5 ms·

Referring to "suspicion" at all here is a distraction that suggests it would somehow be okay in other circumstances. There must not be a way to backdoor user d

Referring to "suspicion" at all here is a distraction that suggests it would somehow be okay in other circumstances. There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances.

hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
The "device" is backdoored. People must be responsible for their own security. Sad, but true. Learn GPG people.
- igor47 1y ago
  If the device is already backdoored all hope is lost. The device can exfiltrate your private key and the password.
  - dec0dedab0de 1y ago
    True, but government is not a monolith.
  - hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
    You must assume it is backdoored. Cell [smart] phones are the greatest surveillance network the government has ever created. But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you phone's location can be hundres of miles away. Use it to your advantage.... They do.
    - JoshTriplett 1y ago
      Current smartphones are already more careful about cell modems than they used to be. And in an ideal world, cell modems would have even less information than they do, and could be (and should be) powered off by the phone until needed. Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive cellular data connection that was intentionally uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way wifi is. Right now, the only legitimate reason cell networks have to identify specific devices to users is for billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in various ways, either by making it a public good, or by integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data connections.
      - im3w1l 1y ago
        To some extent I agree, but if the modem is off how long latency is acceptable for inbound messages? I suppose a low bandwidth broadcast "user 0x76abc937* has a new message" could work. Devices would filter out broadcasts that don't concern them. * Ideally the user id should be used only once and derived from some pre-shared secret.
        JoshTriplett 1y ago
        I'm talking about two different cases here. First, in a case closer to the current world, I'm just suggesting that disabling the cell modem should power it off so it can't do any kind of location or tracking. Second, in a more ideal world, the concept of "data connection" would be entirely separate from any identity attached to a phone or text message, and you could handle the latter via whatever connection you have, whether a cell data connection or wifi or something else.
        im3w1l 1y ago
        That makes a lot of sense.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  "Learn GPG" is neither a useful nor a correct recommendation for people concerned about security; if you believe the device is backdoored, GPG will not save you, nor will anything else.
  - hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
    A backdoored device can transmit secure comms, if the encryption is performed on a protected device.
    - Aachen 1y ago
      I've read up on this in the context of potentially backdoored CPUs and there is fundamentally no way. You don't need to trust the router (as you say: a device that just relays data can have all the backdoors you want, thanks to asymmetric cryptography enabling E2EE), but the scenario is that your own device has software from law enforcement on it In which case, the best you can do is use an obscure method that the attacker is unprepared for. If they've hijacked the AES CPU operation to store the key and include it in the output for a later syscall like when writing the output file, but you unexpectedly use some funky experimental cipher, you'd be lucky until they push an update. The device has a mandatory backdoor after all, so govt can also decide what new code it needs to run now, perhaps under the guise of detecting more situations of terroristic content or whatnot. There's no winning that game except through obscurity, and I presume everyone has heard about how reliable security through obscurity is
      - quotemstr 1y ago
        He's referring to doing something like using a compromised device to take a photograph of the ciphertext made on a different device or something like that.
weinzierl 1y ago
Exactly, and "suspicion" is a slippery slope, it can and will be defined so vague to become a useless restriction.
btown 1y ago
Between a surveillance state where every communication is siphoned up, fed to LLMs, and used to target random people not already under suspicion... and a world where at the very least there needs to be some documented/auditable/accountable/whistle-blowable process of identifying an individual target and serving, say, a warrant to a third-party chat company... the second world has something of a "damping function" that slows the acceleration of authoritarianism. While far from ideal, it's better than the first option, which ChatControl was laying the groundwork for.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  We are not obligated to choose a "lesser of two evils" here. We should reject both. I really appreciate Signal's public responses to warrants ("sure, here's all the information we have, by design we don't have anything important"). https://signal.org/bigbrother/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/
  - RandomLensman 1y ago
    I think, there are warrants to put surveillance software on a device under certain circumstances (in Germany, Quellen TKÜ).
    - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      Anywhere that a warrant could be used to do something, you can be certain that someone is doing that same thing without the warrant. The method that works is to make it technically or practically impossible.
      - RandomLensman 1y ago
        Why? How?
        JoshTriplett 1y ago
        By way of example, if there's a backdoor key, it can be stolen or misused. Witness the many examples of companies that collect too much data and have that data stolen, and many examples of police departments abusing police databases for personal stalking and similar misuses. Any other backdoor mechanism can similarly be breached or misused. There is no such thing as a backdoor that can only be used for what it is "supposed" to be used for.
postepowanieadm 1y ago
Electronic communications surveillance shall be governed by the same rules that apply to the post.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  And as you are free to exchange unintelligible information through the post, you are free to exchange unintelligible information electronically.
littlestymaar 1y ago
Backdooring isn't OK because by definition you cannot selectively backdoor someone's phone, you need to have it backdoored by default to exploit it later, which is obviously terrible. Wiretaping a suspect's phone on the other hand is a fine (and often necessary) police operation, as long as it must be approved by an independent magistrate.
hopelite 1y ago
"Suspicionless" is poor translation of "Anlasslose" which would more appropriately translated as "unfounded" in order to convey the uncommitted nature of "anlasslose". "Anlass" in this context is literally "reasons". Because the language is far clearer in the US, you would and do hear "warrantless" being used in both the legal and general sense when it comes to these topics, but translating "Anlasslos" as "warrantless" would imply far too much confidence than is given. "Unfounded" also reflects the weak perspective on hard boundaries of law and limitations on the state that simply do not exist in Germany and effectively all of Europe in the way that they do in the USA as de facto immovable law of the Constitution. "Anlasslos" implies a mental framework and conception that defers your rights (free speech in this case) to the subjective judgement of various people like politicians, judges, technocrats, bureaucrats, regulators, police officers, etc., i.e., someone does not like your speech so they will monitor your communication with our grandma for the abusive and narcissistic, manipulative concept of "hate speech", aka. "speech I hate".
layer8 1y ago
As an aside, “suspicionless” is a bad translation of what would correctly translate to “without cause”. I agree that there shouldn’t be a backdoor by default. But, for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated.
- observationist 1y ago
  That's active surveillance and wiretapping, and is not a backdoor. Backdoors are unacceptable 100% of the time, and should never be legal. A backdoor is a lazy power grab that is either supported in ignorance by technically illiterate useful idiots or supported in full knowledge of the intended partisan abuses of basic civil liberties. Hacking a criminal's phone with compromised software, and/or intercepting their voice & data, is not a backdoor. Backdoors mandate a violation of informed consent, and as such, should be criminalized without exception. There's no place for backdoors in civilized societies.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > I agree that there shouldn’t be a backdoor by default. But, for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated. Sure. And on the flipside, given the many ways such a capability is a security risk and an abusable backdoor itself, it's something to develop additional technical safeguards against, such as Binary Transparency to verify that everyone's getting the same binaries.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Court warrants aren't reliable, at least in Germany. Until that is fixed, which is quite important, there is not reason to allow something like chat control. There are other channels for investigations that are enough, chat control introduces less security that we would gain (if there even is any gain).
cubefox 1y ago
> There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances. One can make an argument that if there is strong evidence that someone is planning to commit an unusually serious crime, e.g. a terrorist attack, then secretly installing surveillance software on their device is warranted. I would also add that this surveillance operation can't be used to collect any other data which is unrelated to the suspected serious crime (like terrorism), and if such data is collected by accident, that it can't be used as evidence in court. (I'm very sure that this is currently perfectly legal in the US, which sounds pretty bad.)
Stefan-H 1y ago
Many consumer devices can be selectively targeted for updates. The entities that control the update servers are controlled by the states that they are a part of. People seem to have forgotten that companies once felt the need to invent warrant canaries to warn when they had received non-public court orders. Presumably they can also be forced not to remove the warrant canary. Edit: My first read had me interpret backdoor as any undetected means of gaining access to a device/system. I have updated by definition to mean using a flaw in the system left intentionally to gain access. This somewhat negates the need for my previous comment, but I'll leave this for illustrative purposes.
clickety_clack 1y ago
Agreed. Some people say “I don’t have anything to hide”, but the actual fact is they don’t have anyone to hide from. It just takes one election, or a couple of years of political distress leading to a coup and you can find yourself on the other side from the government. You might find that the “normal” things “everyone” believes aren’t so well tolerated anymore, and things like laws turn out to be a little less powerful than you were promised. Once the infrastructure is built out, it’ll turn out the bad guys are perfectly capable of using it to suit their needs.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
Good call, it is a weasel argument. Our current government coalition in Germany that is "against" it for publicity reasons use the exact same terminology. It just postpones the chat control issue though. Slamming the door and making noise here is the way to go because your officials are dishonest about their intentions.

Referring to "suspicion" at all here is a distraction that suggests it would somehow be okay in other circumstances. There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances.

hackernewsdhsu 1y ago

The "device" is backdoored. People must be responsible for their own security. Sad, but true. Learn GPG people.

igor47 1y ago
If the device is already backdoored all hope is lost. The device can exfiltrate your private key and the password.
- dec0dedab0de 1y ago
  True, but government is not a monolith.
- hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
  You must assume it is backdoored. Cell [smart] phones are the greatest surveillance network the government has ever created. But, you can use that against them. Your phone doesn't have to always be with you. You can be where you are, and you phone's location can be hundres of miles away. Use it to your advantage.... They do.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    Current smartphones are already more careful about cell modems than they used to be. And in an ideal world, cell modems would have even less information than they do, and could be (and should be) powered off by the phone until needed. Imagine an architecture in which you had a pervasive cellular data connection that was intentionally uncorrelated with any identifying information, the way wifi is. Right now, the only legitimate reason cell networks have to identify specific devices to users is for billing, and for PSTN. The latter could be made utterly irrelevant with VoIP. The former could be solved in various ways, either by making it a public good, or by integrating anonymous payment mechanisms for a "session". Then, we could just have pervasive data connections.
    - im3w1l 1y ago
      To some extent I agree, but if the modem is off how long latency is acceptable for inbound messages? I suppose a low bandwidth broadcast "user 0x76abc937* has a new message" could work. Devices would filter out broadcasts that don't concern them. * Ideally the user id should be used only once and derived from some pre-shared secret.
      - JoshTriplett 1y ago
        I'm talking about two different cases here. First, in a case closer to the current world, I'm just suggesting that disabling the cell modem should power it off so it can't do any kind of location or tracking. Second, in a more ideal world, the concept of "data connection" would be entirely separate from any identity attached to a phone or text message, and you could handle the latter via whatever connection you have, whether a cell data connection or wifi or something else.
        im3w1l 1y ago
        That makes a lot of sense.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
"Learn GPG" is neither a useful nor a correct recommendation for people concerned about security; if you believe the device is backdoored, GPG will not save you, nor will anything else.
- hackernewsdhsu 1y ago
  A backdoored device can transmit secure comms, if the encryption is performed on a protected device.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    I've read up on this in the context of potentially backdoored CPUs and there is fundamentally no way. You don't need to trust the router (as you say: a device that just relays data can have all the backdoors you want, thanks to asymmetric cryptography enabling E2EE), but the scenario is that your own device has software from law enforcement on it In which case, the best you can do is use an obscure method that the attacker is unprepared for. If they've hijacked the AES CPU operation to store the key and include it in the output for a later syscall like when writing the output file, but you unexpectedly use some funky experimental cipher, you'd be lucky until they push an update. The device has a mandatory backdoor after all, so govt can also decide what new code it needs to run now, perhaps under the guise of detecting more situations of terroristic content or whatnot. There's no winning that game except through obscurity, and I presume everyone has heard about how reliable security through obscurity is
    - quotemstr 1y ago
      He's referring to doing something like using a compromised device to take a photograph of the ciphertext made on a different device or something like that.

weinzierl 1y ago

Exactly, and "suspicion" is a slippery slope, it can and will be defined so vague to become a useless restriction.

btown 1y ago

Between a surveillance state where every communication is siphoned up, fed to LLMs, and used to target random people not already under suspicion... and a world where at the very least there needs to be some documented/auditable/accountable/whistle-blowable process of identifying an individual target and serving, say, a warrant to a third-party chat company... the second world has something of a "damping function" that slows the acceleration of authoritarianism. While far from ideal, it's better than the first option, which ChatControl was laying the groundwork for.

JoshTriplett 1y ago
We are not obligated to choose a "lesser of two evils" here. We should reject both. I really appreciate Signal's public responses to warrants ("sure, here's all the information we have, by design we don't have anything important"). https://signal.org/bigbrother/ https://signal.org/bigbrother/
- RandomLensman 1y ago
  I think, there are warrants to put surveillance software on a device under certain circumstances (in Germany, Quellen TKÜ).
  - SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    Anywhere that a warrant could be used to do something, you can be certain that someone is doing that same thing without the warrant. The method that works is to make it technically or practically impossible.
    - RandomLensman 1y ago
      Why? How?
      - JoshTriplett 1y ago
        By way of example, if there's a backdoor key, it can be stolen or misused. Witness the many examples of companies that collect too much data and have that data stolen, and many examples of police departments abusing police databases for personal stalking and similar misuses. Any other backdoor mechanism can similarly be breached or misused. There is no such thing as a backdoor that can only be used for what it is "supposed" to be used for.

postepowanieadm 1y ago

Electronic communications surveillance shall be governed by the same rules that apply to the post.

JoshTriplett 1y ago
And as you are free to exchange unintelligible information through the post, you are free to exchange unintelligible information electronically.

littlestymaar 1y ago

Backdooring isn't OK because by definition you cannot selectively backdoor someone's phone, you need to have it backdoored by default to exploit it later, which is obviously terrible. Wiretaping a suspect's phone on the other hand is a fine (and often necessary) police operation, as long as it must be approved by an independent magistrate.

hopelite 1y ago

"Suspicionless" is poor translation of "Anlasslose" which would more appropriately translated as "unfounded" in order to convey the uncommitted nature of "anlasslose". "Anlass" in this context is literally "reasons". Because the language is far clearer in the US, you would and do hear "warrantless" being used in both the legal and general sense when it comes to these topics, but translating "Anlasslos" as "warrantless" would imply far too much confidence than is given. "Unfounded" also reflects the weak perspective on hard boundaries of law and limitations on the state that simply do not exist in Germany and effectively all of Europe in the way that they do in the USA as de facto immovable law of the Constitution. "Anlasslos" implies a mental framework and conception that defers your rights (free speech in this case) to the subjective judgement of various people like politicians, judges, technocrats, bureaucrats, regulators, police officers, etc., i.e., someone does not like your speech so they will monitor your communication with our grandma for the abusive and narcissistic, manipulative concept of "hate speech", aka. "speech I hate".

layer8 1y ago

As an aside, “suspicionless” is a bad translation of what would correctly translate to “without cause”. I agree that there shouldn’t be a backdoor by default. But, for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated.

observationist 1y ago
That's active surveillance and wiretapping, and is not a backdoor. Backdoors are unacceptable 100% of the time, and should never be legal. A backdoor is a lazy power grab that is either supported in ignorance by technically illiterate useful idiots or supported in full knowledge of the intended partisan abuses of basic civil liberties. Hacking a criminal's phone with compromised software, and/or intercepting their voice & data, is not a backdoor. Backdoors mandate a violation of informed consent, and as such, should be criminalized without exception. There's no place for backdoors in civilized societies.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
> I agree that there shouldn’t be a backdoor by default. But, for example, planting a modified app update with backdoor on the device of a suspected high-risk felon, based on a court warrant, is something that can be more reasonably debated. Sure. And on the flipside, given the many ways such a capability is a security risk and an abusable backdoor itself, it's something to develop additional technical safeguards against, such as Binary Transparency to verify that everyone's getting the same binaries.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
Court warrants aren't reliable, at least in Germany. Until that is fixed, which is quite important, there is not reason to allow something like chat control. There are other channels for investigations that are enough, chat control introduces less security that we would gain (if there even is any gain).

cubefox 1y ago

> There must not be a way to backdoor user devices, under any circumstances. One can make an argument that if there is strong evidence that someone is planning to commit an unusually serious crime, e.g. a terrorist attack, then secretly installing surveillance software on their device is warranted. I would also add that this surveillance operation can't be used to collect any other data which is unrelated to the suspected serious crime (like terrorism), and if such data is collected by accident, that it can't be used as evidence in court. (I'm very sure that this is currently perfectly legal in the US, which sounds pretty bad.)

Stefan-H 1y ago

Many consumer devices can be selectively targeted for updates. The entities that control the update servers are controlled by the states that they are a part of. People seem to have forgotten that companies once felt the need to invent warrant canaries to warn when they had received non-public court orders. Presumably they can also be forced not to remove the warrant canary. Edit: My first read had me interpret backdoor as any undetected means of gaining access to a device/system. I have updated by definition to mean using a flaw in the system left intentionally to gain access. This somewhat negates the need for my previous comment, but I'll leave this for illustrative purposes.

clickety_clack 1y ago

Agreed. Some people say “I don’t have anything to hide”, but the actual fact is they don’t have anyone to hide from. It just takes one election, or a couple of years of political distress leading to a coup and you can find yourself on the other side from the government. You might find that the “normal” things “everyone” believes aren’t so well tolerated anymore, and things like laws turn out to be a little less powerful than you were promised. Once the infrastructure is built out, it’ll turn out the bad guys are perfectly capable of using it to suit their needs.

raxxorraxor 1y ago

Good call, it is a weasel argument. Our current government coalition in Germany that is "against" it for publicity reasons use the exact same terminology. It just postpones the chat control issue though. Slamming the door and making noise here is the way to go because your officials are dishonest about their intentions.