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It's an extrapolation. If you listen to the speech[1], what Cameron is actually saying is that he believes that it should be possible to intercept the content

It's an extrapolation. If you listen to the speech[1], what Cameron is actually saying is that he believes that it should be possible to intercept the content of communications via the Internet in the same way that letters and phone calls can be intercepted (when authorised by a warrant from the Home Secretary). My interpretation is that this is aimed at companies like Facebook[2] and Twitter. There's been no specific mention (to my knowledge, at any rate) of banning encryption or forcing companies to backdoor encryption software. 1: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-and-snapchat-could-be-banned-under-new-surveillance-plans-9973035.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11255039/Lee-Rigby-report-Facebook-still-withholding-details-of-five-accounts-held-by-Michael-Adebowale.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

anon1385 12y ago
Yes, but it's impossible to achieve what Cameron said he wants to achieve without restricting encryption. It's hard to imagine a workable law that bans the distribution of chat apps that do end-to-end encryption that doesn't also ban setting up a web server that supports TLS and connecting to it with a web browser that supports TLS, or using a web browser that supports WebRTC. etc etc there are endless examples. Maybe some kind of licensing system where you agree to log everything in exchange for being allowed to encrypt things over the wire, but the more you think about it the more utterly unworkable it is. When he first made these comments I assumed it was either him mis-speaking, or making up policy on the fly during a speech without actually understand the implications of what he was saying (which he has a history of). But he has come out with the same line several times now and importantly it has been reported across much of the press. Normally when a politician mis-speaks or says something dumb that would shit all over an entire industry the politician's party would be desperately back-tracking by lunchtime. That has not happened. I can only assume that the Tories are at least happy for everybody to go into the next election with the impression that they want to move to restrict crypto, even if they don't actually plan to legislate on it. To my mind that is still grossly reckless. How much investment in the UK tech sector is he going to scare off with this posturing?
nly 12y ago
> My interpretation is that this is aimed at companies like Facebook[2] and Twitter. And to retroactively legitimise GCHQs unfettered access to Skype calls.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  Not to mention that awful Yahoo! webcam spying thing, OPTIC NERVE - a particularly distasteful one, that. Petabytes of JPGs of private (unencrypted) webcam streams, simply hoovered up en masse and untargeted - a not-insignificant number of them extremely intimate and personal, many between people of absolutely no intelligence relevance or value whatsoever - and used as a dataset for face-recognition experiments, amongst other things. They've got an extension you can call for counselling if an analyst happens to be selecting/browsing through it and sees 'something that may disturb them' (underage sexual acts, for example). I seriously doubt any of it has ever been deleted, either, even since. When GCHQ spout their boilerplate, what they're pointedly not disclosing is that GCHQ have a general interception policy for all communications they believe might be useful for intelligence purposes in the future (I've never quite been clear myself whether that's under some sort of actual general warrant, or they just do it under An Understanding - quite possibly the latter, because spying on MPs could be rather legally thorny!). And they try doing just that, limited only by the practicalities of storage space and processor power - hence the 72-hour ring buffers on full-take feeds on major links like Level3 and GlobalCrossing, progressively filtered down by highly-specialised lexers and parsers. Data point: There were apparently mentions of WhatsApp at the conference, but not on transcript. It uses the TextSecure protocol now, which is remarkably good and has forward-secure ratcheting. (It's closed-source, so I'd never recommend it over TextSecure/Signal itself, but it does not appear to me to have been compromised, and the huge number of people using that app getting this sort of pretty strong encryption for free is great news overall.) So yes, it seems he does (at the moment, before any potential U-turns! - I mean, "clarifications") want backdoored encryption, and to ban any end-to-end encryption that isn't backdoored. He plans to raise it after the election, if he wins, and he wants to do this specifically because GCHQ and The Security Service ("MI5") asked him to. It's almost like they don't realise they're doing anything wrong, and they're doubling-down on their tactics - because, save for a few very brave whistleblowers, they actually, really, don't think they are. Road to hell's paved with good intentions and all that, even if you're still buying the good intentions. Their reaction to the rise of stronger encryption since Snowden has so far been to get their friends/ex-bosses to make vague threats that this would mean they'd have to hack more (like making them need to work to do targeted interception in specific, more justified cases instead of bulk collection is a bad thing?!). Ugh.

anon1385 12y ago

Yes, but it's impossible to achieve what Cameron said he wants to achieve without restricting encryption. It's hard to imagine a workable law that bans the distribution of chat apps that do end-to-end encryption that doesn't also ban setting up a web server that supports TLS and connecting to it with a web browser that supports TLS, or using a web browser that supports WebRTC. etc etc there are endless examples. Maybe some kind of licensing system where you agree to log everything in exchange for being allowed to encrypt things over the wire, but the more you think about it the more utterly unworkable it is. When he first made these comments I assumed it was either him mis-speaking, or making up policy on the fly during a speech without actually understand the implications of what he was saying (which he has a history of). But he has come out with the same line several times now and importantly it has been reported across much of the press. Normally when a politician mis-speaks or says something dumb that would shit all over an entire industry the politician's party would be desperately back-tracking by lunchtime. That has not happened. I can only assume that the Tories are at least happy for everybody to go into the next election with the impression that they want to move to restrict crypto, even if they don't actually plan to legislate on it. To my mind that is still grossly reckless. How much investment in the UK tech sector is he going to scare off with this posturing?

nly 12y ago

> My interpretation is that this is aimed at companies like Facebook[2] and Twitter. And to retroactively legitimise GCHQs unfettered access to Skype calls.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago
Not to mention that awful Yahoo! webcam spying thing, OPTIC NERVE - a particularly distasteful one, that. Petabytes of JPGs of private (unencrypted) webcam streams, simply hoovered up en masse and untargeted - a not-insignificant number of them extremely intimate and personal, many between people of absolutely no intelligence relevance or value whatsoever - and used as a dataset for face-recognition experiments, amongst other things. They've got an extension you can call for counselling if an analyst happens to be selecting/browsing through it and sees 'something that may disturb them' (underage sexual acts, for example). I seriously doubt any of it has ever been deleted, either, even since. When GCHQ spout their boilerplate, what they're pointedly not disclosing is that GCHQ have a general interception policy for all communications they believe might be useful for intelligence purposes in the future (I've never quite been clear myself whether that's under some sort of actual general warrant, or they just do it under An Understanding - quite possibly the latter, because spying on MPs could be rather legally thorny!). And they try doing just that, limited only by the practicalities of storage space and processor power - hence the 72-hour ring buffers on full-take feeds on major links like Level3 and GlobalCrossing, progressively filtered down by highly-specialised lexers and parsers. Data point: There were apparently mentions of WhatsApp at the conference, but not on transcript. It uses the TextSecure protocol now, which is remarkably good and has forward-secure ratcheting. (It's closed-source, so I'd never recommend it over TextSecure/Signal itself, but it does not appear to me to have been compromised, and the huge number of people using that app getting this sort of pretty strong encryption for free is great news overall.) So yes, it seems he does (at the moment, before any potential U-turns! - I mean, "clarifications") want backdoored encryption, and to ban any end-to-end encryption that isn't backdoored. He plans to raise it after the election, if he wins, and he wants to do this specifically because GCHQ and The Security Service ("MI5") asked him to. It's almost like they don't realise they're doing anything wrong, and they're doubling-down on their tactics - because, save for a few very brave whistleblowers, they actually, really, don't think they are. Road to hell's paved with good intentions and all that, even if you're still buying the good intentions. Their reaction to the rise of stronger encryption since Snowden has so far been to get their friends/ex-bosses to make vague threats that this would mean they'd have to hack more (like making them need to work to do targeted interception in specific, more justified cases instead of bulk collection is a bad thing?!). Ugh.