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I saw a comment here (that I can't reply to) that brought up the inevitable point: > The problem with end-to-end encryption is that it is also used to shield f

• bloqs 3y ago
  The police have the right with suitable warrant to break a lock and breach a wall if necessary
  • IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
    "the police have the right" I suppose it depends on how your constitution is written ?
    • hutzlibu 3y ago
      I don't know any constitution or law that forbids the police from entering peoples home if there was a serious crime. (A warrant Btw. landlords also may do this under special circumstances, as well as a firemen. But the default is, that your home is sacred and the doors my not breached. Just as the default for communication should be, that it is private. If there is a suspect, the police may hack their computers with a warrant, but they may not hack all of our computers(by implementing backdoors), because it is more comfortable for them.
  • johngladtj 3y ago
    A wall, not every wall.
    • brabel 3y ago
      So if technology made it possible to "unlock" only a single encrypted connection from a particular suspect, then it would be fine? Because such technology is actually feasible if you accept that the police will never use that to unlock someone's connections without a judicial order (like we seem to assume is the case when the police raids a "wall" or home). That can be enforced by having a system that requires a judge's private key to sign a digital warrant which can the only be used to "unlock" a particular encrypted channel. The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are.
      • _heimdall 3y ago
        I don't think many would complain if there was a truly secure way to allow decryption of a single person's communication after the fact. The problem is partly that end users have no way of knowing when their communication has been decrypted. I know if the cops kicked my door in, I don't know if they're watching my messages with or without a warrant.
        • seanw444 3y ago
          Thank God there isn't. My own government scares me more than random hackers do.
      • naasking 3y ago
        > The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are. This is the real problem. This introduces a global vulnerability that isn't analogous to anything physical, like breaking down walls. There are almost 50,000 judges in the USA alone. Breaking into any one of their offices or houses, or bribing them, could grant you access to every phone or computer on the planet. A local magistrate doesn't have the authority to issue a warrant to break down every door in the USA, nor would the local police be able to execute such an order even if it could be issued. There are matters of scale here that are novel.
  • _trampeltier 3y ago
    Suitable .. they just come with a warrant of bullshit. Thats enough.
  • cbeach 3y ago
    It's visible and rare, when government breaks down the door of your physical home. These awful new laws make it invisible and routine for the government to break down the door to your digital home.
  • solarkraft 3y ago
    As much as I like privacy and e2ee, this is an important point. If there were locks or walls that are entirely impenetrable, would people be disallowed to possess or use them? I probably wouldn't like it, but it seems less crazy than some people make it out to be. In practice the analogy doesn't hold up of course, since it's costly and noticeable for cops to raid a house but cheap and easy for the government to spy on everyone (and we know how eager they are to do it).
    • M3L0NM4N 3y ago
      Why is communication being compared to physical access? E2EE protects my conversations from being "heard" by others. If I was walking at the park talking to my friend, the government wouldn't complain that there's not a microphone nearby. Nobody else is physically able to listen to that conversation, and that's perfectly common and acceptable.
      • sensanaty 3y ago
        I know it's cliche to bring up 1984 in these kind of talks, but your comment reminded me immediately of that section in the book where Winston goes to that park in order to be away from prying eyes and ears (If I'm remembering it correctly, it's been ages since I've read it).
        • simbolit 3y ago
          Winston and Julia go out into the countryside, they each take different trains, then meet at a pre-arranged location in the middle of nowhere, and then go out into the literal woods, to talk (and have sex), and they are still paranoid under every second branch there might be a microphone.
      • Almondsetat 3y ago
        Nobody owns the air around you, whereas the cables and routers and switches your communication propagates through are owned by private corporations and by the state
  • kitd 3y ago
    A specific lock and a specific wall. They don't have the right to require all locks and walls to be built with fundamental flaws so they can be broken with the tap of a hammer.
    • Brian_K_White 3y ago
      Except for TSA locks on luggage at the airport. Which are pure placebo pretend locks that don't lock anything from anyone.
    • emblaegh 3y ago
      If indestructible walls were feasible you bet they'd ban it.
      • WJW 3y ago
        It's useless to get into an escalatory war with the government. Even if you could get an indestructible wall they can just cut off water and power, then siege your home until you come out to get food or something like that.
        • mcv 3y ago
          And they can also arrest or interrogate you without reading your encrypted message. There are plenty of ways to investigate crime that doesn't rely on breaking walls or encryption.
      • hackeraccount 3y ago
        These aren't indestructible wall though. Encryption schemes used by real people in the real world are never implemented and used flawlessly. The question isn't if you can get at conversation between two law abiding people or two pedophiles - in both cases you can if you through sufficient resources at it. The question is - what's sufficient? My concern is that if you connive to make it a trivial amount of effort the temptation for Government will be to listen in on every conversation to lessen the chance of missing an important one. Further the more trivial you make it for the Government the better the chance that the not-Government will be able to listen in on any as well. If on the other hand the effort is non-trivial then the Government will need to carefully consider where to put it's effort. Obviously there's a greater chance that the effort will be misapplied and the two pedophiles will have the freedom to plot or whatever but that tends to worry me less. Note I'm an American. People run around shooting each other regularly here and I still don't think telling people they can't own a gun is a good idea so I'd take what I say with a grain of salt.
  • tpm 3y ago
    The police have the right with suitable warrant to break any encryption.
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    The police also have all kinds of allowances that aren't afforded to regular citizenry to surveil and pry and monitor and track behaviour and map social contacts and plant listening devices and watching devices and almost any other flavour of surveillance they can get a judge to sign-off. The problem with all of the above is that it takes human effort, which is costly. We've all seen the Pandoras Box that the likes of Google and Facebook have opened on automated behavioural decision making. Police want that, their quotas and their budgets neeeeeeeeeeeed iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttt like Renton needs that one last hit. Outsource our decisions to 'the infallible machine' so that we can answer "computer says no". No culpability, no responsibility, even less need to apply our x million-years-in-the-making built-in logic engines that once (maybe?) were directed and trained in how to be applied to the job of policing in order to better serve the public. Policing is meant to be difficult, because getting it wrong has great potential to completely fuck people's lives. If they can't "prove it" without access to the last morsel of individual privacy afforded by E2EE, then it's likely there's nothing to prove. Earn it you lazy fucks. Edited to add: A little bit of retrospective guilt in the offensively opinionated ending above, but I'm going to make it a bit worse and spread it a bit wider. It's politicians calling for this because it seems to "play in the electorate". So "earn it you lazy fucks" is directed at all the lazy fucks in the chain from ideas man to lobbyist to number-cruncher to adviser to political mouthpiece to sponsor of legislation to partisan supporters of the bill and even to the somewhat victims as the enforcers of bad legislation. An entire chain in which none of whom seem to have an understanding of the context of what they're promoting outside of "how it plays" or "this says you're doing illegal". Fuck them all out of an airlock.
    • bloqs 3y ago
      Not at all, great comment
• renegat0x0 3y ago
  You cannot have both: privacy and safety, and lawful access for the government. Choose one. This has consequences: - pegasus was abused by governments to spy and repress people. This is how it is going to be - there is no escape from banning encryption, as governments will do anything in their might to push that through - it introduces backdoors for hackers, and you will be an easy target, because the government want an easy access to your data - paedophiles and terrorist will use other means to communicate, or other protocols, solutions. Therefore lawful access is not to fight with terrorists, and not against paedophiles - what we are left is that it will be used to control population, and have easy access to data Everything in thread of banning encryption is straight propaganda and naivety of some folks that think banning encryption solves anything.
  • joenot443 3y ago
    There was a case in the U.K. where a man was arrested and charged for misgendering a trans person on the street. The very obvious (to me) next step would be facilitating surveillance to track when people commit similar hate crimes (like using the wrong pronouns) online. We in North America forget that our friends across the pond have a very different relationship with speech than what we enjoy here. I find this bill pretty chilling.
    • tekla 3y ago
      I don't want to believe you. Can you link the case?
      • johndunne 3y ago
        I think this is the case being referred to, and it was less misgender, more harassment and public humiliation. - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-64905216 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-64905216
        • averageRoyalty 3y ago
          The article you've linked doesn't support your interpretation: > Earlier, the court saw video footage from the preacher's body-worn camera which showed Ms Munir approaching Mr McConnell as he spoke to a small crowd. > She was seen to ask him: "Does God accept the LBGT community?" > The video then showed the 42-year-old as he responded to the crowd and referred to her as "this gentleman" and saying: "This is a man." It appears this trans woman approach a preacher and at best asked a question and got an answer. Without context, I wonder if it were intentionally inflamatory. Regardless, it hardly fits the bill of 'harassment'.
• dalore 3y ago
  Some would say the Royal Family itself is a shield for the activities of pedophiles. Are we allowed to say that now?
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    I have a theory that the rich and powerful are more likely to be into more twisted and crazy gross shit because they can afford to have reached various boundaries of human experience, and if they've got that kind of money and power then they're also more likely to be driven to explore such boundaries. Money and Power are the unpickable locks and impenetrable walls of the conversation above.
  • pmarreck 3y ago
    Not without good evidence
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    > Are we allowed to say that now? That depends on where you live...
• 0dayz 3y ago
  That's a very bad example as all walls and all locks are breakable.
  • mcv 3y ago
    So is encryption with sufficient resources. The point is to make it non-trivial.
    • chrismorgan 3y ago
      The express goal of cryptographers is to make this false. Currently, no viable attacks on state-of-the-art cryptography are publicly known.
    • porridgeraisin 3y ago
      The difference in magnitude of resources required is so immense that it's not meaningful to compare at all.
      • mcv 3y ago
        It's not like police generally go about knocking down walls to find criminals either. Quite often, bypassing walls and locks requires a warrant. And I'm all for police being able to use a warrant to demand that you decrypt a message. Demanding that people use no or easily breakable encryption amounts to demanding that people use easily pickable locks. Or walls with holes in them. It undermines the security of ordinary people.
    • rjmunro 3y ago
      It's possible to make encryption where "sufficient resources" is of the order of all the energy in the Sun until the end of time. That's not remotely breakable, even for the government.
      • hackeraccount 3y ago
        I disagree - most breaks in encryption come about not because of poor math but rather poor implementation.
• _Algernon_ 3y ago
  But then again, the only reason the balance has landed where it has with respect to physical locks is that physical locks and walls are already breakable by state actors should they need to. There is no truly secure physical lock That's not true for e2ee.
  • vetinari 3y ago
    It is also pretty obvious that the lock was broken and it is impossible to break them en-masse, without anybody noticing. That's not true for the government-proposed regulation either.
    • _Algernon_ 3y ago
      Yes, exactly. Which is why any comparison of e2ee to physical locks is a ridiculous proposition.
  • seanw444 3y ago
    I get caught off guard when people use "physical locks aren't actually that secure because the government can just make it irrelevant, but encryption is dangerously strong" as an argument against encryption, when it should be a tell about how terrifying your government is.
    • _Algernon_ 3y ago
      I'm not arguing against encryption. Access to encryption is a generally a good thing. I'm arguing against a specific comparison being made between physical locks and encryption which is ridiculous on many levels, one of which I highlighted in my previous comment. Broad access to secure encryption is necessary in a free society.
      • seanw444 3y ago
        I wasn't necessarily saying you were making that claim. Just in general.
• darajava 3y ago
  Yes but there are no (non-government) walls that the government can’t itself tear down.
• paganel 3y ago
  With the added caveat that all throughout history governments have been the biggest perpetrators of children being, well, murdered (for example Anne Frank was a child), to say nothing of the massive land confiscations enacted by the same governments (or at least tacitly supported by them). Which is to say that I’d take the side of the individual rapists and killers each day, every day, if the alternative is of siding with governments who are always two or three foreign policy events away from supporting genocide. I also blame the same governments for making me take the side of rapists and criminals, not a thing I usually do but that’s what they (the governments) force us to choose.
• pilchard123 3y ago
  There is a Douglas Adams quote from 1999 similar to that: > I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people "over the Internet." They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans "over a cup of tea," though each of these was new and controversial in their day. https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
  • da_chicken 3y ago
    Worth remembering that King Charles II banned coffeehouses after returning from exile in Europe because he knew the anti-monarchy opposition groups met and discussed things in coffeehouses. https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-coffeehouse-culture/ https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-coffeehouse-culture/
    • lostlogin 3y ago
      I wonder if this explains cafes in Britain? They just don’t work quite right in the UK. Cafes end up being more like tea rooms, and pubs seem to fill the role of ‘place to meet friends, grab foot and a beverage’. I’m from Auckland, New Zealand. I also completely acknowledge that our pubs aren’t even close to as good as the ones in every single UK town.
      • iainmerrick 3y ago
        Hmm, what's wrong with British cafes? I'm not saying they're great, just that I'm not sure what's missing! In popular cafes there are usually plenty of people sitting around chatting and/or co-working on Macbooks, if that's what you mean. Fun fact: the owner of a once very popular UK cafe chain, Lyon's Corner Houses, was a pioneer in computing. They built some of the first digital computers in the UK purely to manage their booming cafe business! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co.
• AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... We're down to just two horsemen, these days.