10 ms·

Banning E2EE is stupid

207 points by dp-hackernews 3y ago

pil0u 3y ago
I agree with the author's statement, like probably a lot of people who already understand how e2ee works under the hood. I'm not sure if writing code on GitHub to be run in a terminal is going to change policy makers' minds.
startages 3y ago
That will be the case eventually, and not everyone can write code and make their own e2ee, so I think there has to be some sort of open source solution that allows people to implement some sort of encryption without any coding.
- porridgeraisin 3y ago
  Yes. I made a toy version of this, it's an extension that adds e2ee to your chat websites by hooking into the send button, and the "add message to local list" function.
no_time 3y ago
Arguing in good faith against the lawmakers who are perfectly aware of the the gaping holes in their own arguments is too common in this field IMO. If we want to protect the right to encryption and (pseudo)anonimity to the degree we have it now, we have to appeal to emotion. Just like how "child advocacy" groups tried to make you into a monster if you think blanket scanning of all data on our computing devices is a bit too far gone.
- cnity 3y ago
  Yes. You can actually flip the script with "think of the children arguments" because banning E2EE fundamentally makes children less safe. However I suspect it's worse than this: these law maker's don't care about children, they care about power and establishing control over how citizens communicate. There is no argument to deter them, we can only hope to convince the public or else be damned to illegal activity as hackers.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Governments love passing bills that give the government more power. Very rarely do governments pass bills to remove that power later. This is a power grab and should be treated as such. E2EE makes police work more inconvenient but it should be inconvenient. If you want to optimize for police work convenience, you get a police state.
- lynx23 3y ago
  A great example why the "assume good intentions"-meme is actually pretty broken and leaves those that follow it with a disadvantage. The same way as "assume good intentions" fails when interacting with sociopaths, it also fails when interacting with lawmakers and authorities in general.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    Commander William T. Riker: In all trust, there is the possibility of betrayal. I'm not sure you were... prepared for that. Lt. Commander Data: Were you prepared, sir? Commander William T. Riker: I don't think anybody ever is. Lt. Commander Data: Hm... Then it is better not to trust? Commander William T. Riker: Without trust, there's no friendship, no closeness. None of the emotional bonds that make us who we are. Lt. Commander Data: And yet you put yourself at risk. Commander William T. Riker: Every single time. Lt. Commander Data: Perhaps I am fortunate, sir, to be spared the emotional consequences. Commander William T. Riker: Perhaps. https://youtu.be/JCvqMk4P3zQ https://youtu.be/JCvqMk4P3zQ
    - cnity 3y ago
      TNG is the most comprehensive analysis of ethics I've ever witnessed. No media or publication even comes close to delivering such a sense of understanding the timeless difficulties of the human experience.
      - lynx23 3y ago
        And yet, it portrays a "would like to have" world that couldn't be more distant from what we actually have. It is literaly (science) fiction. Using a fictious 24th century chat between a womanizer and a fancy robot to explain to a 21st century real world human they should be more trusting is rather, shall I say odd?
        cnity 3y ago
        You're missing the point. The setting of TNG is radically different from ours for the reason you described, and yet their problems of trust are the same. Using science fiction to deliver messages pertinent to today is typical and, arguably, the goal of science fiction. It isn't odd at all.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  The challenge there is that "protect the children" and "terrorists" weigh more heavily on a moral level than "protect my privacy".
  - lopis 3y ago
    Bad actors can use this to actively harm children by intercepting their communication with their friends and family and putting them at risk. No need to even change arguments.
    - Jcowell 3y ago
      this is too technical , you need to be broader and more fear mongering: Bad actors will use the this to find children to harm.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        "Burning down the village in order to save it. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
  - pif 3y ago
    The real challenge is that none of the ones screaming "protect my privacy" can offer a solution to "protect the children" as well.
    - jermaustin1 3y ago
      The real challenge is getting people screaming "protect the children" to provide evidence that "the children" actually need protection in a meaningful way that also reduces the privacy of everyone.
      - seanw444 3y ago
        We continue to put responsibility on the government to fix our problems, when many of them nowadays are societal and cultural. You can't slap on a law to fix immorality and lack of wisdom. All you do is restrict the moral and wise. I hope we return to holding parents responsible for raising their kids properly. The world they face now is a terrifying and disgusting colossus, and facing it cannot be done without moral and wise future generations.
- j45 3y ago
  Some argue you have to appeal to lawmakers to make a law that prevents breaking encryption. Perhaps the avoidance of political engagement by tech inclined folks is contributing to or at least allowing some of this to progress a lot eaiser. A key part of this issue is learning about the frequency with which this type of legislation is brought up over and over again and how it might be new to some not not everyone. Perhaps bureaucracies are counting on people relatively new to encryption erosion not having context that they are far from alone.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  It’s not the first time I hear this kind of statement, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. Maybe it’s true, realistically speaking. But it’s also an admission that we can’t be better than this, and that very much tastes like defeat, like reading post-Trump Scott Adams. (Not to be confused with the idea that it “validates” emotional manipulation or whatever; that one’s externally motivated, while this one is internal.) It also, of course, contains the kind of implicit contempt for the public that has led to widespread disdain of politicians in the first place, because while many people may be easily swept along by appeals to emotion, they still usually have a good feeling for when the speaker doesn’t respect them. I don’t know if anyone’s really trying to figure out what it would take to make these tactics not work on a large scale, rather than how to use or work around them. See also: “Guided by the beauty of our weapons”[1] by Scott Alexander. Compare: Paul Graham’s statement[2] that “Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.” [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-o... [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html
- worldsayshi 3y ago
  For every successful bad faith actor there are 10 useful idiots parroting their claims. This perhaps addresses them.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  If we want to protect these rights they need to be guaranteed somewhere where daily politics can’t touch it, like a constitution. Otherwise it’s a battle that will only end when the rights are gone.
- gnarlouse 3y ago
  I disagree with this take. This implies that pathos is a more durable political mechanism than logos, or that in the short term pathos is more impactful.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  This assumes that said lawmakers are as intelligent or knowledgeable as they would need to be in order to purely be seeking power. I do think there's some merit to your second point, however.
gizmo 3y ago
Although E2EE is great I'm not sure I follow the logic of this argument. Yes, it's easy to implement E2EE on top of an plain communication channel, but why is that relevant? It's also easy to make a machete from plate steel from your local hardware store. It's easy to create chlorine gas by mixing cleaning supplies. You can even make a perfectly functional rifle from the junk in your garage. And yet, you're not allowed to. (Substitute other examples if you live in a freedom loving country.) We should oppose an E2EE ban (or backdoor mandates) because E2EE is good technology that protects regular citizens from being spied on. Not because it's technologically easy to circumvent a ban.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  The real danger comes when using your own encryption becomes illegal; that is, anyone using encryption within a weakened encryption thing will be an immediate target because obviously they have something to hide. Dystopian but there you have it.
  - jack_pp 3y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. Even though you can encrypt on top of existing messaging services if it becomes the norm that they can watch all traffic anyone who uses such an extra layer will be immediately flagged and put under more surveillance. So for the surveillance state it would be much easier to deal with people who try to live outside the system / norm and simply criminalize privacy of any kind. I don't agree with it but you can't say it's stupid or they have no incentive to pass this.
    - jusssi 3y ago
      And criminals will just send selfies of themselves, with their encrypted message hiding in least-significant-bit noise. Good luck proving there's a hidden message.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  This was something people largely missed at one point around Australia’s Assistance and Access Bill five years ago: the Prime Minister was widely derided for saying (as reported) “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”. Government is all about forbidding things that are physically possible. Maths says you can do these things. Governments can say you’re not allowed to do these things. (A&A Bill was the rather-dubiously-handled piece of legislation that, in part, makes first-party end-to-end encryption not an acceptable defence for declining to fulfil legal warrants.)
deanc 3y ago
Of course governments can legislate to ban companies from implementing E2E, such that they cannot read intercepted messages. People who then have a need or wish to still send E2E encrypted messages will find ways to do so using existing methods as the OP eloquently points out. But then the governments will legislate against citizens usage of the technology. This is the logical next step in the over-reach.
- gizmo 3y ago
  When everybody uses E2EE it's a neutral technology. When people homebrew encryption over an insecure channel it's automatically suspect. Encrypted traffic will stick out like a sore thumb and the courts will force users of E2EE to hand over their keys.
  - js8 3y ago
    > Encrypted traffic will stick out Not really, there are steganographic LLMs that can disguise encrypted traffic as a regular chat between two people.
    - jack_pp 3y ago
      have those been adversarially tested though? I highly doubt such texts wouldn't stand out. The conversation flow would look like absolute gibberish to a normal person so an adversarial LLM could be created to sniff out even such tactics. I'm reminded of Peripheral where the police AIs would have so much info on every person that any irregularity in movement or behaviour of any kind would instantly flag you and put you under investigation.
      - js8 3y ago
        Well, everything evolves. They will eventually be adversarially tested. Wise societies will realize that it's better to spend resources to prevent physical violence than to control everyone's thought. It seems it broadly goes that way so far.
      - 3y ago
Mindwipe 3y ago
Do not do this, write to lawmakers pointing out how child protection charities are fantasists.
maxehmookau 3y ago
This article is entirely correct. It misses the point entirely though. Lawmakers don't care about actually catching criminals, they want to be seen to be catching criminals. In this case, nobody is made safer. Normal folks are made actively _less safe_ and criminals are pushed further underground.
- _shantaram 3y ago
  "you can do crime, just don't do it where i can see you" -- politicians, probably
rblank 3y ago
"That said, if your heuristic is 'words used in strange ways' then you will get false positives from all teenagers." This made my day.
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
While this may not change the minds of any lawmakers, it actually is a decent piece of example code IMO for using some features of libsodium!
robbywashere_ 3y ago
Encryption is only used by criminals. I have nothing to hide so I don’t need it
- barelyauser 3y ago
  Mass surveillance by a benevolent AI is the best outcome for humanity. That or correcting the evil out of man by genetic engineering.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    The Day the Internet Stood Still
  - blooalien 3y ago
    > "Mass surveillance by a benevolent AI is the best outcome for humanity." Except that "benevolent AI" doesn't exist, and likely won't exist before the evil humans abuse existing AI to destroy humanity.
- eimrine 3y ago
  That's a poor apology for implementing a social rating score. Which is inevitable since you consider you have strictly NOTHING to hide.
- AndroTux 3y ago
  You have nothing to hide? Tell me your password to your email and bank account then.
  - robbywashere_ 3y ago
    I get encryption for these types of things but if the police need to see things to protect citizens they should be able to.
- timrichard 3y ago
  How about the Ansible Vaults in my Git repositories?
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
It would be trivial to build a bot that can send a stream of normally-looking messages with secrets steganographed into the stream. Or if you need to send more data, send a picture which offers ability to hide even more encrypted content into it. I wish a good luck any government agency that tries to analyse bits of selfies exchanged by people to try to figure out if they are actually using it to coordinate nefarious activities.
javajosh 3y ago
We have progressive income tax, why not progressive anti-encryption law? E.g. the more money and power you have the less you get to use encryption.
- rpigab 3y ago
  Yes, this was my thoughts too, since this is pushed by politicians, they should roll out the end of encryption to their phones first, and if in 10 years we uncover no new sex scandals or other big scandals about them, it means that having no encryption is perfectly fine. If they want encryption but with a backdoor, just send the master key to a bunch of random citizens for monitoring. In my case, I'm French, so they won't last a week like this. Don't give felon politicians a place to hide.
wzdd 3y ago
I am absolutely not in favour of banning E2EE, but most people aren't technically adept, and even those who are get lazy, and opsec is hard, so in fact such laws probably would catch quite a few people. In tech we like to think that if a solution doesn't cover 100% of cases then we should't implement it, but in law, it's all about relative impacts -- in this case, increase in conviction rate vs loss of liberties.
Roark66 3y ago
Sadly, stupid politicians are a problem in every democracy. The only way to resolve it is to incentivise more intelligent/knowledgeable people to go into politics, but how? The best motivation for going into politics is probably patriotism, wanting to change things for the better etc. But then people we would want in politics, unless they are already wealthy, would have to take a substantial pay cut if they "went into politics". I can mostly speak for my own country (Poland) where a typical salary of a member of Parliament is in the region of €2.5k per month,plus another up to €2k to run an office(but they spend it on employing someone to run the office). The Prime minister of a 40mln people country gets €3k per month. That's the entry level salary in IT in the bigger cities here. So only people in the following categories go into politics: "really passionate", wealthy already, is interested in political science/can't do anything else better paid anyway(such person usually has a degree in philosophy or history), someone who loves having power over others, someone hoping for a chance to earn money on corruption(illegal or semi-legal). It is no surprise amongst such group there is a lack of knowledge and no incentive to understand topics like encryption. That's why I'm very strongly for increasing the salaries in politics(it's a very unpopular opinion here in PL). It it not a solution to all problems, but it is definitely a requirement IMO.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  >Sadly, stupid politicians are a problem in every democracy. Are they actually stupid or do they just play dumb to better serve the interest of their main backers (or supposed audience)?
- seanw444 3y ago
  I've thought the same, but in the end it doesn't give us enough of the people that want to make positive change. People with good ideas and motivations overwhelmingly succeed in the private sector. In democracy, they get held back and waste their time. Whether they consciously think it or not, democracy is a big reason potential good politicians don't participate in democracy. So like I said, increasing salaries doesn't do enough to shift this balance. Increasing it enough to shift the balance will shift it in the wrong direction: people who are only in it for the money will flock to political positions. And then we have the same ignorant fools again, but at a higher taxpayer expense. All I see on HN is people trying to come up with "material" frameworks for fixing our problems. It's all bandaid fixes. Actually no, it's bandaids on a slashed artery. Morality and wisdom is in rapid decay. The only true way to fix that at the source is to have strong families again, but that's unpopular now. They've incentivized dissolving families, disincentivized starting healthy families, ruined our attention spans, destroyed proper sexuality (one of our biggest motivators for anything), convinced us that violence is never appropriate, and they've brainwashed us so well that we beg for more of all of it. And as a result, we're likely doomed to fail.
mhandley 3y ago
The only argument I know of that might work on lawmakers is that mandating backdoors to end-to-end encryption puts your own high-tech industrial secrets at high risk from nation-state adversaries. It puts a huge target on that backdoor with very high payoff if you manage to compromise it, provides for very high rewards for any insider who can be bribed into leaking information enabling the use of the backdoor, or huge risk for the family of any insider who could be coerced into leaking such information.
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  Yes, very much yes. Your comment has now been enshrined in my encryption web page. [1] Thank you. [1]: https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/#encryption-is-a-necessity-for-national-security https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/#encryption-...
- raziel2p 3y ago
  ironically this rhetoric might be what pushes officials to use proper self hosted end to end communication channels.
AnonCoward42 3y ago
The end goal of this can only be to outlaw all secrets (for all citizens) if you think it through. First they say messenger may not E2EE, next they outlaw circumvention (i.e. using GPG encryption inside the messenger, side channels) and after that comes steganography. Don't be fooled, encryption is almost impossible to hide if you want to do it casually. What is going to remain? “If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.” ― Philip Zimmermann It's simply about totalitarian control at this point.
h2odragon 3y ago
People thought banning alcohol, and other drugs, would work. People thought banning pornography would work. Some people still think banning personal weapons will work. I think we don't learn from failures here.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  Banning personal weapons has been shown to work empirically. More examples in that vein: People thought banning driving without a seat belt would work. People thought banning driving through red lights would work.
frizlab 3y ago
This is exactly what happens in the Mail app on macOS when two people exchange mails and both signs them. Once the public key of someone is known, mails are automatically encrypted from now on while the certificate is valid. It’s excessively convenient and I loathe the certificate industry for making the acquisition of certificate such a painful and expensive process, otherwise we could have encrypted communication with emails easily.
cornholio 3y ago
In almost any context where banning E2E encryption would have useful law-enforcement results against unsophisticated criminals, there is always a legal way to install a wire tap via an active attack. For example, a judge can force Signal to perform a MITM attack, and an unsophisticated target will simply ignore the key change warning. An alternate approach would be to use the auto-update features of the terminal and force the app distributors to sign and push a trojan to that specific target. You might have objections against such law enforcement techniques, but I think they have their place with proper judicial oversight. Conversely, if the target is aware of such techniques, it's very, very unlikely they would use a channel they know is monitored. So the trade-off here is: break the privacy of everyone, but allow law enforcement to do passive attacks without judicial overview. It's a no brainer that both things are bad and they do not improve our safety one bit. Who really finds such powers useful? Spooks and entrenched power structures, of course.
- hellojesus 3y ago
  > An alternate approach would be to use the auto-update features of the terminal and force the app distributors to sign and push a trojan to that specific target. This is a compelling reason to build from source for e2e messagers. Google's move to signing apks with their own keys helps facilitate the above.
  - cornholio 3y ago
    Realistically speaking, defending against an active attack from your OS distributor targeting you specifically is an exceptionally tall order. It ultimately comes down to obtaining a known safe compiler, building something like a Gentoo stage 1 installation, then manually audit the source of each and every every security patch you apply, knowing that any minor update might actually hide some kind of remotely exploitable back door. You would need NSA-level of resources to pull this off, I doubt the apk signing by Google changes things significantly for Android users.
    - hellojesus 3y ago
      True, but don't you think a massive amount of folks would devote time to an open source alternative just to stick it to govs if they tried to pass something like banning unlocked bootloaders? Grapheneos exists with a far smaller potential user base.
alkonaut 3y ago
I don't think there will be an explicit "ban on e2ee". That I would almost fear less than what I think is on the table now: a targeted way to add cert backdoors just to the top 10-or-so products and browsers. Generally worded of course, but only enforced on the big players. So that 99.9% of users and messages are compromised but no one really has to worry about the rest. It's a good enough improvement and no one cares whether the people they actually talk about catching are using secure services like they have been all along.
anothernewdude 3y ago
Just allow some countries to ban End to end, and then see them lose financial services.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  And web browsers, web sites, a fair proportion of most operating systems, software updates, remote work VPNs, etc. End to end encryption is baked into the overwhelming majority of everything that travels over the internet these days. If it were to be banned, there wouldn't really be anything left.
gavinhoward 3y ago
https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/ https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/
fredgrott 3y ago
Note, one of the heavy warning voices in the CIA before 9-11 has pointed out in all his books after leaving the CIA that media and other banning only made it harder to know what is going on in the terrorist world and tracking terrorists down for prosecution. Banning encryption is about like trying to ban synthetic drugs as we have to legally specify a specific and once that happens the demand for it encourages people to find solutions to that ban.
INTPenis 3y ago
Absolutely, this is what I said when chat control was first proposed; it will only serve to make criminals out of ordinary people. And even worse, I foresee not only a black market of app distribution without backdoors, but also a lot of young people will prefer these apps because young people are going to be young people online. And if they know what it means to communicate safely I'm sure they will prefer it over anything else.
- hellojesus 3y ago
  People will just start building g from source to ensure their apps aren't backdoored. This will happen all the way down to the lowest level (e.g., mass migration to grapheneos). Maybe not enough due to proprietary baseband blobs, or maybe govs will try to outlaw unlocked bootloaders, but that is likely where things would go.
kardianos 3y ago
The author appears to think these bills are actually targeted to "bad guys".
junto 3y ago
Return of the Clipper chip Part V.

207 points by dp-hackernews 3y ago

I agree with the author's statement, like probably a lot of people who already understand how e2ee works under the hood. I'm not sure if writing code on GitHub to be run in a terminal is going to change policy makers' minds.

startages 3y ago

That will be the case eventually, and not everyone can write code and make their own e2ee, so I think there has to be some sort of open source solution that allows people to implement some sort of encryption without any coding.

porridgeraisin 3y ago
Yes. I made a toy version of this, it's an extension that adds e2ee to your chat websites by hooking into the send button, and the "add message to local list" function.

no_time 3y ago

Arguing in good faith against the lawmakers who are perfectly aware of the the gaping holes in their own arguments is too common in this field IMO. If we want to protect the right to encryption and (pseudo)anonimity to the degree we have it now, we have to appeal to emotion. Just like how "child advocacy" groups tried to make you into a monster if you think blanket scanning of all data on our computing devices is a bit too far gone.

cnity 3y ago
Yes. You can actually flip the script with "think of the children arguments" because banning E2EE fundamentally makes children less safe. However I suspect it's worse than this: these law maker's don't care about children, they care about power and establishing control over how citizens communicate. There is no argument to deter them, we can only hope to convince the public or else be damned to illegal activity as hackers.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Governments love passing bills that give the government more power. Very rarely do governments pass bills to remove that power later. This is a power grab and should be treated as such. E2EE makes police work more inconvenient but it should be inconvenient. If you want to optimize for police work convenience, you get a police state.
lynx23 3y ago
A great example why the "assume good intentions"-meme is actually pretty broken and leaves those that follow it with a disadvantage. The same way as "assume good intentions" fails when interacting with sociopaths, it also fails when interacting with lawmakers and authorities in general.
- rcarr 3y ago
  Commander William T. Riker: In all trust, there is the possibility of betrayal. I'm not sure you were... prepared for that. Lt. Commander Data: Were you prepared, sir? Commander William T. Riker: I don't think anybody ever is. Lt. Commander Data: Hm... Then it is better not to trust? Commander William T. Riker: Without trust, there's no friendship, no closeness. None of the emotional bonds that make us who we are. Lt. Commander Data: And yet you put yourself at risk. Commander William T. Riker: Every single time. Lt. Commander Data: Perhaps I am fortunate, sir, to be spared the emotional consequences. Commander William T. Riker: Perhaps. https://youtu.be/JCvqMk4P3zQ https://youtu.be/JCvqMk4P3zQ
  - cnity 3y ago
    TNG is the most comprehensive analysis of ethics I've ever witnessed. No media or publication even comes close to delivering such a sense of understanding the timeless difficulties of the human experience.
    - lynx23 3y ago
      And yet, it portrays a "would like to have" world that couldn't be more distant from what we actually have. It is literaly (science) fiction. Using a fictious 24th century chat between a womanizer and a fancy robot to explain to a 21st century real world human they should be more trusting is rather, shall I say odd?
      - cnity 3y ago
        You're missing the point. The setting of TNG is radically different from ours for the reason you described, and yet their problems of trust are the same. Using science fiction to deliver messages pertinent to today is typical and, arguably, the goal of science fiction. It isn't odd at all.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
The challenge there is that "protect the children" and "terrorists" weigh more heavily on a moral level than "protect my privacy".
- lopis 3y ago
  Bad actors can use this to actively harm children by intercepting their communication with their friends and family and putting them at risk. No need to even change arguments.
  - Jcowell 3y ago
    this is too technical , you need to be broader and more fear mongering: Bad actors will use the this to find children to harm.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      "Burning down the village in order to save it. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
- pif 3y ago
  The real challenge is that none of the ones screaming "protect my privacy" can offer a solution to "protect the children" as well.
  - jermaustin1 3y ago
    The real challenge is getting people screaming "protect the children" to provide evidence that "the children" actually need protection in a meaningful way that also reduces the privacy of everyone.
    - seanw444 3y ago
      We continue to put responsibility on the government to fix our problems, when many of them nowadays are societal and cultural. You can't slap on a law to fix immorality and lack of wisdom. All you do is restrict the moral and wise. I hope we return to holding parents responsible for raising their kids properly. The world they face now is a terrifying and disgusting colossus, and facing it cannot be done without moral and wise future generations.
j45 3y ago
Some argue you have to appeal to lawmakers to make a law that prevents breaking encryption. Perhaps the avoidance of political engagement by tech inclined folks is contributing to or at least allowing some of this to progress a lot eaiser. A key part of this issue is learning about the frequency with which this type of legislation is brought up over and over again and how it might be new to some not not everyone. Perhaps bureaucracies are counting on people relatively new to encryption erosion not having context that they are far from alone.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
It’s not the first time I hear this kind of statement, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. Maybe it’s true, realistically speaking. But it’s also an admission that we can’t be better than this, and that very much tastes like defeat, like reading post-Trump Scott Adams. (Not to be confused with the idea that it “validates” emotional manipulation or whatever; that one’s externally motivated, while this one is internal.) It also, of course, contains the kind of implicit contempt for the public that has led to widespread disdain of politicians in the first place, because while many people may be easily swept along by appeals to emotion, they still usually have a good feeling for when the speaker doesn’t respect them. I don’t know if anyone’s really trying to figure out what it would take to make these tactics not work on a large scale, rather than how to use or work around them. See also: “Guided by the beauty of our weapons”[1] by Scott Alexander. Compare: Paul Graham’s statement[2] that “Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.” [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-o... [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html
worldsayshi 3y ago
For every successful bad faith actor there are 10 useful idiots parroting their claims. This perhaps addresses them.
tinus_hn 3y ago
If we want to protect these rights they need to be guaranteed somewhere where daily politics can’t touch it, like a constitution. Otherwise it’s a battle that will only end when the rights are gone.
gnarlouse 3y ago
I disagree with this take. This implies that pathos is a more durable political mechanism than logos, or that in the short term pathos is more impactful.
ravenstine 3y ago
This assumes that said lawmakers are as intelligent or knowledgeable as they would need to be in order to purely be seeking power. I do think there's some merit to your second point, however.

gizmo 3y ago

Although E2EE is great I'm not sure I follow the logic of this argument. Yes, it's easy to implement E2EE on top of an plain communication channel, but why is that relevant? It's also easy to make a machete from plate steel from your local hardware store. It's easy to create chlorine gas by mixing cleaning supplies. You can even make a perfectly functional rifle from the junk in your garage. And yet, you're not allowed to. (Substitute other examples if you live in a freedom loving country.) We should oppose an E2EE ban (or backdoor mandates) because E2EE is good technology that protects regular citizens from being spied on. Not because it's technologically easy to circumvent a ban.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
The real danger comes when using your own encryption becomes illegal; that is, anyone using encryption within a weakened encryption thing will be an immediate target because obviously they have something to hide. Dystopian but there you have it.
- jack_pp 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Even though you can encrypt on top of existing messaging services if it becomes the norm that they can watch all traffic anyone who uses such an extra layer will be immediately flagged and put under more surveillance. So for the surveillance state it would be much easier to deal with people who try to live outside the system / norm and simply criminalize privacy of any kind. I don't agree with it but you can't say it's stupid or they have no incentive to pass this.
  - jusssi 3y ago
    And criminals will just send selfies of themselves, with their encrypted message hiding in least-significant-bit noise. Good luck proving there's a hidden message.
chrismorgan 3y ago
This was something people largely missed at one point around Australia’s Assistance and Access Bill five years ago: the Prime Minister was widely derided for saying (as reported) “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”. Government is all about forbidding things that are physically possible. Maths says you can do these things. Governments can say you’re not allowed to do these things. (A&A Bill was the rather-dubiously-handled piece of legislation that, in part, makes first-party end-to-end encryption not an acceptable defence for declining to fulfil legal warrants.)

deanc 3y ago

Of course governments can legislate to ban companies from implementing E2E, such that they cannot read intercepted messages. People who then have a need or wish to still send E2E encrypted messages will find ways to do so using existing methods as the OP eloquently points out. But then the governments will legislate against citizens usage of the technology. This is the logical next step in the over-reach.

gizmo 3y ago
When everybody uses E2EE it's a neutral technology. When people homebrew encryption over an insecure channel it's automatically suspect. Encrypted traffic will stick out like a sore thumb and the courts will force users of E2EE to hand over their keys.
- js8 3y ago
  > Encrypted traffic will stick out Not really, there are steganographic LLMs that can disguise encrypted traffic as a regular chat between two people.
  - jack_pp 3y ago
    have those been adversarially tested though? I highly doubt such texts wouldn't stand out. The conversation flow would look like absolute gibberish to a normal person so an adversarial LLM could be created to sniff out even such tactics. I'm reminded of Peripheral where the police AIs would have so much info on every person that any irregularity in movement or behaviour of any kind would instantly flag you and put you under investigation.
    - js8 3y ago
      Well, everything evolves. They will eventually be adversarially tested. Wise societies will realize that it's better to spend resources to prevent physical violence than to control everyone's thought. It seems it broadly goes that way so far.
    - 3y ago

Mindwipe 3y ago

Do not do this, write to lawmakers pointing out how child protection charities are fantasists.

maxehmookau 3y ago

This article is entirely correct. It misses the point entirely though. Lawmakers don't care about actually catching criminals, they want to be seen to be catching criminals. In this case, nobody is made safer. Normal folks are made actively _less safe_ and criminals are pushed further underground.

_shantaram 3y ago
"you can do crime, just don't do it where i can see you" -- politicians, probably

rblank 3y ago

"That said, if your heuristic is 'words used in strange ways' then you will get false positives from all teenagers." This made my day.

fullspectrumdev 3y ago

While this may not change the minds of any lawmakers, it actually is a decent piece of example code IMO for using some features of libsodium!

robbywashere_ 3y ago

Encryption is only used by criminals. I have nothing to hide so I don’t need it

barelyauser 3y ago
Mass surveillance by a benevolent AI is the best outcome for humanity. That or correcting the evil out of man by genetic engineering.
- teddyh 3y ago
  The Day the Internet Stood Still
- blooalien 3y ago
  > "Mass surveillance by a benevolent AI is the best outcome for humanity." Except that "benevolent AI" doesn't exist, and likely won't exist before the evil humans abuse existing AI to destroy humanity.
eimrine 3y ago
That's a poor apology for implementing a social rating score. Which is inevitable since you consider you have strictly NOTHING to hide.
AndroTux 3y ago
You have nothing to hide? Tell me your password to your email and bank account then.
- robbywashere_ 3y ago
  I get encryption for these types of things but if the police need to see things to protect citizens they should be able to.
timrichard 3y ago
How about the Ansible Vaults in my Git repositories?

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

It would be trivial to build a bot that can send a stream of normally-looking messages with secrets steganographed into the stream. Or if you need to send more data, send a picture which offers ability to hide even more encrypted content into it. I wish a good luck any government agency that tries to analyse bits of selfies exchanged by people to try to figure out if they are actually using it to coordinate nefarious activities.

javajosh 3y ago

We have progressive income tax, why not progressive anti-encryption law? E.g. the more money and power you have the less you get to use encryption.

rpigab 3y ago
Yes, this was my thoughts too, since this is pushed by politicians, they should roll out the end of encryption to their phones first, and if in 10 years we uncover no new sex scandals or other big scandals about them, it means that having no encryption is perfectly fine. If they want encryption but with a backdoor, just send the master key to a bunch of random citizens for monitoring. In my case, I'm French, so they won't last a week like this. Don't give felon politicians a place to hide.

wzdd 3y ago

I am absolutely not in favour of banning E2EE, but most people aren't technically adept, and even those who are get lazy, and opsec is hard, so in fact such laws probably would catch quite a few people. In tech we like to think that if a solution doesn't cover 100% of cases then we should't implement it, but in law, it's all about relative impacts -- in this case, increase in conviction rate vs loss of liberties.

Roark66 3y ago

Sadly, stupid politicians are a problem in every democracy. The only way to resolve it is to incentivise more intelligent/knowledgeable people to go into politics, but how? The best motivation for going into politics is probably patriotism, wanting to change things for the better etc. But then people we would want in politics, unless they are already wealthy, would have to take a substantial pay cut if they "went into politics". I can mostly speak for my own country (Poland) where a typical salary of a member of Parliament is in the region of €2.5k per month,plus another up to €2k to run an office(but they spend it on employing someone to run the office). The Prime minister of a 40mln people country gets €3k per month. That's the entry level salary in IT in the bigger cities here. So only people in the following categories go into politics: "really passionate", wealthy already, is interested in political science/can't do anything else better paid anyway(such person usually has a degree in philosophy or history), someone who loves having power over others, someone hoping for a chance to earn money on corruption(illegal or semi-legal). It is no surprise amongst such group there is a lack of knowledge and no incentive to understand topics like encryption. That's why I'm very strongly for increasing the salaries in politics(it's a very unpopular opinion here in PL). It it not a solution to all problems, but it is definitely a requirement IMO.

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
>Sadly, stupid politicians are a problem in every democracy. Are they actually stupid or do they just play dumb to better serve the interest of their main backers (or supposed audience)?
seanw444 3y ago
I've thought the same, but in the end it doesn't give us enough of the people that want to make positive change. People with good ideas and motivations overwhelmingly succeed in the private sector. In democracy, they get held back and waste their time. Whether they consciously think it or not, democracy is a big reason potential good politicians don't participate in democracy. So like I said, increasing salaries doesn't do enough to shift this balance. Increasing it enough to shift the balance will shift it in the wrong direction: people who are only in it for the money will flock to political positions. And then we have the same ignorant fools again, but at a higher taxpayer expense. All I see on HN is people trying to come up with "material" frameworks for fixing our problems. It's all bandaid fixes. Actually no, it's bandaids on a slashed artery. Morality and wisdom is in rapid decay. The only true way to fix that at the source is to have strong families again, but that's unpopular now. They've incentivized dissolving families, disincentivized starting healthy families, ruined our attention spans, destroyed proper sexuality (one of our biggest motivators for anything), convinced us that violence is never appropriate, and they've brainwashed us so well that we beg for more of all of it. And as a result, we're likely doomed to fail.

mhandley 3y ago

The only argument I know of that might work on lawmakers is that mandating backdoors to end-to-end encryption puts your own high-tech industrial secrets at high risk from nation-state adversaries. It puts a huge target on that backdoor with very high payoff if you manage to compromise it, provides for very high rewards for any insider who can be bribed into leaking information enabling the use of the backdoor, or huge risk for the family of any insider who could be coerced into leaking such information.

gavinhoward 3y ago
Yes, very much yes. Your comment has now been enshrined in my encryption web page. [1] Thank you. [1]: https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/#encryption-is-a-necessity-for-national-security https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/#encryption-...
raziel2p 3y ago
ironically this rhetoric might be what pushes officials to use proper self hosted end to end communication channels.

AnonCoward42 3y ago

The end goal of this can only be to outlaw all secrets (for all citizens) if you think it through. First they say messenger may not E2EE, next they outlaw circumvention (i.e. using GPG encryption inside the messenger, side channels) and after that comes steganography. Don't be fooled, encryption is almost impossible to hide if you want to do it casually. What is going to remain? “If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.” ― Philip Zimmermann It's simply about totalitarian control at this point.

h2odragon 3y ago

People thought banning alcohol, and other drugs, would work. People thought banning pornography would work. Some people still think banning personal weapons will work. I think we don't learn from failures here.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
Banning personal weapons has been shown to work empirically. More examples in that vein: People thought banning driving without a seat belt would work. People thought banning driving through red lights would work.

frizlab 3y ago

This is exactly what happens in the Mail app on macOS when two people exchange mails and both signs them. Once the public key of someone is known, mails are automatically encrypted from now on while the certificate is valid. It’s excessively convenient and I loathe the certificate industry for making the acquisition of certificate such a painful and expensive process, otherwise we could have encrypted communication with emails easily.

cornholio 3y ago

In almost any context where banning E2E encryption would have useful law-enforcement results against unsophisticated criminals, there is always a legal way to install a wire tap via an active attack. For example, a judge can force Signal to perform a MITM attack, and an unsophisticated target will simply ignore the key change warning. An alternate approach would be to use the auto-update features of the terminal and force the app distributors to sign and push a trojan to that specific target. You might have objections against such law enforcement techniques, but I think they have their place with proper judicial oversight. Conversely, if the target is aware of such techniques, it's very, very unlikely they would use a channel they know is monitored. So the trade-off here is: break the privacy of everyone, but allow law enforcement to do passive attacks without judicial overview. It's a no brainer that both things are bad and they do not improve our safety one bit. Who really finds such powers useful? Spooks and entrenched power structures, of course.

hellojesus 3y ago
> An alternate approach would be to use the auto-update features of the terminal and force the app distributors to sign and push a trojan to that specific target. This is a compelling reason to build from source for e2e messagers. Google's move to signing apks with their own keys helps facilitate the above.
- cornholio 3y ago
  Realistically speaking, defending against an active attack from your OS distributor targeting you specifically is an exceptionally tall order. It ultimately comes down to obtaining a known safe compiler, building something like a Gentoo stage 1 installation, then manually audit the source of each and every every security patch you apply, knowing that any minor update might actually hide some kind of remotely exploitable back door. You would need NSA-level of resources to pull this off, I doubt the apk signing by Google changes things significantly for Android users.
  - hellojesus 3y ago
    True, but don't you think a massive amount of folks would devote time to an open source alternative just to stick it to govs if they tried to pass something like banning unlocked bootloaders? Grapheneos exists with a far smaller potential user base.

alkonaut 3y ago

I don't think there will be an explicit "ban on e2ee". That I would almost fear less than what I think is on the table now: a targeted way to add cert backdoors just to the top 10-or-so products and browsers. Generally worded of course, but only enforced on the big players. So that 99.9% of users and messages are compromised but no one really has to worry about the rest. It's a good enough improvement and no one cares whether the people they actually talk about catching are using secure services like they have been all along.

anothernewdude 3y ago

Just allow some countries to ban End to end, and then see them lose financial services.

mnw21cam 3y ago
And web browsers, web sites, a fair proportion of most operating systems, software updates, remote work VPNs, etc. End to end encryption is baked into the overwhelming majority of everything that travels over the internet these days. If it were to be banned, there wouldn't really be anything left.

gavinhoward 3y ago

https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/ https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/

fredgrott 3y ago

Note, one of the heavy warning voices in the CIA before 9-11 has pointed out in all his books after leaving the CIA that media and other banning only made it harder to know what is going on in the terrorist world and tracking terrorists down for prosecution. Banning encryption is about like trying to ban synthetic drugs as we have to legally specify a specific and once that happens the demand for it encourages people to find solutions to that ban.

INTPenis 3y ago

Absolutely, this is what I said when chat control was first proposed; it will only serve to make criminals out of ordinary people. And even worse, I foresee not only a black market of app distribution without backdoors, but also a lot of young people will prefer these apps because young people are going to be young people online. And if they know what it means to communicate safely I'm sure they will prefer it over anything else.

hellojesus 3y ago
People will just start building g from source to ensure their apps aren't backdoored. This will happen all the way down to the lowest level (e.g., mass migration to grapheneos). Maybe not enough due to proprietary baseband blobs, or maybe govs will try to outlaw unlocked bootloaders, but that is likely where things would go.

kardianos 3y ago

The author appears to think these bills are actually targeted to "bad guys".

junto 3y ago

Return of the Clipper chip Part V.