
Some tech firms being 'friendly to terrorists' says UK police chief - randomname2
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/04/21/uk-britain-security-tech-idUKKBN0NC1HX20150421
======
madaxe_again
The lock on Mr Rowley's front door is friendly to terrorists, as it prevents
the security services from legally entering his unlocked property without a
warrant. You never know what he might be hiding!

Perhaps he should do an open house, in the nude. Only then can we be safe from
this potential predator. He locks his door! He _must_ be hiding something
sinister. The evidence - his use of a technology to restrict access to
information about his self - points to a guilty conscience.

------
NoCowLevel
"It[technology] can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and
helps them ... and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence
agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that."

"We all love the benefit of the internet and all the rest of it, but we need
their support in making sure that they're doing everything possible to stop
their technology being exploited by terrorists. I'm saying that needs to be
front and centre of their thinking and for some it is and some it isn't."

\-- Unsurprisingly, the main argument here is that creating more surveillance-
proof software is essentially the same as being friendly with terrorists. I
beg to differ on that.

~~~
Squarel
exactly. It is the equivalent of "You made doors with extra locks built in,
this makes it harder for us to break down criminals doors."

------
abalos
So it sounds like "being friendly to terrorists" is actually code for securing
user data and ensuring privacy. Yes, it's possible that terrorists could use
these services. However, I don't think the global population should give up
liberty and privacy for the negligible amount of safety that removing this
encryption would provide.

------
Silhouette
This is a typical biased perspective from someone whose job is to deal with
the worst of humanity every day. It seems more realistic to assume that the
threat from terrorism is very small, and there are other threats that are much
greater. Those include threats that good security and privacy technology help
to mitigate. They also include threats from which strong civil liberties
protect us.

So no, preventing technology from being exploited by bad people should not be
"front and centre" of its creators' thinking. That attitude just leads to
never building useful things. Should we also stop building good quality roads,
because being able to drive faster is friendly to bank robbers? Should we
abolish cash, because being able to transact quickly and anonymously is
friendly to fraudsters?

~~~
marcosdumay
> This is a typical biased perspective from someone whose job is to deal with
> the worst of humanity every day.

And this is giving too much credence for people that were already caught
abusing their powers.

No, evidence is that those people are not biased. They have a clear view of
their goals, and they are trying to keep the population terrorized enabling
them to gather more of government's power. They are terrorists themselves,
using terror to enable a coup.

------
SeanDav
I am surprised he did not also try for the paedophile angle. Those are the 2
old chestnuts always pulled out to justify government/police surveillance.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, government is using terrorist introduced
legislation to spy on people overfilling their garbage bins....

~~~
dazc
"Meanwhile, back in the UK, government is using terrorist introduced
legislation to spy on people overfilling their garbage bins...."

Which would be very funny if it were not true.

~~~
irixusr
"Which would be very funny if it were not true."

Sounds like a great story to share. What's happening in the UK with garbage
and surveillance?

~~~
dghf
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-
counc...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-councils-use-
anti-terror-laws-to-spy-on-bin-crimes.html)

Seven years old: don't know if it still goes on.

------
Lancey
Daily reminder that "terrorist" is a code word for "did something the
government doesn't like".

------
fredkbloggs
As long as there are police, they'll be saying things like this to justify
their demands for ever more power. It's in their nature. If you don't want to
hear it, you'll have to get rid of them. Otherwise there's really nothing for
it, and certainly no point in offering any kind of substantive response. The
viper's nature is to bite; one does not attempt to educate it into peaceful
coexistence but opts instead for avoidance or extermination.

~~~
kbenson
The police are like an aggressive guard dog. The aggressive nature is what
what makes it a good guard dog, but occasionally that aggression turns back on
those it's supposed to protect. It's important as the owner of this beast to
keep it on a short leash, redirect it as needed, and chastise it when it's
been bad.

The police don't want power for power's sake, they really do want it to do
their job better. Unfortunately, they lose track of the fact their job is
ultimately to uphold the laws and our way of life by aggressively pursuing the
short-term goal of reducing immediate threats. The police are a force for
good, and we are better off for their presence, but like the guard dog above,
they require attention to keep inline.

~~~
droopyEyelids
Your analogy sort of falls apart because the 'owner of the guard dog' can
easily want power for power's sake.

~~~
kbenson
_We_ are the owners of the guard dog. Those between us and our guards are our
employees, and if ever they forget this, they are just as in need of
redirection and chastisement. Failure to do that is our own failure, as it is
our job to manage our tools and resources. We cannot expect them to run
themselves.

~~~
6d0debc071
You're going to redirect and chastise people with a total monopoly on the
means of war and control of the majority of the nation's wealth and media?
There's a quick and simple way to deal with threats when you're in that
position. Car crash, suicide, incriminating evidence found that gets you
locked up for some moral crime....

~~~
kbenson
That assumes that the majority of that group are in need of corrective action
_and_ that they are completely unwilling to do so themselves (on top of the
unwillingness to carry out the public's wishes, as presupposed by this
thread). I don't believe that's the case.

I also don't believe this group is the same as the group that controls most
the media. There may be some overlay, and some shared interests, but
ultimately the politicians do not control the media. Both politicians and the
media pander to, and manipulate, the public. It's obvious the public has the
actual power here, and it's just a matter of asserting it and making it's will
known. Of course, that's not necessarily an easy thing to do.

~~~
6d0debc071
There are several possibilities. It could be that when you don't catch all
defectors in such a system the remaining defectors reduce your ability to
catch future defectors. It could be that the power structure, and associated
politics, of the group mean that defecting is a move that increases your
relative fitness - in terms of the power that you will wield within the group
and over its moral character - dramatically (imagine if the person
investigating a complaint is a defector, or someone performing public interest
tests when deciding whether to prosecute has some incentive to prosecute
regardless....) It could just be that most people within the group are in fact
good, but that the systems that allow them to publicise and correct malign
actors within the system are not present, or are very ineffective.

It seems to me that you only require that the majority of the group be in need
of corrective action, and be completely unwilling to do so themselves, if you
think that the group is ruled by a majority... If you believe that power
between the members of the group, is roughly evenly distributed, and can be as
easily turned to any end. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that the
moral character of the group taken as a whole is uncertain, but that a few
very powerful people establishing the character of the system are operating
under fairly perverse incentive structures... and that there's no readily
apparent way to get rid of them.

That is to say, that there is no candidate you can vote for where your vote
translates into meaningful action in removing them. That, if you were an
individual policeman, there is no action you could take there to remove them
either. That even if the majority of the group were good, there are problems
of detection and power disparities that they would have to act in concert to
overcome (perhaps even on a national level)...

That as such the chance of anything significant to being done to curtail
abuses of the system, before they can grow and become the nature of the
system, (if they are not already,) are very low. You don't need everyone in
the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. A few
people in the right place, that you can get to do what you want them to, will
do perfectly well. It doesn't even need to be the case that they're evil if
you can feed them the wrong intelligence. The people who turn up to arrest the
person might honestly believe that they're a criminal.

They may even be right. Everyone's guilty of something these days and
selective enforcement would be a fantastic weapon if you were a hypothetical
evil master-mind type. You arrange for someone to be looked more closely at,
and they'll be effectively eliminated even by people who are trying to
impartially uphold the law. You get to eliminate your problems while thumping
your chest about how impure the world is and how you need more power to
protect it....

Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable,
even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad
participants.)

~~~
kbenson
I don't believe the conditions you outlined make it impossible to change the
system, but they do outline a situation that makes it _very hard_. At a
minimum, voting to aggressively replace incumbents in all offices for a few
terms would definitely shake up any existing internal power relationships (as
I said, _hard_ ). But if we can outline way out of the scenario you outlined
above that _possible_ , we can work backwards from there to see what is a
necessary condition for the desired outcome and how we can achieve it by
iterating on a known possible solution (even if initially unlikely).

> You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially
> problematic civilian.

No, but you need a fair percentage of people, or people in power to be, to do
it continuously without getting caught. Additionally, as long as general
consensus is against specific group actions, they will eventually come to
light. Just as there is a chance that a normally lawful person may
occasionally, due to some aspect of their personality or environment,break the
law, there is a chance that a person that normally breaks a specific law will
decide that this instance of it occurring within the group is inexcusable in
the way it previously was, and make it public. That is, groups that exhibit
aberrant behavior with regard to the social norm will eventually be exposed,
and society in general will take steps to correct that behavior if it is
_aberrant enough_. I.e. The group defined by getting just a little too close
when greeting people will face little or no social correction, while the group
that spits in your face instead of saying hello will face some heavy
corrective actions.

> Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become
> abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs
> bad participants.)

I'm not sure any system is incorrectably abominable. Nature seems to abhor
steady state systems (if it seems to be steady, perhaps the scale is too
small), cyclical seems more common. and cyclical implies change (and return,
to be fair).

------
p01926
"we need [tech firms to do] everything possible to stop their technology being
exploited by terrorists"

Such absolutism is foolish. The only way to guarantee technology cannot be
used by terrorists is to never invent any technology. In the real world we
need to offset the tiny benefits to an extreme minority of bogeymen against
the enormous benefits to typical consumers.

------
a3n
> Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies
> needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating
> products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during
> investigations.

And law enforcement has to think about the distrust of government by its
supposed citizen/masters that it's causing by indiscriminately spying on
_everyone_. Snowden isn't the problem. The problem is that there was something
worth exposing.

If spies and law enforcement worked indisputable within the bounds of
expectation and law (and not merely within law that they essentially drafted,
for their convenience), rather than in the shadows, then I'm quite sure that
businesses and others would mostly have no problem working with them.

If I know that you're going to be honest, I have no reason to protect myself
against you specifically. If not, you're just another threat.

Come back into the fold, law enforcement. We miss you.

------
coralreef
It would seem that any constitution or right to privacy is also friendly to
terrorists.

~~~
wesleytodd
This would make a great Onion article, "4th amendment found to be pro-
terrorism"

~~~
TeMPOraL
"Officials have found that John Doe rightfully exercised his 4th amendment
rights and immediately charged him with terrorism."

------
Nursie
>> "It can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them
... and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or
it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that."

If you're making tech that is not creating challenges for law-enforcement, in
light of all we know now, you're doing it wrong.

~~~
droopyEyelids
Sort of- if you care about liberty and freedom and all those enlightenment
ideals.

Let's not forget there are people who enjoy increasing their power, tracking
political enemies, exercising authority over other people, and all other forms
of winning-at-other's-expense.

------
Arubis
"We will continue persecuting you until you trust us!"

Really, this feels like a large-scale version of a spouse, caught cheating,
refusing to admit any wrongdoing and then getting ripshit about not feeling
trusted.

------
mercurial
If one thing is "friendly to terrorists", that's cranking up the panopticon.
Maybe M. Rowley should turn himself in and get an appointment in room 101.

------
aburan28
What are these agencies/governments doing? They say that companies are
friendly to terrorists and expect what reaction? If you want cooperation you
need mutual respect and the UK/US government are acting out of line.

~~~
a3n
They're not looking for trust with companies. They're manipulating public
thought so the next wave of laws won't be opposed by any significant
percentage of the population. "Oh, terrorism you say? Oh, well ... OK, I
guess. You know what's best."

If they were serious, they'd name and shame the supposed terrorist friendly
companies, and encourage the public not to do business with them.

This is no different from Joe McCarthy's list of government employees who were
communists, which he always waved and never shared.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy)

------
ams6110
Of course the quote about trading liberty for security comes to mind.

------
wahsd
Nice./s Next stage of terrorism infection is starting to set in; metastasis of
turning on one's own. As someone with a more classic understanding of
terrorism, it is both amazing and chilling seeing the social pathogen injected
on 9/11 coursing through the "Anglo-Saxon" west.

------
stegosaurus
I have no obligation to help the security services, or the police, or any
other authority.

If my neighbour performs an illegal action, I will not report him unless I
believe the action to merit punishment.

I do not believe secure communications are bad and therefore I will not aid in
their destruction.

Simple.

------
allemagne
There's been an awful lot said about the philosophy of "freedom vs security"
in these comments, but it seems to me that the disconnect tech people feel
with law enforcement is at least equally due to a technical gap. In the spirit
of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity," I'd imagine that if those making policy decisions understood
exactly what it would take to make the internet completely or even
significantly transparent to intelligence agencies they would be less
comfortable leading the crusade against encryption in the name of combating
terrorism and pedophilia.

~~~
JupiterMoon
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,"

Some might attribute that soundbite to malice rather than stupidity...

They have a very clear idea what they want. They want central keyholding
authorities with master keys that they can use... This could then be used to
keep the banking system safe enough (NB safe enough rather than safe) whilst
allowing no private communications.

~~~
allemagne
It's a good point that this vision they have is specific and technical to some
extent. But it's also not very well thought out from the perspective of an
elected official and the general public (their bosses, even if we want to go
all the way to the level of an inherent social contract).

------
rm_-rf_slash
Presumably this is the kind of boldfaced rhetoric meant to inflame the "if you
do nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" crowd.

------
darkarmani
> Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies
> needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating
> products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during
> investigations.

Doesn't it also make it hard for terrorists to access the authorities'
materials as well? A tool is a tool.

------
beaknit
Dang! Are they helping paedophiles too??

Please read all my email because I want to keep all the children safe!

------
Rmilb
>"Snowden has created an environment where some technology companies are less
comfortable working with law reinforcement..." I'm pretty sure that the
governments are the parties responsible for this environment.

------
venomsnake
Privacy vs having 1/1000000 chance of dying from terror act. I know which I
choose. I suppose that is with those guys - they know how tiny and useless
their job is.

------
fennecfoxen
I love the stock photo and its caption.

"An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a
laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013."

omg h4x0rz

------
JupiterMoon
And the original organisation designated as terrorist by the UK government
was? (Hint you'll probably be a supporter of their motives.)

~~~
JupiterMoon
The answer is those that were campaigning for women to get the vote.

