E2E will be banned in the UK. Not least because journalists and MPs use it everyday in signal and WhatsApp.
- agilob 5y agoThe regulation won't ban MPs using E2E encryption, the government doesn't care about journalists and their stupid rights. Everyone, but MPs and other people in power will be except from the ban.
- ljm 5y agoI think the government just rolls this kind of legislation out whenever something else is going on and they need a diversion. I've said it in previous threads on the topic but something like this has probably come up once or twice a year for the past 20 years. Encryption, porn, age restrictions on the internet... We shouldn't become dismissive of it that way but I'm sure this will conveniently fall off the radar when it's served its purpose. But it should be noted that our PM Boris Johnson referrs to something like this as a dead cat: throw a dead cat on the table and everyone's looking at the dead cat, not the other thing that's going on.
- eptcyka 5y agoMPs and other parliamentary officials are exempt from ISPs keeping logs of their web activities, do you honestly think that this will affect the people in power?
- flipbrad 5y agoThey aren't. The Investigatory Powers Act just tightens the conditions/ circumstances under which it is supposed to happen.
- UltraViolence 5y agoDidn't you get the memo? In the UK all the laws and rules only apply to the working class, not the ruling class. See BoJo's Christmas Parties and weekly "work meetings" for details.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- samwillis 5y agoWhat a waste of public money. As the paraphrased saying goes: “If you outlaw Encryption only outlaws will have Encryption.” It doesn’t solve a thing, other than make politicians look like they are doing something. Petty thieves, small time drug dealers and other small time criminals may end up without encryption. But it doesn’t solve organised crime, there are the problem and they are intelligent enough to use an encrypted app, even if it “illegal”. Amusingly our politicians all seem to run our government and parliament via WhatsApp and that’s obviously E2EE.
- jan_Inkepa 5y agoWell if only (non-crypto) criminals use crypto and that is defective illegal then only criminals will be punished. That aspect is not a-priori immoral to me. I don't see how you can win over many people by repeating a mantra like this...
- samwillis 5y ago> I don't see how you can win over many people by repeating a mantra like this... I don’t expect to, this isn’t about wining over or educating the public at large. You would never be able to on a technical issue like this, especially when horrific illegal activity is involved. The issue is knowledgable and informed politicians and agency spinning this rubbish trying to convince the public they can win this, when they know they can’t. They are lying.
- ahelwer 5y agoThose in possession of blobs of data passing tests of statistical randomness must be punished. Send any of that statistically-random data over the web? That’s a punishin’.
- charcircuit 5y ago>“If you outlaw Encryption only outlaws will have Encryption.” You overestimate outlaws. 99% of them will just use major platforms and not bother with encryption. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
- eptcyka 5y agoPrevious discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978952
- Arathorn 5y agoThis isn’t really a dupe ftr; the previous comments were about a leak of the campaign - whereas the campaign is now launched and it needs all the attention it can get to avoid the UK trying to legislate against E2EE… cc dang
- VVVExobyte 5y ago
- hughrr 5y agoI can't wait until this one backfires on them. A good take on government competence on this sort of stuff was done by Brass Eye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRw1ERj2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRw1ERj2Gc
- monocasa 5y ago> This video contains content from LDS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
- nsajko 5y agoVideo seems to be affected by a false copyright claim: > Video unavailable > This video contains content from LDS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds LDS "suggests" I watch "Michael McIntyre On Christmas | Michael McIntyre" instead.
- gilleain 5y agoIt's quite short. I can't find a link to a quote online, a transcript is: "Last month, the notorious paedophile Sidney Cook was blasted into space, to spend the rest of his life aboard a one-man prison vessel, posing no further threat to children on Earth. But it was revealed that an eight-year old boy was placed on board, by mistake, and is now trapped alone in space with the monster. A spokesman said: 'This is the one thing we didn't want to happen' "
- foxhill 5y agothe linked video is the "pedophile blasted into space" segment from Brass Eye (a very dark humored current affairs parody from the late 90s), for anyone else unable to view.
- agilob 5y agoWhy does the website have HTTPS??
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoHow do you know where’s tls terminated?
- makach 5y agohttps is only encryption in transit. endpoints see all traffic.
- nonrandomstring 5y agoIt also works perfectly through Tor
- agilob 5y agoSo what you're saying is this website supports people who can hurt children?
- VVVExobyte 5y ago
- Accacin 5y agoconvenient list of charities I will no longer be supporting. This whole campaign is disgusting, and reminds me of the propaganda the government put out when the UK had a vote on vote reform.
- georgia_peach 5y agoThere are so many charities today. Utterly impossible that more than a handful are sustained by $25 checks from old ladies. Most are money/reputation laundering & tax dodges for corporations, lobbyists, governments, and high net-worth individuals. They are unclean, and should be cleansed with fire.
- styeco 5y agoSorry for the choice words, but shit like this makes my blood boil. You're not trying to "keep our children safe" motherfucker, and you know it. You're trying to prevent people from being able to have private conversations, so your secret agencies can harvest all the data from everyone easily. To phrase it as "but think of the children" is instrumentalizing the actual victims of child abuse and you should be ashamed.
- ethanbond 5y agoTo be honest the motivation to keep our children (or people more generally) safe seems way more clear to me that the motivation… to prevent people from having private conversations… to what end?
- iakov 5y agoTo expand the total surveillance even further? It seems to me that every government, no matter how liberal or progressive, loves surveillance. Look at how quick European governments started to vacuum up the data from mobile operators when COVID broke out - all "for your safety", of course.
- ramoz 5y agoPower/control. Fwiw seems rather clear to me that we live in an age where information is groomed for us, for the same reasons.
- fastball 5y agoSo that they can better control you?
- llamaimperative 5y agoBut again… for what? Are you under the impression that every government is actually authoritarian under the hood but that characteristic just doesn’t really show its head due to encryption? Seems to me authoritarian governments have no problem being authoritarian with or without these sorts of provisions. Side note: I’m not actually against E2E encryption. Strong proponent really. I just think these arguments tend not to resonate with a very broad audience outside of the security/privacy/technolibertarian communities
- mhh__ 5y agoLet's say this steering group does really see the benefits of privacy but just wants say more ways to report things or AI magic to spot old people talking about sex to children. That's all well and good, but do you trust the Government to implement it? When I started secondary school about 10 years ago now it was very clearly impressed upon me how to behave online and how to report bad stuff, but the guy who did that was a very fastidious teacher so I bet not everyone else in the UK does. That also happened before the phone had completely taken over as the means of consuming the internet, which has made the internet - especially for young people - into a more walled, more anxious, and more manic place in my opinion.
- mrtksn 5y agoLet's assume that it doesn't have any nefarious motives, What's the argument against doing regular police work to catch criminals? Yes, I understand that it's extremely tempting to be able to peak into every persons communications but that has become feasible only the last decade or so. Just do your job the way it has aways been done. Haven't we seen how endless are the ambitions of politicians even in the most democratic countries? How one can expect that it's going to be their people who will be sneaking into the people's communications? If you are a tory, consider what happens if Corbyn takes over. If you are a democrat, consider what happens if Trump takes over. Don't even let me start over the commercial and industrial espionage in concert with the people in the govt. The moment E2EE is compromised, the computer age dies. This is not like tapping a phone line, the human civilisation is living in a virtual reality where communities come together, organize and express themselves at global scale. We don't need 3D avatars in a metaverse BS, we are already there and compromising E2EE instantly turns our world into a dystopia.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIn fairness, perhaps the problem of doing it the way "it's always been done" is that the criminals don't operate the same anymore, more than likely they aren't meeting up in dockside speakeasies, moreover they're probably not talking over phone lines either. Pimps and drug dealers don't need to stand on the street corners and advertise their stuff to make sales. Crime has changed. If their communication has mostly gone modern, digital, and encrypted, traditional policework gets a lot harder. That said, I'm not sure if going after encryption is the right way. But could be it is. I don't know. What if we the technology we've developed has us facing a choice between an Orvellian nightmare and Mad Max?
- mrtksn 5y ago"The old ways" doesn't have to be without using technology, what I mean by "old ways" is actually without having complete access to all the information. I don't say go tap phone lines, what I say is do the investigations without having access on every single thing that every one said or thought. Go seize servers, go install fake GSM towers to target the people under investigation. I don't see why not having access to complete communications should warrant Mad Max. You don't need to have access to everyones data to notice that kids are disappearing or firearms are being traded or something like that.
- yob22 5y ago
- mathieubordere 5y agoA compromise could be to only disable E2EE when communicating with children over these platforms? How you ascertain a user is a child is probably a different matter though ...
- KaiserPro 5y agoone of my opsec friends speculates that this is being done because the National Crime Agency (nca) doesn't have any credible digital forensics capacity.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoDidn't the wikileaks stuff show the GCHQ and other five eyes agency basically have direct access to all this information anyway. I don't know enough about E2EE to know whether a backdoor or some other circumvention is possible.
- logifail 5y ago> Didn't the wikileaks stuff show the GCHQ and other five eyes agency basically have direct access to all this information anyway ...and the 2003 incident involving Katherine Gun showed that those agencies don't really give an $expletive about anyone's privacy, and that many governments don't give an $expletive about telling the truth.
- giords 5y agoIt's sad because obviously banning E2EE will make pretty much zero difference in keeping children safe. Pedofiles and abusers will just install E2EE apps manually or use one of the zillion systems to send E2EE messages. As an example, banning movie piracy had zero effect in stopping emule, torrents and illegal streaming.
- samhw 5y agoFWIW, it's pedophile (or paedophile). 'Pedofile' is the notoriously efficient entropy coding compression format used for child pornography stashes (/s).
- UltraViolence 5y agoI believe so too. It's not that currently, with no encryption in place on Facebook Messenger, child abusers refrain from grooming children. Yes, it will be slightly more difficult to prosecute them in some cases, but in both cases it will come after the fact. There simply isn't enough capacity to police the messages of billions of users. Government is pushing for a complete segregation online between children and adults, where you need to have a government issued ID to post online and where you will be prevented from contacting children below the age of 16.
- georgia_peach 5y agoHats off! It's an efficient move--collecting a salary and pension while forcing nerds in a different country to do your job for you--for free! If only they were this concerned about the children in Rochdale... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring
- kristofferR 5y agoThankfully they launched this during a period of big government/PM scandals, I don't see them giving much attention to this campaign.
- laputan_machine 5y agoWrite to your MP: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ https://www.theyworkforyou.com/
- advael 5y agoI am strongly against child abuse, and have never seen a campaign against child abuse that didn't seem like a callous attempt to use something that in many people's minds is infinitely heinous as a pascal's wager to get people to do whatever they wanted It feels absolutely horrible to be in a position where I have to be skeptical of any proposed way to stop children being abused, because someone is likely trying to pull the wool over my eyes about an authoritarian power grab they are trying to do, but that's a rational response to the world we live in
- georgia_peach 5y agoobligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
- UltraViolence 5y agoWhat they want is continuous scanning for "illegal content" and where intelligence services can freely roam, store and analyze everything the population says. They can use this to control the population, massaging and prodding the herd to move in a certain direction. If this becomes reality then democracy is dead and I will plead for an authoritarian regime with me at the head.
- raspyberr 5y agoWith how many people only read headlines and nothing else, is calling it "No Place to Hide" a wise decision"?
- MoSattler 5y agoThere are so many more low hanging fruits to combat child abuse material, but governments are not taking any action. By now it's common knowledge that it's really NOT that hard to take down vast amounts of it. https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/sexual-violence-against-children-why-aren-t-thousands-of-gigabytes-of-abusive-images-removed-from-the-web-a-99f36312-8054-479b-8d7c-ff86679daa45 https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/sexual-violence-a... So I find it hard to believe that this is about protecting children.
- ineedasername 5y agoI wonder, would E2E rotc13 count as illegal? What about the old method of both users having the same copy of a book and sending lookups of particular letter and words. Where do you draw the line on banned algorithms? Where do you draw the geographical line? Would people in the UK no longer be allowed to communicated with someone in the US if that other person would only use E2EE?
- bonoboTP 5y agoIt starts with child abuse, then it's about harassment, then it's about bullying, then it's about hate speech, then it's about medical misinformation, then it's about political dissent, then it's about...
- ollybee 5y agonoplacetohide.uk redirects to a page giving an alternate perspective.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoI'm working on the wording of this that I intend to use in any such discussion of fake attempts at "think of the children": Whenever a politician invokes "think of the children", ask them about their funding of Child Protection Services. Any political action that's said to be under the umbrella of "think of the children" that doesn't provide massive amounts of additional funding into Child Protection Services (boots on the ground, education programs, etc), is hiding something, and actively working against helping children because it's distracting from the actual efforts that Child Protection Services are providing as well as spending money on entirely "something else".
- xg15 5y agoThere is a large array of organisations listed in the page's footer which support this initiative. I don't know who they are, but I'd think researching who those organisations are and what their political angle is could shed a little more light on whether this is genuinely motivated by online safety or just a scare tactic for more surveillance. How the page is worded, it sounds as if they'd also be OK with "only" mandatory client-side scanning a la Apple. (Not that this would be much less dystopic, but it would permit E2EE)
- dmoo 5y agoWonder what impact this will have on GDPR adequacy for the UK. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_3183 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
- DrBazza 5y agoI find the UK government ministers (and others governments I suppose) completely thick and are generally ex-arts-students who (mostly) graduated in "non-degrees" and have precisely zero understanding of science and technology. There's a saying 'those who can do, and those who can't teach'. I'd add "and those that can't teach go into politics".
- nonrandomstring 5y agoI've worked in government influence campaigns myself. I really believe in positive influence as a social good. Amazing campaigns that we've had in the UK are the famous 70's "Stop Look. Listen." road safety campaign with Darth Vader actor D.Prowse, and other great Saatchi ones with the NHS on heart health and anti-smoking. These all undoubtedly saved millions of lives without fearmongering, or being overbearing nanny-state performances. There is however, a rather sinister subculture within British influence of smug down-talking, classist, oh-so-superior "we know best" messaging. The BBC's TV licence ads were comical, with overt menacing of the poor and old. The late 1980's AIDS/HIV campaigns felt disgracefully out of touch. Although they look like internal projects coming through outfits like NHS, 77 Bgd. or the H.O. it's really spun out to contractors and the messaging quickly gets out of control. In this case I believe its Saatchi again. Unfortunately they've really rather fucked this one. I'd call it malinfluence and stright up propaganda in the bad old sense. Indeed, it's a disgraceful example of what happens you you mix technology with people who are intellectually out of their depth. Knowing a abit about how this stuff works though, I'd say it really isn't necessarily the position of the government. It's a cheap "think of the children" shot against Big Tech (so of course I applaud that) and also a smokescreen for all the other general mischief and twattery going on these days. It's terrifying that people of such incompetence and ignorance can get their hands on powerful channels - precisely what we're trying to curb when Facebook do it.
- threesquared 5y ago> We like the idea of zero trust and provable perfect end to end encryption. But would prefer it to be based on vendor trust, unverifiable, imperfect by design and have a man in the middle.
- hooby 5y agoChild abuse is a serious topic. It should be treated seriously. Evoking a topic like that, creating fear and outrage in an attempt to sway public opinion - by encouraging an emotional response rather than a rational one - is to be considered shameless manipulation, regardless of what agenda it's being used for. Would any campaign that takes child abuse truly serious rely on tactless and tasteless marketing campaigns like that? Seems a bit unlikely. People who take child abuse seriously and understand that it's a very complex and multi-faceted topic, tend to really dislike seeing it misused for scare-mongering like that. Did any of the previous marketing-campaigns that did rely on misusing the topic in manipulative ways result in an actual reduction of child abuse cases? Not that I am aware of? Have any of those previous alleged anti-child-abuse surveillance measures been rolled back, after they have shown to be completely ineffective at actually combating child abuse? Well, some have actually been abolished again on the grounds of being unconstitutional. But other than that, being not effective has mostly only resulted in loud demand for even more, equally inefficient, surveillance methods. I really think that people should be called out over misusing the topic of child abuse as a populist scare mongering tactic to sway public opinion. That sort of thing needs to stop - regardless of what anyone thinks of the measures it's being employed for.
- jackdrb 5y agoI don't think there's been a government more willing to wheel out the 'Think of the Children' defense (or other similar meaningless done-to-death arguments such as stopping terrorists etc.) than the UK government, and a populous more willing to lap it up at every turn. (Remember Cameron's anti-porn and anti-encryption crusade? Remember Theresa May banging on about the very same things?) Some stances are just perpetually expected to be brought at some point, at least in my eyes, and it can be quite tiring to fight the same battles and arguments again and again, which I suppose is the whole point of beating said stances over the electorate, until they relent. Given the current precarious position of PM Johnson though, I do not see this actually doing anything just yet other than being a flagrant distraction/appeasement/corruption/all of he above.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoHow about this as a solution instead: Make it in law that if a convicted offender is found to have used a messaging platform to send/receive material, then heavily fine the company that was used in the messaging - but only if they had failed to report the offence. To operate in the UK the company has to pay these fines. This puts the ball in the company's court - like it should be. Now the messaging-platform could claim that since it's E2EE they have no visibility on what's being sent/received, but I believe technical solutions exist for this - E.g. pictures and videos go through a post-processing client-side to remove identifiable data (faces in images, text in images, that sort of thing). The original unmodified image is sent E2EE, and the post-processed one is sent to the company and then it's up to them to identify offending images.
- beej71 5y agoIf the company sends themselves anything they can read as a middleman, that's no longer E2EE.