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The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot. Therefore you know this is not about chasing the bad guys. It's a

The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot. Therefore you know this is not about chasing the bad guys. It's about keeping the Average Joe under the thumb.

luckylion 2y ago
> The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot. That's a very bold assumption after EncroChat and SkyECC.
rich_sasha 2y ago
I don't know to what extent this is true. A lot of criminals strike me as good at chopping off fingers etc but not computer stuff. There absolutely is a balance between Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime. Without undermining the former, I'm astounded how HN discounts the latter 100%. It is real.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Because the latter are fucking pathological liars who maintain a rachet stealing away rights. They earned their reflexsive distrust.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  I disagree. There should no compromise on my privacy ever. We are not (yet) in a dictatorship and I’m not a criminal. Why should I suffer because governments are incompetent?
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    In a situation where a criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed for the conviction, why should I suffer because of your absolute views on privacy? I hold neither of the extreme views, and frankly I am baffled by anyone in either of them.
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      In a situation where an accused criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed to view the content which may or not lead to a conviction. This ridiculous idea that law enforcement knows people are guilty and it is these pesky rights that keep getting in the way is just false. Police regularly and consistently abuse their power to railroad people and take the easiest path to convicting someone. Even in situations where citizen rights do “get in the way” of convicting the guilt, that is the price we pay to not be thrown in jail for crimes we didn’t commit. Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” He also said “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order... and the like.”
      - alt227 2y ago
        This seems so obvious and logical. Why cant we live in a world where everyone understands this.
      - rich_sasha 2y ago
        It's easy to construct a reasonable scenario. You catch a guy doing something bad. You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators. And you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted. I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane. Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
  - didntcheck 2y ago
    Devil's advocate: we accept compromise of people's basic freedom of movement (via arrest) when under investigation. Even though we know a non-negligible amount are innocent, virtually everyone considers it a necessary compromise Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
    - kazinator 2y ago
      A compromise here is not technically possible. There is no half crypto. Crypto with a backdoor is not crypto. Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits. Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.
      - rich_sasha 2y ago
        So, strictly speaking, that's not how UK law, at least, works. The court can absolutely compel you to say things you memorized - in fact, including encryption passwords. You can of course, physically, refuse, but you can be held in contempt of court, and jailed until you reveal the information, indefinitely. So not at all off limits.
        karpatic 2y ago
        Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic. Is that a good balance of the Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime you speak of?
        rich_sasha 2y ago
        > Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic. That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  Something something ounce of freedom something something safety something something deserves neither
rcxdude 2y ago
It'll catch the bad guys who don't know what they're doing, which is a pretty big percentage of them.
- miki123211 2y ago
  Yeah, this is likely not intended to catch the most sophisticated of hackers, but your average drug dealer / murderer / thief / paedophile. I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth. I'd argue that the opposite is probably true, people who think that crime pays are less smart and more impulsive than the average person, and hence less likely to think about things like this.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth. I think it's a case of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ People here work at the level of things like RowHammer, normal people don't think past the idea that a padlock icon on the screen makes them safe.
  - pantulis 2y ago
    > I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; From forums of tech experts. I do not think this attempt by the authorities will be any useful, while it would initially work... well these guys may not be hackers but are not idiots and over time you will get your average baddies become tech-savvy enough to circumvent this.
    - cmsj 2y ago
      last time I checked, our prisons are full of people dumb enough to get caught.
      - 2y ago
tlb 2y ago
That's true at a point in time, but bad guys start out as clueless noobs with poor opsec. The Silk Road guy, for example, was identified by forum posts he made before becoming a drug lord. The sort of people who become radicalized through online videos aren't using strong crypto until after they've committed to becoming terrorists. So a database of texts going back several years is quite useful in catching actual bad guys. Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.

luckylion 2y ago

> The bad guys know where to find solid open source crypto for their cloud backups and whatnot. That's a very bold assumption after EncroChat and SkyECC.

rich_sasha 2y ago

I don't know to what extent this is true. A lot of criminals strike me as good at chopping off fingers etc but not computer stuff. There absolutely is a balance between Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime. Without undermining the former, I'm astounded how HN discounts the latter 100%. It is real.

Nasrudith 2y ago
Because the latter are fucking pathological liars who maintain a rachet stealing away rights. They earned their reflexsive distrust.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
I disagree. There should no compromise on my privacy ever. We are not (yet) in a dictatorship and I’m not a criminal. Why should I suffer because governments are incompetent?
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  In a situation where a criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed for the conviction, why should I suffer because of your absolute views on privacy? I hold neither of the extreme views, and frankly I am baffled by anyone in either of them.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    In a situation where an accused criminal used Whatsapp and decrypting it is needed to view the content which may or not lead to a conviction. This ridiculous idea that law enforcement knows people are guilty and it is these pesky rights that keep getting in the way is just false. Police regularly and consistently abuse their power to railroad people and take the easiest path to convicting someone. Even in situations where citizen rights do “get in the way” of convicting the guilt, that is the price we pay to not be thrown in jail for crimes we didn’t commit. Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said “It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.” He also said “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order... and the like.”
    - alt227 2y ago
      This seems so obvious and logical. Why cant we live in a world where everyone understands this.
    - rich_sasha 2y ago
      It's easy to construct a reasonable scenario. You catch a guy doing something bad. You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators. And you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted. I'm not saying, based on that, you throw away privacy rules. But to not even acknowledge that there is a conflict is IMO insane. Reading through this thread, I get the sense that the desire for absolute privacy stems from a perception of the government as basically another mafia - a ruthless, unprincipled organisation that will exploit any weakness in you, just because. Maybe that's the root of the difference. I'm lucky enough to have never lived in such a country. Sure, I care about government accountability, there will always be bad actors, and governments in general aren't always super-competent, but I believe fundamentally, governments in places I have lived are not evil. They aren't another mafia I need a firewall against.
- didntcheck 2y ago
  Devil's advocate: we accept compromise of people's basic freedom of movement (via arrest) when under investigation. Even though we know a non-negligible amount are innocent, virtually everyone considers it a necessary compromise Perhaps part of the difference is that the public acknowledge this as a necessary _evil_ and get rightly outraged when they hear of people being detained without good cause. But with privacy, especially electronic privacy, almost nobody cares when "we will only allow a small number of agents to use this for imminent terrorist danger" inevitably turns to "we will let any random council worker casually pull up every website you've been to with no warrant"
  - kazinator 2y ago
    A compromise here is not technically possible. There is no half crypto. Crypto with a backdoor is not crypto. Someone's encrypted files should be regarded to be in the same category as material they memorized in their brain. Off limits. Find some other way to get evidence about their wrongdoing to convict them.
    - rich_sasha 2y ago
      So, strictly speaking, that's not how UK law, at least, works. The court can absolutely compel you to say things you memorized - in fact, including encryption passwords. You can of course, physically, refuse, but you can be held in contempt of court, and jailed until you reveal the information, indefinitely. So not at all off limits.
      - karpatic 2y ago
        Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic. Is that a good balance of the Average Joe's right to privacy and privacy restrictions for fighting crime you speak of?
        rich_sasha 2y ago
        > Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic. That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
mistercheph 2y ago
Something something ounce of freedom something something safety something something deserves neither

rcxdude 2y ago

It'll catch the bad guys who don't know what they're doing, which is a pretty big percentage of them.

miki123211 2y ago
Yeah, this is likely not intended to catch the most sophisticated of hackers, but your average drug dealer / murderer / thief / paedophile. I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth. I'd argue that the opposite is probably true, people who think that crime pays are less smart and more impulsive than the average person, and hence less likely to think about things like this.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; the popularity of cool-looking "encrypted" phones as opposed to actually encrypted apps like Signal should have long dispelled that myth. I think it's a case of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ People here work at the level of things like RowHammer, normal people don't think past the idea that a padlock icon on the screen makes them safe.
- pantulis 2y ago
  > I don't know where the belief that all criminals are tech experts comes from; From forums of tech experts. I do not think this attempt by the authorities will be any useful, while it would initially work... well these guys may not be hackers but are not idiots and over time you will get your average baddies become tech-savvy enough to circumvent this.
  - cmsj 2y ago
    last time I checked, our prisons are full of people dumb enough to get caught.
    - 2y ago

tlb 2y ago

That's true at a point in time, but bad guys start out as clueless noobs with poor opsec. The Silk Road guy, for example, was identified by forum posts he made before becoming a drug lord. The sort of people who become radicalized through online videos aren't using strong crypto until after they've committed to becoming terrorists. So a database of texts going back several years is quite useful in catching actual bad guys. Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.