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> So should the government be reading every piece of mail too? Essentially all governments have some mechanism to make it legal and possible for them to read a

> So should the government be reading every piece of mail too? Essentially all governments have some mechanism to make it legal and possible for them to read any post in transit. US postal inspectors need a warrant, which they can easily get. In the UK, once you post something in a post box, it becomes the temporary property of the crown (the state) until it is delivered, so they can read it when they want. They have to open it, of course, so you would know it happened. The simple problem with encryption is that it replaces communications that are exposed to this authority with communications that can evade it. Whether you are happy with it or not, it's absolutely true that inspecting post has thwarted serious crimes, so it's not surprising to see governments seeking to have the same powers. The fact that it's impossible to do safely doesn't necessarily make it an idiotic request. And the instantaneous nature of these communications means retention for some period of time is the only way inspection is even possible. I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. It's technologists' jobs to explain why easily-broken encryption is a bad idea. In the UK that's really easy. You just say "imagine if the Prime Minister could read their own party's whatsapp group whenever they liked". And then they get it.

Hizonner 2y ago
> I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. The breadth and depth of surveillance that you can do on the average modern person with electronic monitoring is unprecedented in all human history. Reading somebody's letters does not begin to compare. There is not an "established social contract". They got a massive spying windfall, beginning with wiretapping, and then exploding when practically everything anybody did was recorded in a machine somewhere. The changes in the last 20 or 30 years have been overwhelming. There's no "150-year social contract" on their side, but there are several hundred thousand years of established balance of power on our side. The powers these people want to "retain" are things they didn't have for long enough that it could be intertwined with the biological evolution of the species.
hiatus 2y ago
> The simple problem with encryption is that it replaces communications that are exposed to this authority with communications that can evade it. > I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. Encryption is math. I can encrypt messages and send them by post, and law enforcement would be equally powerless to read them. Ciphers are not a new invention. The social contract you are speaking of never existed. > It's technologists' jobs to explain why easily-broken encryption is a bad idea. No, it is on the people who want new powers to justify them.
- throw46365 2y ago
  Yes I don't need explaining that encryption is maths and letters can be encrypted. That is pretty obvious. (Postal inspectors the world over would assume evidence of a crime.) > No, it is on the people who want new powers to justify them. The exact point I am getting at is that the governments who want these things are seeking to protect the power they have, not expand it. Encrypted communications are eating away at the power to inspect communications they already have, that we have been happy to grant them (that is the social contract I am talking about; it has existed for as long as postal services have). It's a very American thing to assume that government in general is always acting in bad faith, I guess.
Hizonner 2y ago
I noticed another thing here that I think matters, especially because it's a common frame shift. > Essentially all governments have some mechanism to make it legal and possible for them to read any post in transit. You changed it from "every" to "any". The EU proposal is much more similar to "every", in that it would end up recording so much information about all messages, in case that information happened to be needed later. And I'm pretty sure that information would, at least in some cases, include the content, or things that were more content-like than envelope-like. It is true that the US, at least, has done mass "metadata collection" on the mail for a long time. They don't open or read it, but they do photograph every single piece of mail that goes through the system and keep the pictures. So they're in a position to do traffic analysis, and do it after the fact if they want to. ... but even that program has vastly increased in actual impact since it was instituted. Originally it was a lot of work to find out what had been sent to whom. You'd have had to manually trawl through a bunch of records that weren't all in one place, might not have been all that well indexed, and probably had fairly limited retention periods. That changed, step by step, but over a very short time in the grand scheme of things, so that now all you have to do is type in an address to see a picture of everything sent to or from it in a very long time. I'm not sure that they could ever have created the program if anybody'd understood that they would eventually be able do that. > US postal inspectors need a warrant, which they can easily get. They can easily get a warrant for a specific person's mail if they have something that can at least pass for probable cause to think that that mail will contain evidence of a crime. They are at least theoretically supposed to do everything they can to identify the particular mail, and sometimes they're even actually forced to get pretty specific. And they have to get the warrant in advance. Once the mail has been delivered, there's no way to retroactively read it other than to go raid the target and try to find it. That's quite different from proactively collecting a copy of the actual content of everything that gets sent through the mail, just in case you later find out you want to look. That applies even if the "looking" step does require a warrant. Some of the data retention stuff the EU keeps wanting to do is much more like that. That's why the phrase "mass surveillance" keeps coming up in these things. This also ties into a bunch of US domestic controversies about using "foreign surveillance" to get around the rules even as applied to domestic communications.
- throw46365 2y ago

Hizonner 2y ago

> I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. The breadth and depth of surveillance that you can do on the average modern person with electronic monitoring is unprecedented in all human history. Reading somebody's letters does not begin to compare. There is not an "established social contract". They got a massive spying windfall, beginning with wiretapping, and then exploding when practically everything anybody did was recorded in a machine somewhere. The changes in the last 20 or 30 years have been overwhelming. There's no "150-year social contract" on their side, but there are several hundred thousand years of established balance of power on our side. The powers these people want to "retain" are things they didn't have for long enough that it could be intertwined with the biological evolution of the species.

hiatus 2y ago

> The simple problem with encryption is that it replaces communications that are exposed to this authority with communications that can evade it. > I am not sure we should blame governments for wanting to retain powers in a social contract we've been broadly happy for them to have for 150 years. Encryption is math. I can encrypt messages and send them by post, and law enforcement would be equally powerless to read them. Ciphers are not a new invention. The social contract you are speaking of never existed. > It's technologists' jobs to explain why easily-broken encryption is a bad idea. No, it is on the people who want new powers to justify them.

throw46365 2y ago
Yes I don't need explaining that encryption is maths and letters can be encrypted. That is pretty obvious. (Postal inspectors the world over would assume evidence of a crime.) > No, it is on the people who want new powers to justify them. The exact point I am getting at is that the governments who want these things are seeking to protect the power they have, not expand it. Encrypted communications are eating away at the power to inspect communications they already have, that we have been happy to grant them (that is the social contract I am talking about; it has existed for as long as postal services have). It's a very American thing to assume that government in general is always acting in bad faith, I guess.

Hizonner 2y ago

I noticed another thing here that I think matters, especially because it's a common frame shift. > Essentially all governments have some mechanism to make it legal and possible for them to read any post in transit. You changed it from "every" to "any". The EU proposal is much more similar to "every", in that it would end up recording so much information about all messages, in case that information happened to be needed later. And I'm pretty sure that information would, at least in some cases, include the content, or things that were more content-like than envelope-like. It is true that the US, at least, has done mass "metadata collection" on the mail for a long time. They don't open or read it, but they do photograph every single piece of mail that goes through the system and keep the pictures. So they're in a position to do traffic analysis, and do it after the fact if they want to. ... but even that program has vastly increased in actual impact since it was instituted. Originally it was a lot of work to find out what had been sent to whom. You'd have had to manually trawl through a bunch of records that weren't all in one place, might not have been all that well indexed, and probably had fairly limited retention periods. That changed, step by step, but over a very short time in the grand scheme of things, so that now all you have to do is type in an address to see a picture of everything sent to or from it in a very long time. I'm not sure that they could ever have created the program if anybody'd understood that they would eventually be able do that. > US postal inspectors need a warrant, which they can easily get. They can easily get a warrant for a specific person's mail if they have something that can at least pass for probable cause to think that that mail will contain evidence of a crime. They are at least theoretically supposed to do everything they can to identify the particular mail, and sometimes they're even actually forced to get pretty specific. And they have to get the warrant in advance. Once the mail has been delivered, there's no way to retroactively read it other than to go raid the target and try to find it. That's quite different from proactively collecting a copy of the actual content of everything that gets sent through the mail, just in case you later find out you want to look. That applies even if the "looking" step does require a warrant. Some of the data retention stuff the EU keeps wanting to do is much more like that. That's why the phrase "mass surveillance" keeps coming up in these things. This also ties into a bunch of US domestic controversies about using "foreign surveillance" to get around the rules even as applied to domestic communications.

throw46365 2y ago