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I have no problem with the police hacking into devices. They have the right to use bugs and find exploits just like they have the right to pick a safe of force

I have no problem with the police hacking into devices. They have the right to use bugs and find exploits just like they have the right to pick a safe of force a door. But backdoors and unacceptable, that's like mandating that every house have microphones in every room connected to the police center

totetsu 4y ago
I was thinking about this today. Like we watch a moive about cold war times and see the gmen or the stasi doing some unbelievable intrusive surveillance and think wow what times they would have been to live in, and at the same time my every movement for the past 10 years when I had a cellphone in my pocket is in a database somewhere and I barely think about it.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  I think the difference is that in those situations the people had no say in what was and wasn't acceptable and some of the things we take for granted as basic freedoms may have been outlawed and targeted. This is why you can feel comfortable with it but they could not: there's not a huge disparity between what you want to do or say and what you're allowed to do or say, and you feel the punishment for doing or saying as you shouldn't is acceptable.
- ulnarkressty 4y ago
  Or, we watch a movie like 24 where the protagonist is asking his agency buddies to hack random computers while straight up torturing people to get information - and we cheer for him.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  "The Lives of Others" is a great movie about this. Apparently they used authentic early-80's-era spying gear in that movie.
sroussey 4y ago
It’s like having a computer in every car, connected to the internet. And the police asking who was speeding yesterday.
codedokode 4y ago
What about banning end-to-end encryption while allowing client-server encryption like HTTPS?
layer8 4y ago
This is problematic if, as is often the case, it leads to keeping vulnerabilities undisclosed, so that they can continue to exploit them. This gives bad actors more opportunity to find and exploit the same vulnerabilities, and it gives security companies that find vulnerabilities the incentive to sell their services to the police and to government agencies instead of informing the software manufacturer.
- rekoil 4y ago
  There's a solution to this problem for the big actors. Bug bounty programs that pay as well or better than the likes of NSO group.
  - layer8 4y ago
    This is limited by the “big actor’s” perceived benefit of catching the bugs. They are already known to not be overly generous. Conversely, security companies can potentially monetize the same vulnerability over and over.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
1984 was a warning, not a manual! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
- rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  I finished reading the book yesterday. I truly believe Orwell was a time traveler. (joke) The parallels between Oceania and some nations of the world nowadays is infinite.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nullsense 4y ago
    Now every time I see a war or natural disaster story on the 6 o'clock news I have the movie adaptation's voice in my head saying "Oceania is continually at war with East Asia"
  - int_19h 3y ago
    You should try reading some of his non-fiction. This was written in 1944: "I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
dalbasal 4y ago
There comes a point where reasoning about rights by analogy loses its bite... imo. Digital rights, digital ownership, digital business models, privacy, security, speech, digital policing... they're all very different from their analog analogs. The differences between A & B are less pronounced in the digital realm. Police hacking into devices has more in common, practically and culturally, with signals intelligence than it does with ordinary policing. I don't disagree with you. I just don't agree that "it's very simple." We need to invent or adopt novel concepts, not insist that nothing has changed.
vbezhenar 3y ago
You can open any door or safe. The question is about required time and noise. If you're not restricted by those factors, you'll open it. That's not the same for software. It's pretty much trivial to write an encryption software which is basically unbreakable. Complex software has bugs, but sometimes simple software is enough. That said, I don't see how backdoors would help here. Evil guys won't use vulnerable software.

totetsu 4y ago

I was thinking about this today. Like we watch a moive about cold war times and see the gmen or the stasi doing some unbelievable intrusive surveillance and think wow what times they would have been to live in, and at the same time my every movement for the past 10 years when I had a cellphone in my pocket is in a database somewhere and I barely think about it.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
I think the difference is that in those situations the people had no say in what was and wasn't acceptable and some of the things we take for granted as basic freedoms may have been outlawed and targeted. This is why you can feel comfortable with it but they could not: there's not a huge disparity between what you want to do or say and what you're allowed to do or say, and you feel the punishment for doing or saying as you shouldn't is acceptable.
ulnarkressty 4y ago
Or, we watch a movie like 24 where the protagonist is asking his agency buddies to hack random computers while straight up torturing people to get information - and we cheer for him.
pmarreck 4y ago
"The Lives of Others" is a great movie about this. Apparently they used authentic early-80's-era spying gear in that movie.

sroussey 4y ago

It’s like having a computer in every car, connected to the internet. And the police asking who was speeding yesterday.

codedokode 4y ago

What about banning end-to-end encryption while allowing client-server encryption like HTTPS?

layer8 4y ago

This is problematic if, as is often the case, it leads to keeping vulnerabilities undisclosed, so that they can continue to exploit them. This gives bad actors more opportunity to find and exploit the same vulnerabilities, and it gives security companies that find vulnerabilities the incentive to sell their services to the police and to government agencies instead of informing the software manufacturer.

rekoil 4y ago
There's a solution to this problem for the big actors. Bug bounty programs that pay as well or better than the likes of NSO group.
- layer8 4y ago
  This is limited by the “big actor’s” perceived benefit of catching the bugs. They are already known to not be overly generous. Conversely, security companies can potentially monetize the same vulnerability over and over.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

1984 was a warning, not a manual! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

rodolphoarruda 4y ago
I finished reading the book yesterday. I truly believe Orwell was a time traveler. (joke) The parallels between Oceania and some nations of the world nowadays is infinite.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nullsense 4y ago
  Now every time I see a war or natural disaster story on the 6 o'clock news I have the movie adaptation's voice in my head saying "Oceania is continually at war with East Asia"
- int_19h 3y ago
  You should try reading some of his non-fiction. This was written in 1944: "I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."

dalbasal 4y ago

There comes a point where reasoning about rights by analogy loses its bite... imo. Digital rights, digital ownership, digital business models, privacy, security, speech, digital policing... they're all very different from their analog analogs. The differences between A & B are less pronounced in the digital realm. Police hacking into devices has more in common, practically and culturally, with signals intelligence than it does with ordinary policing. I don't disagree with you. I just don't agree that "it's very simple." We need to invent or adopt novel concepts, not insist that nothing has changed.

vbezhenar 3y ago

You can open any door or safe. The question is about required time and noise. If you're not restricted by those factors, you'll open it. That's not the same for software. It's pretty much trivial to write an encryption software which is basically unbreakable. Complex software has bugs, but sometimes simple software is enough. That said, I don't see how backdoors would help here. Evil guys won't use vulnerable software.