
'Five Eyes' nations discuss backdoor access to WhatsApp - humantiy
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/30/five-eyes-backdoor-access-whatsapp-encryption
======
deogeo
> Dealing with the challenge faced by increasingly effective encryption

They weren't able to spy in bulk when communication was primarily offline, and
they won't when it's primarily encrypted.

Don't let them frame the brief, anomalous period when they could listen in on
everyone, as 'normal'.

~~~
tuxxy
This. That entire period should be examined as a lapse in judgement, not a
time when things were better.

Because of our state-of-the-art security, we're now able to do more things
online in less secure environments. A secure, distributed internet is normal.
One that is insecure by design is not.

~~~
OrgNet
proper security has always been "state-of-the-art"

~~~
dmix
Even burner phones were a technically state-of-the-art which was a story which
underpinned an entire season of a TV show's plotline (and title).

Cellphones became so cheap and widely available you could buy and throw them
away efficiently to not get easily tapped and still make enough money, even as
a low level drug dealer living in low income neighbourhoods. That wouldn't
have been possible years prior.

~~~
OrgNet
Burner phones are good for anonymity (if you buy them anonymously), but I
don't think that they add any security

------
cirrus-clouds
Some info about disgraced former International Development Secretary Priti
Patel, who is the UK's new Home Secretary (a position that looks after home
affairs such as crime, security, terrorism, immigration, citizenship).

\- She resigned from her previous position as International Development
Secretary in 2017 when it was discovered she held secret unauthorised meetings
with Israeli officials and lied about it. The meetings were not sanctioned by
the Foreign Office and were a breach of ministerial code.

\- A supporter of Brexit, she suggested last year that the UK leverage the
prospect of food shortages in Ireland in order to gain a better Brexit deal.
Although, she quickly back-pedalled on her comments, she was rightly
criticised for her remarks.

The depressing reality is that the current Conservative Party in the UK is
stuffed to the rafters with nasty politicians just like her.

Priti Patel's voting record in parliament:
[https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24778/priti_patel/witham/v...](https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24778/priti_patel/witham/votes)

" _Generally voted for requiring the mass retention of information about
communications_ "

" _Voted for mass surveillance of people’s communications and activities_ "

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Not to forget that immediately on being appointed Home Secretary she was
accused of breaking the ministerial code yet again, in May! It's currently the
only significant point under the Home Secretary section of her Wikipedia page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel#Home_Secretary:_Ju...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel#Home_Secretary:_July_2019–present)

Most of the reasonable and moderate members of the Tory party are on the back
benches, leaving or about ready to retire. The old, reasonable, one nation
Tory party is dead as a dodo.

~~~
repolfx
The alternative view is that this is the first reasonable and moderate cabinet
since the referendum.

Consider that it's the first one which appears to be serious about actually
doing what the government repeatedly said it would do, both before and after
the vote. A government doing what it promised it would do is reasonable. It is
led by a man who wants very much to reach an acceptable deal with the EU, but
will leave without one if the EU makes it necessary. That's a reasonable and
moderate position of the sort that millions of business leaders take every
single day.

The previous cabinet had a position like this: we're saying we'll leave no
matter what, but we're lying because we definitely won't ever leave without a
"deal" of some sort, which basically means the party we're negotiating with
can propose whatever terms they like and we'll always accept them regardless
of how terrible. Thus an "agreement" which is universally regarded as awful is
presented as the only possible path forward, other than ignoring the biggest
vote in British history. That's not _at all_ a reasonable way to go about
negotiations or politics. Nor is it even slightly moderate - "we must accept
terrible terms or else we'll be destroyed" is an unusually extreme belief, of
the sort usually held by countries which just lost a war.

Patel may have broken some ministerial code, and that's bad. But the former
Prime Minister and her cabinet said 108 times the country would leave the EU
on the deadline with or without a deal _and they were lying every single
time_. The cabinets before that told voters they were committed to bringing
down immigration, but after leaving government Osborne admitted the cabinet
never believed in their stated goal, didn't want to do it and therefore just
ignored it. That sort of blatant, knowing manipulation is far, far worse and
completely destructive to trust in politics. Meeting Israelis without filing
the right paperwork is trivial compared to it.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Whatever the former prime minister, or the current prime minister say, it only
becomes so once it is voted into being. When you have a majority of 3, and a
controversial policy, prior to vote it's just aspiration. If Theresa was
lying, Boris is likely to be lying. Neither brought good governance.

Unless there is an election and the Tory party are returned with increased
majority, it is certain that the current prime minister will have as little
success in the house as his predecessor. They have a majority of 3, soon to be
2, held up by the DUP. There are enough moderates left in the Tory party to
lose the government a vote on every problematic exit scenario, and on a no-
deal exit, just as was the case for Theresa.

> Meeting Israelis without filing the right paperwork is trivial compared to
> it

No, it was worthy of dismissal. She preempted that by resigning. She was not
Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. It was not her role to make policy on the
hoof on a topic irrelevant to her office. She blew her chance to explain by
continuing to leave out some of the meetings, resulting in a _second_ summons
to Downing St. She does not deserve to return to senior office.

~~~
repolfx
That may well be the case, but May didn't have to ask for an extension to
Article 50 or have a man as her Chancellor who was totally against no deal.
She chose to do those things. And it was - to nobody's surprise - later
revealed that she never even brought up the possibility of no deal with her EU
counterparts.

In the end, the current cabinet is much more likely to try and implement the
Conservative's actual manifesto. The only reason you describe that as
immoderate and extreme is you want them to fail to do so. It wouldn't be
considered so if "UK" and "EU" were replaced with random tokens and presented
to people who weren't invested in British/EU politics.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
No one in their right mind would expect them to mention the possibility of no-
deal - it's the idiotic option to be avoided. Mentioning it or threatening it
in negotiations is brinkmanship of the worst kind, as a no-deal is more
damaging for _us_ than the EU.

Moderate and immoderate are well known and defined political positions
completely unrelated to how you are attempting to redefine them.

------
humantiy
>The controversial so-called “ghost protocol” has been fiercely opposed by
companies, civil society organizations and some security experts – but
intelligence and law enforcement agencies continue to lobby for it.

Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live
in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the
point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over
that if there is a way it will be abused.

Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them?

~~~
Nasrudith
The answer is no of course - they have the thought terminating cliche of
"national security" to protect against accountability.

Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is
actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way
around.

If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be
fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively
undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and
making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker?
That is inexcusable incompetence.

~~~
isostatic
> Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around.

However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad
communication". "We" also have nothing to hide.

This yougov poll shows more Americans support backdoors in encryption than
oppose it

[https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-
reports/...](https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-
reports/2015/10/19/americans-all-stripes-worried-about-data-privacy)

[https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inline...](https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2015-10-19/data4.png)

~~~
philipkglass
At first I thought that you linked to the wrong poll by mistake.

The last question does show more "favor" than "oppose" for installing back
doors in encrypted systems, but the first question shows much more "oppose"
than "favor" for reducing encryption to help government agencies. The second
question shows that more people want tech companies to protect customer
privacy than to cooperate with government agencies to fight terrorism and
crime.

So people want encryption back doors that don't reduce encryption and don't
require tech companies to cooperate with government agencies. Of course "we
can have all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff" is a common delusion
among government agencies proposing encryption back doors too.

~~~
inopinatus
Yes, since the operational outcomes of the first and last questions are the
same, the main notion this poll really confirms is that people in general
don’t understand cryptography.

c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation
can override mathematics.

~~~
isostatic
> c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation
> can override mathematics.

I believe the phrase is PI IS EXACTLY 3

~~~
DomreiRoam
According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)
the value of pi would have been defined as 3.2 in Indiana.

------
peterkelly
Ever since Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, I've had zero sympathy for or
trust in any intelligence service, even in purportedly democratic countries.

Last year, my own country (Australia) passed a law which allows the government
to force companies or even individuals to add backdoors to their products, and
makes it a criminal offence to refuse or publicly disclose their requests. I
would go to jail before I complied.

For those of you in other five eyes countries, you'll have similar laws soon
too. Our intelligence agencies have clearly set themselves up against
fundamental principles of human rights, and their efforts to undermine these
must be fought.

~~~
throwaway9d0291
> allows the government to force companies or even individuals to add
> backdoors to their products

I think the tech media and community overstates the impact of this law. The
law [0] makes it clear that the backdoor cannot introduce any systematic
weakness of vulnerability, which explicitly includes "a new decryption
capability in relation to a form of electronic protection".

What it allows is stuff that targets a specific person _and_ is incapable of
affecting anybody else. The second part overrides the first part, so if it's
not possible to target a specific person without weakening protection for
everybody else, you're not required to do anything.

For example asking you to put code into your app that creates a copy of
private keys and sends them to ASIO if the user's ID matches a hard-coded
value would be legally okay per my reading of the law.

However adding ASIO's key to every single message would not be okay.

I'm not saying I'm in favour of the law (I'm not) but its actual effect isn't
at all what people assume (I hear a lot of comments about "Australia banned
encryption" and other such nonsense).

[0]:
[http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...](http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214/s317zg.html)

~~~
rowanG077
What stops the government from just saying I want to target every single
specific person that uses your app?

~~~
throwaway9d0291
Sections 317JC, 317RA and 317ZAA, which require that the decision makers
consider the impact on unrelated people and section 317ZH which requires that
a warrant is obtained for things that would usually require a warrant.

~~~
rowanG077
There are no unrelated people if that is the ask of the government. What would
"usually" require a warrant?

------
nimbius
from what ive learned about encryption and cryptography in general, it seems
like you dont get to put this cat back in the bag once it gets out.

You can hold all the meetings you want. pound fists to table, elegantly
restate your problem, but the mathematic fundamentals of it are your immovable
object. your only option is to block it throughout your nation. this just
makes room for a new, or an updated version of the fly you swat last week that
gets around your flyswatter.

Sure, you can try to poison the code base, or inject some kind of malware, but
this trick only works once. its not a silver bullet.

~~~
MarcScott
I wrote a blog post about this awhile back, when the UK government was talking
about adding backdoors to encrypted messaging platforms, framed as an open
letter to our PM. It's a basic introduction to cryptography (I'm no expert
though).

[http://coding2learn.org/blog/2017/06/11/dear-
theresa/](http://coding2learn.org/blog/2017/06/11/dear-theresa/)

Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal organisation
or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily encrypt their own
communications. The only people who won't are the innocent public, who can be
spied on with impunity.

~~~
coldtea
> _Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal
> organisation or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily
> encrypt their own communications. The only people who won't are the innocent
> public, who can be spied on with impunity._

It's always the innocent public who is the target of such moves. The goal is
state omniscience, not crime fighting.

Competent criminal organisations wouldn't care about laws banning encryption,
and would know to use the proper tools.

The random non-competent criminals caught this way, would be used to justify
the measure...

~~~
mantap
I wouldn't be so cynical. The real goal is to catch stupid criminals. Not all
criminals are stupid, but most are.

Of course governments cannot stop tech people from using e2e encryption.
That's not what bothers them. What bothers them is that e2e encryption is the
_default_. They want to change the default to be insecure.

The people who demand these laws are tasked with making various statistics
change, such as crime rates. They are metaphorical paperclip maximisers: a
surveillance state is not a goal, it is just a means to an end, a way to make
their numbers look better.

~~~
coldtea
> _I wouldn 't be so cynical. The real goal is to catch stupid criminals. Not
> all criminals are stupid, but most are._

The real goal is to expand the state. Bureaucracies, like cancer, want to
expand into any aspect of their subjects lives they can. They get job
security, bigger budgets, and more power as they expand, what's not to like?

Individual opinions (of politicians, bureaucrats, etc) don't really matter, as
the aggregate dynamics of a state/organization tend to expansion and self-
preservation -- even if an organization has no real role or is mostly BS (eg
TSA).

Besides, nothing wrong with being cynical. Remember McCarthy? The real goal of
the collection of data then wasn't to "catch stupid criminals". They collected
data on politicians, journalists, businessmen, etc. Same thing with now public
records of 10 and 20 years later -- check the files on people like MLK,
Lennon, civil rights leaders, etc.

(And of course anybody with experience from European governments like in
Italy, Greece, Spain, France, and so on, knows that private info/surveillance
is used against whom which the state considers an "internal enemy" all the
time, and in fact collection on those was far more common up to the 90s than
collection on criminals -- which merely had their criminal record, and periods
when they were bugged in suspicion of a crime, whereas politicians,
businessmen, activists, writers, journalists etc were tracked all the time).

------
skrowl
If this works, it won't actually stop strong e2e encryption, it'll just make
people download their strong e2e encryption communication apps from non-mass-
surveillance states.

This isn't p*rnhub. You can't backdoor everything.

~~~
amfsn
People generally don't care about LE reading what they say, so no. People used
whatsapp before e2e and will keep using it after e2e.

~~~
andyjh
One might reasonably assume the "bad guys" they're trying to catch would go
elsewhere though, if they have any sense. So then you're just left with
innocent people to spy on.

~~~
amfsn
You'd be surprised to learn how fucking stupid most bad guys are.

~~~
misterprime
We catch lots of stupid bad guys.

Smart bad guys get away with it.

~~~
amfsn
Cynical and correct observation, which I know will get downvoted because it
goes against the mantra of this website:

Being able to read whatsapp would help us catch many more stupid bad guys.

Smart bad guys will always be able to get away with it. That doesn't mean we
should stop trying to catch stupid bad guys.

~~~
dane-pgp
What if catching the stupid bad guys just means the smart bad guys take their
place? Like a spray that kills 99% of bacteria, all you're potentially doing
is applying a selective pressure towards being more technically smart.

And in this case, being more technically smart might just mean clicking the
link to the E2E encrypted web chat site rather than the server-to-client
encrypted site. Perhaps, though, the government will start banning websites
that offer E2E encrypted chat, and require hosting companies to not let you
host such apps yourself.

------
fencepost
Does nobody realize how _inconvenient_ it is that the relationship between the
radius and circumference of a circle cannot be calculated readily by hand? Our
manufacturing processes will be greatly improved by silencing those so-called
'mathematicians' and standardizing on a value of 3 for pi not that never
ending mess.

~~~
peterkelly
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)

------
lunias
"We need to ensure that our law enforcement and security and intelligence
agencies are able to gain lawful and exceptional access to the information
they need"

This entitlement is obscene.

If backdoor access is granted then a new set of heads will emerge from the
hydra.

------
4ntonius8lock
This just in:

Dealing with the challenges faced by having a mere 97% conviction rate,
federal prosecutors and law enforcement conspire with foreign powers to remove
pesky civil liberties.

------
tru3_power
In addition to all the ethical and privacy concerns brought up here, another
thing that always crosses my mind is do we even trust these entities to
properly store this information? What happens if all data that is being
collected from these backdoors is compromised? Think about every private
conversation you’ve ever had potentially leaking to the entire world.

------
carapace
CyberSaber..?

> By choosing a simple but strong cipher that is already widely published and
> agreeing on how to use it, anyone with elementary programming skills can
> write their own encryption program without relying on any products that can
> be banned.

[http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/](http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/)

And Pontifex, aka the Solitaire Encryption Algorithm (SPOILER ALERT):

> In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, the character Enoch Root describes
> a cryptosystem code-named "Pontifex" to another character named Randy
> Waterhouse, and later reveals that the steps of the algorithm are intended
> to be carried out using a deck of playing cards.

[https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/](https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/)

Laws _cannot_ stop encryption, they can stop law-abiding people from using it
maybe but not criminals.

~~~
schoen
The ciphersaber idea is great, but the cipher that was chosen for the project
has been subject to significant attacks (further developments of the ones
mentioned on that page) and has been deprecated in TLS. (The attack setting
for attacking RC4 in HTTPS is probably a lot easier than attacking short
person-to-person communications, but it's still not a good sign.)

Also, when you implement the ciphersaber, you're still only about 1/4 of the
way to the functionality of early-1990s PGP, notably lacking any public key
functionality.

> For file encryption, a user need only memorize one key or passphrase. For
> messaging, users need to exchange pairs of keys through some secure means,
> most likely in person. Maintaining a list of correspondent's keys or
> passphrases in a master file, preferably itself encrypted with a memorized
> master key, is less convenient than public key encryption. But it may be all
> that is left in a few years if PGP key servers are banned.

> It may even be possible to teach a manual version of the Diffie-Hellman key
> exchange, perhaps using large number calculators (easily built in Java 1.1).
> The Diffie-Hellman procedure need be carried out just once per pair of
> correspondents, since CipherSaber eliminates the need to exchange keys for
> every message.

Apart from the implausibility of some of this, you have a very severe issue
about key synchronization if you literally only want to do a key exchange
once. For example, an attacker who can intercept one party's message and then
trick another party into encrypting a known plaintext with the same key
material (because that party doesn't know that the keystream has advanced
yet?) can then decrypt the intercepted message.

Even having the two users accidentally use the same part of the keystream to
send separate unknown messages m₁ and m₂ will allow an adversary to compute
m₁⊕m₂, which is very bad in many cases. One thing I remember from Dan Boneh's
cryptography class is that if either message contains an ASCII space character
(' ') at some position, then m₁⊕m₂ will contain the other message's plaintext
with uppercase and lowercase inverted (for example,' '^'q' is 'Q').

The ciphersaber idea is conceptually really great, and I love the idea of
helping teach people to create their own communications and communications
security infrastructure. But I think that, apart from just how archaic the
cryptographic technology it teaches is, the project really underestimates how
far away this cipher implementation is from a complete system.

~~~
schoen
I should probably also acknowledge that Arnold Reinhold apparently started
writing this page in _1997_ , and so the techniques presented there weren't
nearly as far from the state-of-the-art then!

------
xster
Tony Ma's daughter better not go to any of the Five Eyes countries at this
point.

------
jdauriemma
For those of you searching for good E2E-encrypted messaging apps, Wire is
really good. It has true cross-platform support without being tied to a phone
number.

~~~
bobbyd3
I know a lot of folks who are technical (and non-technical) and it was a big
enough struggle to get them using Signal. I definitely see the advantages of
Wire and not being tied to a phone number but I just don't know anyone using
it. It's odd because some of those folks are using Keybase chat though... they
just bulk at installing yet another messaging app (regardless of features).

~~~
hestipod
I tried to get people to use Wire but it was buggy enough, and still is with
most ignored, the majority of converts have abandoned it. I have continual
problems. If it would have been reliable it could have been a killer app as it
was basically Skype but encrypted and ostensibly available on all platforms.
Having a stand alone (no linked phone) browser (angostic) based option is a
great feature. But, it really feels they left the free/Personal version in the
dust for their Pro/Enterprise option and from reading Github complaints and
seeing a former employee discuss it in another forum I'd assume that to be
accurate. Signal isn't much better from reading around and also still requires
a phone linked and is only Chrome if you want to use it on the desktop (unless
I am behind the times). Seems the space for an all in one encrypted
communication/sharing tool available and accessible to all people and
platforms has sort of died. I will never trust FB so even if people way
smarter than me say Whatsapp is safe it still feels so dirty...and again the
phone required bit.

------
motohagiography
At some point, people are going to see the problem as not of a lack of privacy
technologies, but of a small group who surveils them and exploits their
personal information to keep them disadvantaged, and they will decide that
this is the problem they need to solve.

It is also likely that the technology they use to solve that problem will be
much less sophisticated.

Ballots, surely.

~~~
taneq
> Ballots, surely.

Well, one of the four boxes, anyway.

------
sam0x17
This will just drive people to more and more distributed platforms until there
is nothing they can do.

~~~
14
“Creation, distribution, discussion, or any thought about encryption is
illegal and will be punishable by up to life in prison under new anti-
terrorism laws.” They will certainly try I am sure but at the end of the day
encryption is just math and that is impossible to ban.

------
thelittleone
Or could it be they already have a back door and stories like this serve them
by making people believe they don’t.

~~~
dane-pgp
By this logic, the fact that there were no stories about the government not
being able to spy on messenger apps before, means that those apps were
perfectly secure _until_ they added E2E crypto. That doesn't sound right to
me.

------
yters
As we worry about 'Five Eyes' spying on us, we happily give Google and
Facebook all our communications for free...

~~~
beezle
that is by choice. I have no choice about goverment spying on me.

~~~
est31
In contemporary society you are usually quite the outcast when you say you
don't do social media. You have the choice between being an outcast and being
spied upon. Similarly for government spying in messenger apps: if you are an
outcast who doesn't buy a smartphone or computer you are not affected.

~~~
a0-prw
I can't count the number of assholes I have avoided by not being on Facebook
;)

~~~
946789987649
I can count the number of assholes I have met on Facebook. It's 0. I only put
people I like in the first place on it, and surprise surprise, I enjoy using
it.

It's not the tool people, it's how you're using it.

