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> “there is literally no way for us to comply with this legislation, so our only legal option is to leave your market.” as much as I love my encrypted chats, b

> “there is literally no way for us to comply with this legislation, so our only legal option is to leave your market.” as much as I love my encrypted chats, both those sentences are not true. Devil's advocate would say: 1: Tech companies can obviously share the keys with the government, like they do in a group chat, it would simply mean "GVT has joined the chat" [1] and it could also work the same way wiretaps have always worked, under a very strict legal framework and behind a colossal amount of bureaucracy to authorize their use. 2: tech companies are not leaving those markets, they are simply buying time, they don't want to do the work, because it's work they will not profit from, but there's nothing preventing them on the technical side from doing it. [1] have you ever seen this on an Android device? https://i.imgur.com/XUxiUUr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/XUxiUUr.jpeg

rhaway84773 3y ago
Not only is it not true, it’s very likely they’re already doing it. For example, WhatsApp sells itself as fully encrypted, etc. but if you’re in a group chat thars not true anymore. That information is available to WhatsApp and they almost certainly make it available to several governments (hopefully in a judicially protected way but we can’t know that). Further, if you backup your WhatsApp chats, that’s game over for any privacy. The UK legislation is stupid because the UK has been run by a bunch of stupid people for at least the past decade. Nothing about this legislation is dumber than Brexit, for example, which was a referendum that was proposed to the public in such a ridiculous manner that the next half decade was spent in divining what the referendum actually meant.
- FabHK 3y ago
  > For example, WhatsApp sells itself as fully encrypted, etc. but if you’re in a group chat thars not true anymore. That information is available to WhatsApp and they almost certainly make it available to several governments (hopefully in a judicially protected way but we can’t know that). Source? It could well be that the sender e2ee it to each of the recipients, no? (Trivial to add the government or WhatsApp itself to the recipients, then, but that is a different claim.)
  - bostik 3y ago
    OP reads like something I have played devil's advocate for. In an earlier discussion about WA vulnerabilities, one of the reported bugs was that as implemented, Facebook could have added themselves silently to any group chat, thus receiving with plaintext copies of all messages sent in the group from that point onwards. I then extrapolated that if they so chose, they could change their plumbing enough to make all chats group chats - even when they were between two people. To be absolutely clear, there was not - neither back then, nor since - evidence of this being the case. But the technical capability and potential for such subversion was there at the time. I have not followed the domain news enough to know whether this is still the case. What is available to WA and thus to governments, is the traffic pattern part. Who communicates with whom, when, how large the messages approximately are, and so on. The stuff our industry and journalists at large have chosen to call metadata[tm]. I stubbornly call the whole thing for what it is: traffic analysis. Old-school style.
atoav 3y ago
No. The problem is that as a messenger company you have to comply with different markets at the same time. If the biggest market (the EU) would punish you for breaching privacy and a small market (the UK) wants to punish you for the polar opposite you can either: - develope a seperate app for that small market and break that promise (and have the headache of figuring out just how to treat communications that cross the border of those two markets) - choose the bigger market, retreat from the smaller one and let the small market decide if they really want their special deviating regulation if it now means: "Those politicians took your messenger away" and there is no EU-buerocrat that you can blame for it. Notice how this doesn't even require any particularly strong political stance by the messenger organisation? The latter just makes more sense from the standpoint of an organization that cares about it's use of resources.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > No. The problem is that as a messenger company you have to comply with different markets at the same time. Well then you could technically say they can't keep the keys private then, since some places force them to share. It's definitely a "can but wont" scenario.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > (and have the headache of figuring out just how to treat communications that cross the border of those two markets) You could also ban the ability for UK citizens to have chats with EU citizens, which I imagine some of the kookier UK conservatives would love.
  - atoav 3y ago
    You could do that, but then you cut a whole mode of interaction between e.g. UK parents and their kids who study or live on the continent. Either way this is a measure that (like many conservative talking points) sounds good on paper ("law and order"), but once it becomes reality it won't win you any prices, except negative ones.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
The response to your devil's advocate argument is: giving you the keys is not actually a solution, because now every foreign government is racing to break, steal or buy those keys, and not only can we not guarantee that it won't happen, but we can't even discover if it happens, or when. We can build a secret entrance, but we cannot guard it!
- EGreg 3y ago
  Why can’t they know when someone uses the secret keys? Perhaps the messages would be individually encrypted and the keys would need to be used in order to retrieve the message encryption keys. And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case. The scenario I'm talking about isn't overly-broad warrants, etc. Technology can't prevent that. I'm talking about just the tech implementation. Fine, we have a private keypair for every message, and every message is additionally encrypted with the public key of the government-per-message-keypair. How are these per-message keypairs generated? If from a central server, then that becomes a massive weakpoint in the system for multiple reasons: it could be attacked to prevent new keypairs from being generated, it could be hacked to extract private keys, it could be modified to generate keypairs that an adversary can easily break, it could be modified to also send private keys to adversaries, etc., etc. If they're generated on-client, and the secret key is sent to some central repository, then the client or the device the client is running on could be compromised; the private keypairs could be intercepted en-route; the central repository could _still_ be compromised since it can't be airgapped to receive these keypairs. In the case of a warrant, how is each key actually fetched? I don't mean the legal process, I mean at some point someone has to push a button and decrypt a message. How do we protect that process? Besides the fact that even air-gapped systems can be vulnerable to a sufficiently motivated and well-funded adversary, at some point some human being has to have access to this system, and that human being probably has family members. How vulnerable are they to being beaten with rubber hoses, or receiving their spouse's fingers in the mail? If you're going to build a system that can expose everyone's private communications, it better be incredibly close to fool-proof, or it better not be built at all.
didntcheck 3y ago
> under a very strict legal framework and behind a colossal amount of bureaucracy to authorize their use. In other words we'll provide some comedy material for our "trusted agencies" to amuse themselves with, between writing their latest summary snooping system and sharing stolen nudes round the office
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  First of all, the justice system revolves around the rule of the law, homicides are forbidden, doesn't mean that it is hard to kill someone, it's simply prohibited by the law and people tend not to do it. Wiretaps use the same pattern, potentially it is very easy to listen to other people's conversation, but it is unlawful unless authorized, so people usually don't do it. Imagine this scenario: a man only contacts the phone number of some woman when the phone of his wife is out of town, plus the man's phone can be located at the woman's house only at night when the wife is away. What can that mean? Who knows... That kind of data, which is equally revealing and privacy breaking, is completely legal. Why is that? Because tech corporations don't really care about what you say, but about your habits, to exploit them. The justice system OTOH doesn't work in aggregates and patterns, it decides case by case, because every person is responsible of their actions and only theirs. So the two use cases are vastly different and the tension towards complete and unbreakable secrecy is not 100% aligned with the interests of a society at large. Only a very tiny minority benefits from that. Agencies snooping is illegal too, but they are out of the law anyway. "Licence to Kill" is the title of a Bond movie precisely for that reason.
Tangurena2 3y ago
The tech companies design the system so that there exists no central key that could be used to decrypt every conversation. Each conversation generates their own unique key. If some back door existed, it could never be limited to "law enforcement" any hacker could unlock every conversation. Politicians are incapable of learning this.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
  > The tech companies design the system so that there exists no central key that could be used to decrypt every conversation And in fact nobody claimed that, at least not in this thread. It's still not impossible to provide the keys for a conversation, it's not a technical limitation by any means. Perhaps the good guys at Mullvad can provide that level of privacy, but certainly not WhatsApp, their interest align with those of the users practically never.

rhaway84773 3y ago

Not only is it not true, it’s very likely they’re already doing it. For example, WhatsApp sells itself as fully encrypted, etc. but if you’re in a group chat thars not true anymore. That information is available to WhatsApp and they almost certainly make it available to several governments (hopefully in a judicially protected way but we can’t know that). Further, if you backup your WhatsApp chats, that’s game over for any privacy. The UK legislation is stupid because the UK has been run by a bunch of stupid people for at least the past decade. Nothing about this legislation is dumber than Brexit, for example, which was a referendum that was proposed to the public in such a ridiculous manner that the next half decade was spent in divining what the referendum actually meant.

FabHK 3y ago
> For example, WhatsApp sells itself as fully encrypted, etc. but if you’re in a group chat thars not true anymore. That information is available to WhatsApp and they almost certainly make it available to several governments (hopefully in a judicially protected way but we can’t know that). Source? It could well be that the sender e2ee it to each of the recipients, no? (Trivial to add the government or WhatsApp itself to the recipients, then, but that is a different claim.)
- bostik 3y ago
  OP reads like something I have played devil's advocate for. In an earlier discussion about WA vulnerabilities, one of the reported bugs was that as implemented, Facebook could have added themselves silently to any group chat, thus receiving with plaintext copies of all messages sent in the group from that point onwards. I then extrapolated that if they so chose, they could change their plumbing enough to make all chats group chats - even when they were between two people. To be absolutely clear, there was not - neither back then, nor since - evidence of this being the case. But the technical capability and potential for such subversion was there at the time. I have not followed the domain news enough to know whether this is still the case. What is available to WA and thus to governments, is the traffic pattern part. Who communicates with whom, when, how large the messages approximately are, and so on. The stuff our industry and journalists at large have chosen to call metadata[tm]. I stubbornly call the whole thing for what it is: traffic analysis. Old-school style.

atoav 3y ago

No. The problem is that as a messenger company you have to comply with different markets at the same time. If the biggest market (the EU) would punish you for breaching privacy and a small market (the UK) wants to punish you for the polar opposite you can either: - develope a seperate app for that small market and break that promise (and have the headache of figuring out just how to treat communications that cross the border of those two markets) - choose the bigger market, retreat from the smaller one and let the small market decide if they really want their special deviating regulation if it now means: "Those politicians took your messenger away" and there is no EU-buerocrat that you can blame for it. Notice how this doesn't even require any particularly strong political stance by the messenger organisation? The latter just makes more sense from the standpoint of an organization that cares about it's use of resources.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> No. The problem is that as a messenger company you have to comply with different markets at the same time. Well then you could technically say they can't keep the keys private then, since some places force them to share. It's definitely a "can but wont" scenario.
ethbr1 3y ago
> (and have the headache of figuring out just how to treat communications that cross the border of those two markets) You could also ban the ability for UK citizens to have chats with EU citizens, which I imagine some of the kookier UK conservatives would love.
- atoav 3y ago
  You could do that, but then you cut a whole mode of interaction between e.g. UK parents and their kids who study or live on the continent. Either way this is a measure that (like many conservative talking points) sounds good on paper ("law and order"), but once it becomes reality it won't win you any prices, except negative ones.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

The response to your devil's advocate argument is: giving you the keys is not actually a solution, because now every foreign government is racing to break, steal or buy those keys, and not only can we not guarantee that it won't happen, but we can't even discover if it happens, or when. We can build a secret entrance, but we cannot guard it!

EGreg 3y ago
Why can’t they know when someone uses the secret keys? Perhaps the messages would be individually encrypted and the keys would need to be used in order to retrieve the message encryption keys. And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > And to do this, they would need to provide an explicit reason and only get the limited info that the warrants etc. would support and the reasons would be stated in every case. The scenario I'm talking about isn't overly-broad warrants, etc. Technology can't prevent that. I'm talking about just the tech implementation. Fine, we have a private keypair for every message, and every message is additionally encrypted with the public key of the government-per-message-keypair. How are these per-message keypairs generated? If from a central server, then that becomes a massive weakpoint in the system for multiple reasons: it could be attacked to prevent new keypairs from being generated, it could be hacked to extract private keys, it could be modified to generate keypairs that an adversary can easily break, it could be modified to also send private keys to adversaries, etc., etc. If they're generated on-client, and the secret key is sent to some central repository, then the client or the device the client is running on could be compromised; the private keypairs could be intercepted en-route; the central repository could _still_ be compromised since it can't be airgapped to receive these keypairs. In the case of a warrant, how is each key actually fetched? I don't mean the legal process, I mean at some point someone has to push a button and decrypt a message. How do we protect that process? Besides the fact that even air-gapped systems can be vulnerable to a sufficiently motivated and well-funded adversary, at some point some human being has to have access to this system, and that human being probably has family members. How vulnerable are they to being beaten with rubber hoses, or receiving their spouse's fingers in the mail? If you're going to build a system that can expose everyone's private communications, it better be incredibly close to fool-proof, or it better not be built at all.

didntcheck 3y ago

> under a very strict legal framework and behind a colossal amount of bureaucracy to authorize their use. In other words we'll provide some comedy material for our "trusted agencies" to amuse themselves with, between writing their latest summary snooping system and sharing stolen nudes round the office

peoplefromibiza 3y ago
First of all, the justice system revolves around the rule of the law, homicides are forbidden, doesn't mean that it is hard to kill someone, it's simply prohibited by the law and people tend not to do it. Wiretaps use the same pattern, potentially it is very easy to listen to other people's conversation, but it is unlawful unless authorized, so people usually don't do it. Imagine this scenario: a man only contacts the phone number of some woman when the phone of his wife is out of town, plus the man's phone can be located at the woman's house only at night when the wife is away. What can that mean? Who knows... That kind of data, which is equally revealing and privacy breaking, is completely legal. Why is that? Because tech corporations don't really care about what you say, but about your habits, to exploit them. The justice system OTOH doesn't work in aggregates and patterns, it decides case by case, because every person is responsible of their actions and only theirs. So the two use cases are vastly different and the tension towards complete and unbreakable secrecy is not 100% aligned with the interests of a society at large. Only a very tiny minority benefits from that. Agencies snooping is illegal too, but they are out of the law anyway. "Licence to Kill" is the title of a Bond movie precisely for that reason.

Tangurena2 3y ago

The tech companies design the system so that there exists no central key that could be used to decrypt every conversation. Each conversation generates their own unique key. If some back door existed, it could never be limited to "law enforcement" any hacker could unlock every conversation. Politicians are incapable of learning this.

peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> The tech companies design the system so that there exists no central key that could be used to decrypt every conversation And in fact nobody claimed that, at least not in this thread. It's still not impossible to provide the keys for a conversation, it's not a technical limitation by any means. Perhaps the good guys at Mullvad can provide that level of privacy, but certainly not WhatsApp, their interest align with those of the users practically never.