Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages.
Those who could not afford such luxury had to rely on codes. The prevalence of such codes however increased the chance of being misunderstood by those who searched for treason. When the emerging middle class started to demand political power in the renaissance it was answered with violence and repression. Those who wrote the constitutions of all modern western nations understood that democracy can only exist when the state has no business reading the correspondence of its citizens.
Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to express them-self in public, but even more so in private correspondence. A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.
And yet some still say: but if the state can read all private correspondence it would be so much easier to catch criminals. And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar efficient in fighting street level crime. However for society as a whole, such methods enable a terror of the state that is a crime against humanity itself. They say "but the state will never abuse its power" and i say: it did countless times before. Do not stray away from liberty and freedom for promises of safety made by those that profit from oppression.
> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to express them-self in public, but even more so in private correspondence. A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.
I feel disregarding the usefulness of surveillance is part of the problem. We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. It provides your opponent an easy strawman for a hollow victory. Because frankly, surveillance is a useful tool for law enforcement.
We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness.
> I feel disregarding the usefulness of surveillance is part of the problem. We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. It provides your opponent an easy strawman for a hollow victory. Because frankly, surveillance is a useful tool for law enforcement.
In this regard I recommend you go look into the evidence on mass surveillance. There have been several reports done on the mass surveillance programs that have been operating since 2001 and in report after report, the mass surveillance has been found not only to be ineffective at producing any tips, it commonly just tied up law enforcement resources that could have been spent on their legitimate tips.
Here is a very well sourced article referencing several FBI internal reports, a white house appointed review group, those of non-profits, and local police departments:
Using "it doesn't work" as an argument is a losing battle. If you even manage to convince people of that, best case they'll still be in favour "just in case it does work".
The actual, real point is that they're underestimating the downsides or surveillance, and that even if it would work, it would still not be worth it. That's the only argument that can hold, and the actual reason we're against it.
Moreover, the argument becomes invalid work as soon as someone finds a method that does work. Which creates an incentive for anyone with a vested interest in this spying to create such a working system.
> We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance.
The problem is that we, the people, can never know what, if any, good is coming out of surveillance. Attorney General Barr admitted that in one of his speeches arguing for back doors in encryption. The government cannot reveal what is being discovered through surveillance without disclosing sources and methods that it (understandably) wants to keep concealed from adversaries. But without that information we and our elected representatives cannot exercise proper oversight. And without proper oversight any such capability will be abused.
It's often not the the government "cannot" reveal those details (maybe not immediately and directly in some cases, sure, but certainly with the distance of time that tools such as FOIA requests require), but that they "won't" and have no interest to. It should be the public demand with each attempt to increase surveillance to increase oversight. Sousveillance (watching the watchers) is the best known defense we have at keeping surveillance in check. The hard part is speaking those demands to those in power, embedding those checks/balances/required transparency in the surveillance processes in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by those in power.
> with the distance of time that tools such as FOIA requests require
Often that is way too much time--25 to 50 years in many cases, since those are the time frames for declassification of classified information--for such revelations to be useful for oversight, especially with the state of encryption as it is since computers and the Internet.
Before computers and the Internet, it was possible to have a reasonable tradeoff between strength of encryption and the ability of law enforcement to conduct surveillance, because perfect encryption was impossible and imperfect encryption got more expensive the closer you wanted it to be to perfect. So people were already making a cost-benefit tradeoff (difficulty of breaking the encryption and obtaining private data vs. cost), and it was reasonable for the government to ask that the potential benefits of surveillance be included in the tradeoff, since that would just adjust the balance of the tradeoff, and the adjustment could be periodically reviewed based on data on past surveillance that was revealed by things like FOIA requests.
But now, with computers and the Internet, perfect encryption is cheaper than imperfect encryption. Perfect encryption is just a mathematical algorithm, and it's straightforward to put that algorithm in computer code and verify that the code correctly executes the algorithm. Imperfect encryption requires adding code to that perfect algorithm, which adds cost, and also adds a risk that wasn't even there before, of whatever back doors are in the code being exploited. So now we users, to enable surveillance by law enforcement, would not be just making a small adjustment that could be periodically reviewed in a tradeoff we have to make anyway. We would be adding a new tradeoff that we have no other incentive to make, and thus taking on a new oversight burden, which is, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult to properly fulfill, that we have no other incentive to take on. That is simply not a bargain that free citizens of a free society should accept.
> embedding those checks/balances/required transparency in the surveillance processes in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by those in power.
The processes can't be transparent because, as I said, that would reveal sources and methods that should be concealed from adversaries. An application for a FISA warrant can't wait for the years it would take to allow a FOIA request to be fulfilled in the interest of transparency.
> Often that is way too much time--25 to 50 years in many cases, since those are the time frames for declassification of classified information
That's only part of what I mean about the goal to demand expanding oversight, maybe those timeframes are too long, but the point is that those time frames sometimes serve a useful purpose to slow things down for safety of parties involved or other reasons. A goal should be to find a healthy "medium" where "Surveillance FOIA 2.0" still allows for transparency/oversight/review without hobbling the process, and FOIA was just one example of an existing transparency tool to model from, it's not the only tool/model it was the first example to mind, but you would hopefully expand to a larger suite of transparency/sousveillance ("watch the watchers") tools.
I'm also not claiming that we shouldn't fight surveillance attempts, simply that where surveillance seems inevitable/a foregone conclusion/rough to fight that we also need to devote resources to fighting for increased sousveillance/transparency, because power will always abuse surveillance.
> where surveillance seems inevitable/a foregone conclusion
To me, breaking perfect encryption by putting backdoors in computer algorithms is precisely the kind of place where we should not think that surveillance is inevitable/a foregone conclusion, but should draw a line in the sand and say that no, we're not going to accept this, law enforcement simply needs to up its game and figure out how to operate in this new environment where anyone who wants to can use perfect encryption.
Hmm, that's a good point. It is a problem. And a problem for both sides.
If X is the amount of utility coming out of surveillance, and you cannot know X, then you cannot argue that X = 0 or that X > Y (for any Y you want to pick, like downsides of surveillance) or that X < Y either.
Essentially it becomes impossible to rationally debate the issue on the basis of whether it is a net gain.
Which means you need to fall back on other forms of reasoning. A reasonable position is that freedoms shouldn't be sacrificed for something whose utility cannot be demonstrated. But that's an argument about what sorts of justifications are required for laws, not about how much utility the law would have.
Yes, your point applies to many modern discussions and an often used rhetorical device I see is to jump away from the "should we do this" discussions and into the "does this work discussion" (to paraphrase jurassic park a bit). Common examples that won't make me popular are climate change, current anti-covid measures, and not eating meat. People get hung up on technicalities about whether ice cores show evidence of some climate relationship, or whether staying home reduces disease transmission, and pretend that those facts automatically lead to a conclusion about how we should behave, while bypassing the discussion about the kind of world we want to live in. I hypothesize that people feel on firmer ground when they shift their ideological arguments into facts about causality, instead of head on discussing why they value a certain kind of society.
> We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness.
The argument I make is that it is more cost effective to develop a society where one does not need to commit crimes to get by in the first place. Law enforcement is reactionary and can only punish when crimes are already committed. While we shouldn't get rid of law enforcement, because crime will always exist, let's look to societies that have low crime (and societies that have high crime) and see what we can learn from them (and improve upon). Such policy is far more advantageous for citizens.
It's very clear that the people in power in the UK and USA don't want the law to be enforced. They seemingly don't want low-crime society, they want only to be immune to prosecution themselves.
Your idea seems predicated on people in general being benevolent towards others. That's not going to work, there's a significant motivated cadre who want to do terrible things provided they 'win'. You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others.
> You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others.
Be careful about how you frame that. While this is true of some people who engage in activities like this, there is also the "ends justify the means" group. The latter does believe what they are doing is right and moral, and that being right and moral justifies behavior that is illegal. It's easy to be cynical and assume that the latter group is just the former group deluding themselves, but there are people who genuinely think that way. Addressing them requires a different approach than addressing those who just want power and control by any means.
I see this line of thinking frequently, especially in modern politics, and it always fascinates me. I can get people to agree that the system is messed up because it is a race to the bottom. I can get people to agree that someone needs to draw a line in the sand for it to stop. I can get most people to agree that sacrificing moral values in an effort to win results in a hollow victory (and encourages the race to the bottom). But the interesting part is that my opinion that one needs to hold their own tribe accountable for sacrificing morals is extremely controversial. Yet I see it as logically following from the above.
I think this is why we can see people gladly vote for those that they very much disagree with. I think this is why attacking someone's tribal leader makes them double down and strengthens their convictions rather than changing belief. I think the question is how to get people to realize that you have to fight fair to get others to fight you back with fairness.
If you have the time, I'd highly recommend writing this argument as a blog post; it deserves a higher and more exclusive visibility than it gets as embedded in these forums.
I think if you find that you poll a random set of people, most of them are (for the most part) benevolent towards one another. So I think it is disingenuous to talk about people in power and then apply that to people in general when these two have different behaviors. The point of democracies are to increase the robustness of governments to help discourage abuse of those in power while providing mechanisms to remove those that do abuse that power. Obviously this can be improved, but that's a different conversation all together.
> And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar [sic] efficient in fighting street level crime. However for society as a whole, such methods enable a terror of the state that is a crime against humanity itself
However I think it’s a very serious fallacy to split surveillance into a ‘useful’ component and ‘side-effects’.
They aren’t side-effects. They are the effects.
Reduced crime may be a consequence of a surveillance society.
In such a society you may discover that discussing crime statistics in a negative light would reflect badly on the party bosses and must be done with caution.
By the same token, one could say that extra-judicial torture could have "usefulness" as you put it. We could have a similar discussion of how absolutists on the torture question aren't doing a proper cost/benefit analysis and are "providing their opponents an easy strawman for a hollow victory."
I know this is Hacker News, but not every argument requires infinite nuance, we don't need to sit down and examine the pros & cons of torture or any other clear and obvious abuse of government power. We don't need to dignify the position of "read all citizens private correspondence" with a cost/benefit analysis. This practice provides legitimacy to clearly unconscionable actions. It is permissible, even strategically valuable, to have certain positions that we are absolutist on, policies that aren't tolerated under any conditions.
In that case why corruption is so rife? With so much tools available they should be able to catch some politicians that indirectly cause death and hardship to millions and yet the law enforcement is focused on catching another student who dared to use wrong plant to relax after tough day.
>To paraphrase someone I know, "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like".
>Once they have this ability, it will be much harder to make them give it up.
There's an argument to be made that this is already happening and, in fact, has been happening for decades.
I'm of course referring to the "War on Drugs."
There's quite a bit of analysis in the literature to show that restrictions on mind-altering substances was explicitly introduced to disadvantage particular populations.
What's more, despite popular perception[0], the "crime" rate is at its lowest levels in more than 50 years[1], yet we continue to fund[2] law "enforcement" at levels even higher than when we were at the peak of the "crime" rate during that time.
So. Since crime rates have plummeted, yet we're spending more than ever, it's likely your paraphrase is already the case right now.
Having watched the newspaper coverage of the debacle involving Breonna Taylor with neighborhood interest, it's very clear how much the War on Drugs has caused so much pain for so little gain. There are so many facts involved that make it harder and harder to not cynically and conspiratorially believe there was some sort of personal vendetta involved and the media circus a cover up (the latest word is the city's Drug Enforcement SWAT team throwing the cops involved under the bus for not complying with Drug Enforcement accountability procedures in a warrant search involving a person's residence and throwing the entire department under the bus for trying to execute too many warrants at the same time spreading itself too thin and not following procedures). Occam's Razor still suggests outrageous ineptitude was involved, and the feeling of a conspiracy is just cops doing what they always do and protecting their own as long as they can before only breaking ranks just when public scrutiny gets too tough.
(But the detective that put together the residential warrant "bundled" it with a bunch of non-residential warrants, nearly burying/hiding it, when it took it to the Judge to be signed, and then again the SWAT team now says that the residential warrant execution plan was buried in the same swamp of non-residential warrant executions, and it's really hard to keep from wondering if that was malice or incompetence as all these details come out. Was it personal? Or was it dumb luck? I can't even tell which is worse at this point, because either seems to show a lack of responsibility, and both are worsened by likely what will continue to be a lack of consequences or atonement.)
serious q: encryption challenges the authority of government and the power of its leaders. Why would they willingly give up this power, when they can manufacture consent[1] via a perpetual state of war[2] ?
While morally reprehensible, endless "safe" wars are pretty profitable for industry owners if they are run in countries that do not target their valuable industries. Since the tax payer is footing the bill for it all, they're the ones who have to concent to it. Or perhaps not.
Using the invasion of Iraq as an example, there has been many years where public opinion was negative, or at least lukewarm, towards the invasion, though not violently so. Casually reviewing the polling history, this can be observed as early as in 2004. [1] But I think one can safely say that the war hasn't been at the forefront of most people's minds during the last few decades, except for the very beginning. But then, there has been very little mention of the financial cost of the war in the media, if any. And why would there be, as the media also earns a lot of money on these "safe" wars.
The video “Troops Versus Building --- an Iraq War tale” by soldier grunt Blacktail should give you a pretty hands-on idea of the financial cost of the war, however. [2]
Spot on. And further more, any appeals to safety from politicians should be shouted down as the misdirection that they are.
The root of 99% of crime in the US is poverty. Not private communication.
Trying to solve poverty by spying on everyone’s data is like trying to cure cancer with Tylenol. Even if you temporarily prevent a symptom from occurring, you're still dying of cancer.
So much of political thought in the US is focused on the futile efforts of treating symptoms, and not curing underlying causes.
And the worst part is, if you look at statistics in the rest of the developed world, poverty in fact has a cure! Like in most things, the US is the head-in-the-sand stubborn outlier here.
Everyone should be able to read private politician's correspondence and what they are up to. We should also know their bank accounts and their location at all times. Why should government know those things about us but we can't know that about them? That's a modern slavery.
Everybody should be able to read the private correspondence of politicians? That's absurd. Politicians are (believe it or not) people too, and have families, and relationships, and private lives. We should absolutely be able to read all their work related material, but private things should stay private.
I agree. If we allow the state to start reading all of our correspondence, we are going to start losing our freedoms at a far faster rate than we already have.
Reflecting on this I think we're watching the wrong people.
Politicians in general have shown they don't have the moral probity to be trusted to direct a democracy.
We need a sort of reverse-Stasi. Everything a senior politician does should be reviewed and only closed if it is provably personal and without public interest.
> And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar efficient in fighting street level crime.
You give too much credit to police states.
What happens in reality is that criminals with connections and a minimum of self restrain are folded into the "dark side" of the State, while their rivals are cracked down hard. In this way, a number of low-impact, high-revenue illegal activities are tolerated (in exchange of bribes), crime syndicates are expected to self police and not break whatever taboos were imposed from above; and then this "dark side" of the government do put a lid on top of the deviant side of society, diverting their energies into activities that do not challenge the status quo.
Does it make for a safer place to live for the common citizen? Maybe. While it may be less likely that you will be injured in an armed robbery, you will also be more likely to get your money swindled by this scheme or another... and you will have less chance of redress when this happens.
Rather than calling for backdoors, or secret rooms, this law explicitly prevents civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution for companies that refuse to install backdoors or use end to end encryption that they cannot crack.
I'm not really sure what the EFF is unhappy with about this act, since their complaints don't seem to be reflected in the text.
From the act:
CYBERSECURITY PROTECTIONS DO NOT GIVE RISE TO LIABILITY.—Notwithstanding paragraph (6), a provider of an interactive computer service shall not be deemed to be in violation of section 2252 or 2252A of title 18, United States Code, for the purposes of subparagraph (A) of such paragraph (6), and shall not otherwise be subject to any charge in a criminal prosecution under State law under subparagraph (B) of such paragraph (6), or any claim in a civil action under State law under subparagraph (C) of such paragraph (6), because the provider—
“(A) utilizes full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services;
“(B) does not possess the information necessary to decrypt a communication; or
“(C) fails to take an action that would otherwise undermine the ability of the provider to offer full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services.”.
> Sen. Leahy’s amendment prohibits holding companies liable because they use “end-to-end encryption, device encryption, or other encryption services.” But the bill still encourages state lawmakers to look for loopholes to undermine end-to-end encryption, such as demanding that messages be scanned on a local device, before they get encrypted and sent along to their recipient.
How does the bill encourage that? Unless I'm really missing something, the language in the new child pornography section is the same as the current language in section 230e covering sex trafficking. That existing sex trafficking clause hasn't done any of the things that the EFF says this new one will do.
The original Earn It Act was bad. But that bad stuff has been massively ripped out. Plus real protections for privacy added in. It's not the same as it was - look up the text and compare what's been struck through with what is left.
I think in the current form it's a definite win for privacy and common sense.
All of you smart arses out here and there, we know it, we know. We know, VPNs and other stuff in between are not so secure and not private. Stop saying it, don't you have some other piece of knowledge to be proud of? for god's sake. Tor and Signal are better than Public Cloud, Chrome & SMS if you're looking for privacy. Don't you have common sense?
- HTTPS is more secure and private than HTTP
- Signal is more secure and private than SMS/Skype/Messenger
- Tor/Browser is more secure and private than Cloud/Chrome
- FileVault, BitLocker and LUKS are more secure and private than RAW unencrypted disk data
- 2FA and Hashing is better than raw Passwords
- List goes on and on.
All you have to do is: get out of your desperate situation where "everything's controlled", because it's not true, at least not everything. We don't have the best security and privacy but we have some of it AND we need to fight to keep and expand it.
Now go on and tell me how smart you are and how you see things different and generalize stuff again in replies. Or you can just shut up and stand up to contribute and improve it.
1) Yes, you can build better encryption and privacy preserving technology. That is a technology and adoption problem.
2) There is so much you can do once the law says you can’t encrypt certain kinds of things and if you do, the state will be after you. That is a social problem. Our elected leaders aren’t serving us.
Not mutually exclusive. We have to do both. Build better tech, educate others and esp our politicians who can change the fabric of society.
3) People are willing to sacrifice freedoms to protect kids, likely a result of not understanding the complexities of such a nightmarish problem and how much freedom will have to be sacrificed and how little protection will be gained at great cost. Why? Because our society does not allow us to perform cost benefit analysis on a child's well being despite reality giving us no such relief as removing the need for such.
> Because our society does not allow us to perform cost benefit analysis on a child's well being
I hate this sooo much! Having children really makes some people entirely unable to think. I've heard people entirely willing to outlaw any form of encryption to "protect" their children from pedophiles despite the likelihood of getting their identity stolen, bankrupt and unable to feed their children being significantly higher than a pedophile targeting their child even now, and would increase by several orders of magnitude if we suddenly weren't allowed to encrypt things like e-banking and email.
This tirade and "go improve it" recommendation may make sense in a vacuum, without governments undermining encryption and criminalizing parts of the activities to provide secure, private comms "because terrorism/pornography/covid/whatever".
In the real world, many states freely admit that they will fight against secure, private messaging between citizens (say, because law enforcement needs a backdoor to solve crimes). And while governments can, and do, make laws to that effect, improvement will be legislated away beyond a certain point. This also produces a chilling effect on engineering: why work on a technology that will likely be outlawed if successful?
In most cases when the government is making laws to criminalize X trying to overpower it with better engineering just does not work. My 2c.
Why not work on said technology? It can even end up being very lucrative to take up the cause. Do you forget that prior to the 90s (and also during part of the 90s) much of the lead-in to the completely common, widely commercially and privately used digital encryption we have today was completely discouraged or even made illegal by governments except for their own use.
It was a generation of pioneers who weren't quite so timid about working on new technology and fight absurd, archaic laws that built the foundations of modern consumer/commercial encryption. The U.S government especially tried very hard to chill these efforts too, and failed (so far at least).
Both can be done, activist opposition, and a practical move to build the tools that make circumventing such privacy-hating regulatory nonsense all the more easy to pull off. More simply put: while active public opposition to bad laws is good, few things nullify bad laws better than a fait accompli that's out of the bag.
The first half I disagree with: if a law is passed, circumvention tools won’t help. This is what it seems like you have been arguing for up till now, and frankly not getting traction.
However, the second part (about the fait accompli) is a very important point.
You’d have to achieve widespread usage among the general population for this to be effective to be effective.
I don't see how you could disagree on the first point though. Not only is is often done today to varying degrees of success depending on country and technology, it was exactly how much of consumer crypto got its start back in the earlier days of the internet. During the 90's technologies like RSA, PGP and others basically got built and released while constantly treading all over extremely shaky legal ground. It was their widespread usefulness and steadily growing adoption by users that allowed them to in effect circumvent archaic laws until they were simply recognized as legally usable.
I don't understand what people have against VPNs. I don't want my ISP knowing when I use Tor, since my ISP is in the same country as me and that makes it easier for them to have access to me if they wanted to. Using a VPN means my ISP only sees me connecting to a VPN (which is arguably more innocuous). Then you can use Tor from there. And if you only use HTTPS sites, then only you and the end site can read the traffic. And obviously don't login to accounts created outside of Tor or that use details that can lead back to your real identity.
We today probably have the best privacy tools in all of recorded history. Modern encryption means that anyone on the planet can send a message to anyone else on the planet without fear of government decryption in transit (asymmetric public keys, Tor, PGP, pick your tools). Using freely available tools I can encrypt a file on a USB drive in a way that even an NSA data center running for a billion years wouldn't decrypt. Those sorts of things were not possible a hundred years ago. They weren't really possible only a generation ago.
We also today probably have the best surveillance tools in all of recorded history. Modern phones mean that anyone on the planet can have their location tracked in real time, and if exploited (perhaps by a malicious update to the OS or apps to add a backdoor), the most intimate information about the user can be harvested in bulk, or they can be watched and listened to, without being served a warrant, even in their own home. These sorts of things were not possible a hundred years ago. They weren't really possible only a generation ago.
I mean, fair enough to a lot of the above, but you’re decrying people saying VPN’s are insecure then showing how wrong they are by talking about six otherwise unrelated security technologies.
The VPN’s people will actually use are a poor trade-off that will leave most people with a false sense of security at best, and probably with significantly less rights over what happens to their data regardless.
Sit down dude. You think you are standing up for rights, but are making a case for weaker security by trusting, i.e. that MS and Apple won't backdoor you in an instant if they must. You are literally, actually, a shill, especially with this pompous presentation.
None of your list is better than nothing, if the authoritarians want your data. Except, maybe, Tor, and only if people contribute to running exit nodes.
If it isn't end-to-end, and only you know and control your keys, you are already doomed. In other words, you cannot trust any service with your keys. That includes https and signal.
> If it isn't end-to-end, and only you know and control your keys, you are already doomed. In other words, you cannot trust any service with your keys. That includes https and signal.
Things the EARN-IT bill (reminder: supposedly designed to protect children) doesn't do:
- Increase funding for child protective services & foster care services
- Increase funding for parents (EBT, social work, etc)
- Increase funding for schools (comprehensive sex ed, etc)
Because our priority is kids! Honestly! Seriously I mean it!
Are you mad that laws against murder (reminder: supposedly designed to protect people) don't include funding for domestic abuse shelters, food pantries, social workers, relocation programs, job retraining, college tuition assistance, and comprehensive sex ed?
This kind of rhetoric is so boring at this point. Trying to destroy a proposal via scope creep is intellectually dishonest and does little more than weaken your own sides position. If I was a senator on the fence about this bill and this was the best argument you could muster against it it would be an easy yea.
Nobody anywhere is challenging the laws again child abuse. What they are challenging is the laws attempting to decrease it or catch people doing it through means that don't actually work and harm other important things.
To use your example, it's like writing a law "against murder" that's written in a way that actually doesn't make murder illegal and also bans seat belts.
In fact, this "scope creep" you mention is exactly how laws work. First you make murder illegal (done), then you start looking at the common causes for murder and find ways to fix those.
> The EARN IT Act cynically uses crimes against children as an excuse to hand control of online privacy and speech over to state legislatures
I like the idea of federal legislature ceding power to state legislatures.
Additionally, it looks like encryption is offered more protections in this bill, Considering federal laws preempt state, especially with regard to telecommunications, I do not see what the risks are with passing this(regarding encryption).
The bill ammends Section 230(e) of the Communications Act of 1934.
> CYBERSECURITY PROTECTIONS DO NOT GIVE RISE TO LIABILITY.—Notwithstanding paragraph (6), a provider of an interactive computer service shall not be deemed to be in violation of section 2252 or 2252A of title 18, United States Code, for the purposes of subparagraph (A) of such paragraph (6), and shall not otherwise be subject to any charge in a criminal prosecution under State law under subparagraph (B) of such paragraph (6), or any claim in a civil action under State law under subparagraph (C) of such paragraph (6), because the provider—
“(A) utilizes full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services;
“(B) does not possess the information necessary to decrypt a communication; or
“(C) fails to take an action that would otherwise undermine the ability of the provider to offer full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services.”.
I won't challenge the bill directly, but I'll point out that putting "crimes against children" front and center smells of misdirection, so it begs the question of what's really the bill's goal (though that could be just bad campaigning). Also, Edward Snowden spoke out against this bill. That's hearsay, but personally I've a fair amount of trust in his assessments.
The meat of the bill is that it establishes a commission (yes yet another, unpaid though!) that will establish and forward best practices to AG Barr concerning child sexual exploitation online. It is possible that one of the recommendations might be establishing a backdoor. In the future that recommendation would then be used to argue for legislation.
Snowden is great, but do your own research.
Edit: I usually trust Snowden as well. I could be missing something in this bill. EFF did not provide specifics. Hopefully someone here can.
> Just a few months ago, Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) delivered an ominous threat to Apple, Facebook, and any other tech company that might refuse to kill encryption programs that prevent malicious hackers, law enforcement officers, and others from accessing our private communications systems: "You're going to find a way to do this or we're going to do it for you."
> Graham has authored the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2019 — or EARN IT Act [...]
Lindsay Graham has repeatedly sought to weaken encryption and mandate backdoors and key escrow. Also in June this year following the EARN IT Act he introduced the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act (LAED) which would mandate backdoors:
LEAD is extreme and has little support. It is widely believed that the LAED was not intended to be passed but is meant to help pass the EARN IT Act by making the EARN IT Act seem like a more moderate and reasonable piece of legislation.
The EARN IT Act is really a ploy by Lindsay Graham and others to bypass Congress on this issue which they cannot otherwise get passed, and allow a small group of people who are not even security experts to develop regulation and mandates (which will probably be against encryption) under the guise of fighting child porn.
The basis of the arguments in that article are based on items that have been stricken from the Act. That article and the EFF post are out of date. Compliance with "best practices" is no longer part of the bill. As of right now there is no teeth to the bill.
Handing national interstate matters over to states has proven to always be a terrible idea as it leads to a selective representation as they rule over far more than can vote for them. Doing so for the internet is doubly terrible given that location of all parties isn't reasonably known ahead of time nor usually relevant.
I don't think I've been paying enough attention but how does this work? The FBI, Police, and some congress members afaik have been talking about the going dark problem for years and now suddenly they pass a bill that explicitly protects companies from liability if they implement end to end encryption etc? Huh?! And why is EFF so wrong about this if that is correct?
Maybe it has something to do with "Notwithstanding paragraph (6)"
Notwithstanding means in spite of paragraph 6. So 7(see above) preempts 6(see below).
“(6) NO EFFECT ON CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION LAW.—Nothing in this section (other than subsection (c)(2)(A)) shall be construed to impair or limit—
“(A) any claim in a civil action brought against a provider of an interactive computer service under section 2255 of title 18, United States Code, if the conduct underlying the claim constitutes a violation of section 2252 or section 2252A of that title;
“(B) any charge in a criminal prosecution brought against a provider of an interactive computer service under State law regarding the advertisement, promotion, presentation, distribution, or solicitation of child sexual abuse material, as defined in section 2256(8) of title 18, United States Code; or
“(C) any claim in a civil action brought against a provider of an interactive computer service under State law regarding the advertisement, promotion, presentation, distribution, or solicitation of child sexual abuse material, as defined in section 2256(8) of title 18, United States Code.
The "best practices by a committee they control" requirement which is carte blanche. They could easily set it to considering "key escrow" or "master key" backdoors.
Yeah I think that is the big question that will need to be answered. Would failing to implement such a key escrow scheme qualify for protection under the clause:
> "(C) fails to take an action that would otherwise undermine the ability of the provider to offer full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services.”
My guess is no since even with a key escrow scheme the messages can still be encrypted end to end. Its just that there is another party which may be able to decrypt it later.
But the worst thing that happens if you fail to implement the best practices is that you lose section 230 protections. If you're and E2E messaging app or the author of device encryption software you don't need section 230 protections to begin with.
>I like the idea of federal legislature ceding power to state legislatures.
I don't, because I'm sure most state legislatures are even less informed on the importance of online encryption than Congress is. Doubly so if you live in a red state.
I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security (against state level actors) already. Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed. Platforms are as easy to regulate, as for example the telephone companies were back in the days.
They were easily forced to comply with wiretapping demands of the government.
The moment a central platform controlled (most of) our communication and was able to provide security to the users by using encryption, legislators realized the danger and also the solution. They would just need to force these central hubs with laws as they did back in the day. Legislation was/is needed to break users' encryption and give government the access to all communication that was lost with modern forms of communication and encryption.
So on one hand, it is "just" a return to a previous state of affairs. On the other hand, given for example today's methods of automatically listening in and transcribing voice to text, this would be a way more massive intrusion and control mechanism.
Exactly. I see this defeatism all the time regarding climate change too. It's OK to feel defeated. But why the hell would you spend energy to spread that defeatism?!
> I see this defeatism all the time regarding climate change too.
And I see people suggest that we aren't completely screwed because we got 10,000 people to walk down a street one time. Its an insane position and we need dramatic measures that the human race in its current form are unable to enact.
* Climate change is going to happen because people like cars and supermarkets and nobody is asking anyone to _actually_ sacrifice anything. Much of the climate change movement is "someone else should do something about it" and those that cut themselves by going "off-grid" just make themselves quieter and are replaced by twenty more people with growing carbon footprints.
* Online security is fucked because the vast majority of people can't handle more than a modicum of detail. Its on the technical class (i.e. the 5%-15%) to protect it by hook or crook. It will lose in a democratic battle to preserve it because people aren't interested enough to care and its too complex.
My suggestion is that defeatism posits a better question to answer: "What do we do once we've lost?".
The answer to that question yields something useful instead of the suspension of disbelief that the human race will suddenly turn over a new leaf.
you're being facetious. We don't "have to first lose", its just the very likely outcome is that we will lose.
That's not to say its not worth trying but that we should assume failure, otherwise you end up like the UK's Brexit negotiators who were "all-in" on the "oh they'll buckle as the time runs out" strategy and have no plan if that doesn't pan out beyond "so what now?".
The basic strategy right now seems to run on the basic belief that human-kind will figure out its slowly destroying its habitat and change accordingly. I don't think we've even managed to all figure out the extent of the destruction let alone even start to change accordingly.
What habits have we changed since the 1990s within our population to cut global carbon emissions? I'm struggling to glue a couple of things together. If I'm not mistaken, global air travel has _soared_ within that time window and everyone is just sitting on their hands under the mistaken belief that renewables will bail us out while we all still drive in a car to go to the supermarket.
"it's not a waste of energy to spread depressing truths."
It certainly is, if those "truths" are not absolutes. Find a way to redirect your -- and others' -- energies toward something positive and constructive. Spreading doom and gloom, full stop? Always a waste.
Saying negative things is just negative, full stop, as already stated. You can make this positive by suggesting a solution or asking someone qualified to suggest one and then helping them achieve it.
> Saying negative things is just negative, full stop.
I dunno, I'm not sure that's always an absolute. Example: your boss says the budget has been slashed and the department head will be downsizing the whole department by 50% in the coming months. This is very obviously a negative thing, but is your boss doing you a disservice by giving you a heads up? "Oh but he should give me guidance that I should work diligently but also prepare resumes and look into other options." Of course they should and it would be really nice if they also could find out for sure if your head is on the chopping block- but let me ask you this: even if your boss doesn't offer this very obvious advice or have any insight into the department head's persona non grata list, is knowing about this negative truth a net-negative for any employee this concerns? Of course not.
Or even more relevant to HN: a very outgoing individual who loves the face-to-face environment of the office has just been told that the CEO has decided everyone will be 100% remote starting next week until 2022. Is being told this negative truth a net-negative for the social butterfly employee who now at least has a brief chance to wrap their head around the idea and mentally prepare for the change instead of being blindsided?
Sometimes simply raising awareness that a negative thing is happening isn't a bad thing.
> I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security (against state level actors) already. Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed.
This is very pessimistic. People still can understand the dangers (and are understanding) and switch to decentralized platforms, which by the way are actively being developed: https://joinmastodon.org.
There is nothing to say that 'decentralized' will be better for us on the whole.
Facebook and Google actually do a relatively good job of protecting our data. They have to live up to specific claims by government, which some people don't like, but otherwise, it's pragmatically safe.
'A million servers' here and there, without process, oversight, 'a lot to lose', lack of transparency, and it might be a whole lot worse for most people.
'Many leaks' at small companies may not have the public and regulatory impact as a 'single big leak' at G or FB.
For 'the tech literate' who know how to manage themselves, it may open up avenues of greater security, but for the net-plebes, not so much.
Think about the freedom that comes with ample food + health and lifestyle choices. Some people are incredibly more fit and healthy than any other people in history, but most of us are somewhat more sedentary, we eat to much, don't exercise enough.
Well, if a mastodon instance admin decides to ban you, that's their personal decision. You can go to another instance.
If another user blocks you, that's on them but you have no right to push your messages into another user's home system.
If all else fails, you can host your own. It's ultimate free speech as intended and as someone who hosts a mastodon instance, it's a system that works pretty good, there is no noticeable hatespeech in my federated timeline.
edit: I might have misunderstood the GP, but I'll let the comment exist. Banning mastodon in the US is a non-concern since it's a french open source development.
I think tokamak meant they will be banned by law, which sadly I can see happening - it effectively happened already with napster and bittorrent in some jurisdictions.
I can't. Napster was shut down for copyright infringement. Bittorrent is blocked in some places on similar grounds (although, notably, BitTorrent itself is still alive and well - the law enforcement action has been against distributors of copyrighted materials and sites like TPB).
But even if someone really wanted to get Mastodon banned and created a server full of illegal material to give politicians the fuel they'd need, the law enforcement answer there would be to go after that host. The overall network would not be liable because it wouldn't be hosting/distributing the material.
Once the illegal activity is defined as running the software itself, because it cannot be done legally, then all hosts become liable, regardless of what they host. Simply by launching it, you would have broken the law.
To fight this, please use Mastodon and/or create an instance in it. It must become as widespread as possible to become the norm, then it cannot be (easily) banned.
The authoritarian stream in the EU are already working on something similar, but it will be a much harder sell and i still hope we can stop it, before it is too late.
I fin it very unlikely to see distributed social networks like Mastodon or Diaspora completely banned. In the US, this should be protected under the first amendment, in many other countries, it's protected under similar laws. And many countries don't care as much about violating their citizens' privacy as the US does.
And (more pessimistic future) you'll go to prison if you install such an app, or visit a website that tells you those apps exist.
Already happened in some countries.
B.t.w. someone wrote long ago here at HN that the 2nd amendment about weapons, nowadays should be about cryptography instead. Maybe:
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to [use end-to-end encryption], shall not be infringed.
Do you really see most people leaving the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter? I don't think they care about privacy enough to stop doing what's easy and fun
People have been leaving Facebook in droves. Hardly any of the original users use the platform regularly. Facebook has only remained relevant by buying relevant platforms as they start to take off. Companies that declines an offer or regulation to prevent this buy up behavior is what it takes. Social networks have no monetary buy in to discourage switching the moment your friends aren't on the platform any longer
You might get this impression if your main source of news is HN, but Facebook's monthly traffic among North American users has been steadily climbing quarter after quarter, year after year. Globally, it's up 8% YoY.
...and they've been flocking to Instagram (also Facebook is still huuuuge)
Companies that are willing to play dirty are the ones that get investment and also are the ones who retain users. They have an inherent advantage over any platform that tries to be moral -- or alternatively platforms that try to be moral have an inherent disadvantage. As long as privacy and respectful user experience is on the bottom of the list of priorities of most users they are the ones who will be able to build momentum, and I can't imagine what could happen to change that.
I like Telegram, but I‘m not sure it is the prime candidate for privacy / secure communication. Hopefully Matrix gains traction. Element is getting better but is still full of bugs...
I couldn't see Matrix in the play store, the web page is unusable: I wanted to try it, not ,,learn more''.
I installed Element, but it required username/password pair. I understand that it's a bit more secure than using phone number+email for first authentication, but it makes discovery of friends too hard. It trades too much UX for security, just like PGP.
I've not tried installing Element, but I imagine the app could gain the feature of automatically generating a password for you. Asking a user to select a username when joining a chat network seems like a reasonable UX, although having to pick a server is an extra burden.
Perhaps the creators of the app could partner with some big providers to allow the app to try creating your account on one of these providers at random (and keep trying different providers if your intended name is already taken on one that it tries).
I also agree with you about discovery of friends being hard unless users provide their phone numbers to a central server, so perhaps there should be an option for that when creating your account. This central database could run by an independent, audited, third party service. I'm not sure who could be trusted in that role (perhaps Let's Encrypt?), or how much it would cost, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Email is used for historical reasons, it wouldn't be good enough as a new service. If it disappeared, everybody would be just using Facebook for authentication / connecting with services.
Are you willing to cut yourself off completely from that 90%? Given current policies that third parties have no duty to protect and even a duty to provide their data to law enforcement, you can care about privacy all you want but if every person in your circle isn't just as vigilant you are still screwed. Once one person in your circle leaks data or metadata about you to a privacy unfriendly third party, you've lost the game.
Actual competition for ISPs / access provision is required for this. All consumer ISPs still ban "servers" on their pipes; this is a clear sign of insufficient competition.
My consumer ISP allows me to host servers. I can add on a static IP for a few bucks a month and as long as I don’t break any laws they’re cool with it.
Previously I had “business class” internet but that is just the name of the plan. Anywhere there was cable I could get business class plans.
> Anywhere there was cable I could get business class plans.
The one time I tried to get a business-class connection from Time Warner they refused to offer any business-class service to a non-commercial address except for their "Home Office" plan, which was basically just their top residential plan with a better SLA.
Then we should abandon those big platforms and move to millions of self-hosted personal mini-platforms. That way, you control your data, and you control who you share it with.
> That way, you control your data, and you control who you share it with.
Well, you already control who you share it with, as you're the one initiating connections to sites like Facebook. It just happens people give a lot away to browse sites these days (admittedly exactly what they're giving away remains quite opaque).
Unfortunately even if we did move to one-platform-one-person, the question of data control remains as murky as ever. Suppose you are hosting a party so you send your street address to your friends so they know where to show up. Then they play a fun quiz game that tells them their Harry Potter patronus based on the street address of their friends (that means you). Suddenly some anonymous quiz maker (let's call them Oxford Synthetica) has access to your street address and at least one of your friends' info through no direct fault of your own.
Government and coporations are just systems. If people want a certain thing those systems change. Simple as. However, change takes decades sometimes. Just form good privacy habits so you don't even feel any inconvenience. And most importantly, tell people. Get the idea across that privacy has value. Tell companies you've chosen competitors over them because of their privacy policy. Ask businesses how long they keep your data. Ask people if you can use alternative technology.
It really is a case that if you give up then it will be over. Just make it a part of your life. I'm not asking you to rally every week. Just don't forget about it and positive change will come.
"Once the net adopted the platform model, we were screwed. Platforms are as easy to regulate, as for example the telephone companies were back in the days."
Perhaps - and most fall into this category.
However, you do have the ability to form a (simple, cheap) SCorp/LLC in the US jurisdiction of your choice and provision your own mail/dns/vpn/etc. by that corporate entity.
So now a corporate entity is the provider, and you are the customer, and notices/subpoenas/takedowns/requests will be seen by you and you will take action on them.
At the very least, you can self-provide your own VPN this way if you don't want to run your own mail services.
Except state actors are currently also using the blanket privacy and security to influence elections. This is a couple of levels above talking crap about your government or buying some drugs.
And if that is to the point that it scares you that they'd lock you up for such behavior then you need better government, not better privacy.
> I strongly believe we have lost the war for privacy and security
You are mistaken counselor (c) The Descendants. These three easy things improve your privacy by 10x:
- Incognito / Private browsing by default. Clears cookies used by trackers and platforms. Staying logged in is bad. Login, do your thing and close the tab. No Chrome, it has its own Id.
- VPN. Hides your browsing history from ISP and your IP address from trackers and platforms. Smartphone too, and disable Location and Background app refresh for most apps.
- Adblocker (uBlock Origin / AdGuard for Safari, iOS too). Prevents trackers and malware from executing.
No, it is too harsh. These rules will work for most people. In social media, never share your address book and don't give your phone number, which is very powerful identifier. Unique email is good too.
That is just plain wrong. Even a distribuited model would have the same problems because they would be "platforms" to regulate. The truth is that they cannot win although they will demonstrate a mierdas touch and turn everything they touch to shit because what they are insane and demand the literally impossible. The "leadership" should probably be put in an insane asylum as a danger to self and others with no understanding of objective reality.
these are all just battles though and all that losing these battles does is pass more and more power to the technical class.
I know where I'm watched and how not to be watched, I know how to very easily hide the odd activity. The average citizen no longer gets that for free and it really sucks for them but remember that's what this has always been about, trying to improve the lot of the average, not us. We're fine because we know and can do.
So its elliptic curve time for messengers but everyone that "knows" will get some European or underground US piece of software on their phone via an unofficial app store.
That https was established as defacto-standard was a huge success and I don't think it will go away again.
Freedom only works with some responsibility, but it seems to me that state level actors just try to keep up with the ad and tech industry in collecting data.
The EFF tries to blame it on Barr, but I think the wish for control is bipartisan, especially since a generation is in charge that doesn't really understand the problems of this data collection. Not that their younger compatriots seem more promising in assessing actual problems.
There might be a point where using a Asian or African social network would be preferable, but that is something not on the mind of common social media users. Sure, they do it if the product has appeal like TikTok. On bad days I wish users of social media (the self presenting kind) would be banned from all other sites.
Wrote Feinstein and got a reply (?!) that EARN-IT is “misunderstood” and that she won’t stop supporting it womp womp. Why does this bill have any bi-partisan support?? Would expect there would at least be some large special interests funding an opposition... big companies rely on encryption to keep secrets.
Feinstein is always on the wrong side of copyright/patent/encryption bills. Just look up her voting record. She co-sponsored PIPA. See also https://www.wired.com/2016/04/senates-draft-encryption-bill-.... She co-sponsored the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, too.
Many people have a delusion that just because they find that one major party is bad then the other one must be good. It's part of a common psychological phenomenon that has us overlook flaws in our allies/friends/family because we need them and can't survive alone.
> big companies rely on encryption to keep secrets.
A lot of big companies have old and crusty leaders / owners, who do not understand the terms of this problem.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this bill pass and then get nerfed in a few years, once big corporations actually experience the operational cost and lobby to have it rolled back / made it optional for them.
It's really easy. You just have to say that the backdoors are a method to stop [very big bad] from happening and that without it, you're supporting [very big bad].
The thing we have to come as a society is willing to accept that sometimes [very big bad] will happen, but a lack of back doors is more important.
Sadly Australia did the opposite - they can force us to backdoor applications and punish us for refusing. Australia is not the place to look for security applications.
As an Australian, my plan is to route most of my traffic through a self hosted VPN on a server that resides outside the five eyes (and possibly also the extended thirteen eyes).
Yes, there are insecurities and holes in the above, pending the methods of implementation, but it's one level of potentially many.
And whilst it's good to know that there are technical workarounds such as this, the real work, the real progress for society, is to make these technical workarounds unnecessary by, as the EFF says, contacting your representatives and letting them know what they're constituency thinks. Politics, sickeningly, is the only avenue for worthwhile change.
When asked about how the law would ban certain mathematical operations, IIRC the Australian PM said something along the lines of "The laws of mathematics should be subservient to the laws of Australia"
PGP was specifically created to combat this sort of legal threat. It is proof that encryption is ultimately controlled by individuals. The identity management is completely decentralization and it works over pretty much any medium.
It seems that the world has somehow forgotten the lesson. People can only see the centralized systems and don't realize that the problem they are trying to solve is not solvable in general. Encryption is unstoppable.
Average Joes routinely use PGP on the darknets. So we even have a good current example of how encryption used in crime can come in a form that this legislation is powerless against.
Encryption might be unstoppable but they can always just assign you an IPV6 address and encryption fingerprint that becomes your new online social security number that is required from the compiler on up.
Notarize your apps buddy and sign into your app account... ;)
The threat here is not against anonymity, it is against encryption.
You can make as many PGP identities as you want and associate them with any sort of identity you desire, so there might be a political point available with respect to anonymity as well in some situations.
Would this have any affect on software developed outside of the USA? The USA is becoming increasingly irrelevant on the world stage. Couldn’t a company in some other country create a browser with encryption that any of us could use? Could Apple move iOS development offshore and continue creating a mobile OS with encryption?
Apple has already stated (with regards to China) that they will respect the laws of the nation they are offering service in. So while they put up a constant assault against privacy invading moves in the US, they handed chicom the keys to iCloud with zero pushback.
If this passes you can be sure anything digital is no longer safe from alphabet agencies. Sadly the younger generation has no concern for privacy and the older generation likely has no clue their data is being siphoned. Advocates are too much of a minority to make a difference.
Already today, as a European iOS developer with your apple developer program contract counterparty being their European corp, you still have to deal with US export restrictions and self reporting paperwork if you make a single HTTPS call in your iOS app (because somehow, your app is being exported from "iTunes in the US" even when both you, your app, your target audience, and the counterpart of your development program are European entities)...
Not necessarily affecting software developed outside the US, but most likely if your non-US company has communications in your app and US customers, you'll be screwed. For consumers, vice versa with using apps from FAANG since your communications will now be affected by nonsense US laws. This is of course unless the big companies want to split their apps into US & Worldwide versions, which is probably not happening and would cause other forms of feature drift if they did so.
I wouldn’t bet against a USA-RoW split any more. ~90% of internet users are outside America now, and even accounting for income differences more than 2/3rds of the money is outside the USA.
Hmm. I'm not sure the Chinese government would agree with your first statement. They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.
Yes, I'm aware of some of the issues surrounding IP copying. I won't call it theft because the word is contentious and there are those in this forum who don't think you can steal ideas.
I'm also aware of the US' own history of gathering IP to bootstrap its industrial efforts. I guess that "but you did it first" isn't a good defence in law (not really sure of that, after all IANAL) but it makes the US case weaker in my eyes.
> They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.
Do you think that's related to China allowing zero domestic tech competition, but demanding that their companies be allowed to compete in the rest of the world?
America hasn't been trying that hard to make a power grab on shared tech like encryption, so it's possible that the rest of the world will have a fighting chance.
If a fair fight is one where everybody plays by the same rules, then America fights as fair as you can get.
The main issue with something like this though isn’t really about the rest of the world catching up to the US technologically. It’s a question of whether service providers would choose not operating in the US over following their rules. But given the size of the US market, you’d find a lot of service providers choosing to follow the rules.
Which is incidentally the same way EU nations enforce their laws on companies like Google. And how countries like France, Germany and UK would enforce the anti-encryption laws they’ve been trying for years to get on the books.
Most countries capable of doing that already have similar or even stricter laws. In a few decades there will be no country in the world that doesn't do something like this. It's over, the privacy war is already lost
I remember someone from here posting about how the user contacted Feinstein and got the most boilerplate response possible. They honestly do not care about the citizens at this point.
If you want them to care, stop by their offices and have a really rational talk with their staffers and the representative. If you can explain things with stories (for example, where a backdoor was used to crack ___ resulting in very personal damage to ____), you will change minds. Get 20-30 tech leaders to go meet with Feinstein and discuss how this will affect them. If she won't budge at that point, then maybe y'all need to vote for someone else. Encryption is easy to explain: if the good guys can use the backdoor, the bad guys will use the backdoor, to. The cops don't get keys to your car, safe, or home for the exact same reason.
You're assuming good faith in elected representatives and their staff.
I wonder if anyone in the last decade has _ever_ walked into their rep's office, talked to them, and changed their vote on a key issue. I really doubt it.
I have. Multiple times, but not every time. Reps get close to zero direct interaction with constituents. It's usually filtered by a group with an agenda (petitions, campaigns). When you go as a citizen and talk (not scream or debate) about an issue that really matters, you will get their ear. You may not get the vote you want, but you will be take seriously, and the staff and rep will discuss what you are bringing to them. If you have 2-3 people approach your rep with the same problem it will have the same effect as a petition with thousands of signatures.
Actually, reality is counterintuitive. Being in congress is a terrible job where you do not even have time to read 1/2 of the bills you are going to vote on this week. So you count on others to help you. Mostly this is staffers, interns and lobbyists because those are the people who show up and help. If you as a citizen want to make change, then all you have to do is show up, in person and have a friendly conversation with the rep or even just with their staffers. Come with easy to understand stories, and be able to rationally talk about the other side. E.g. I realize that law enforcement has a strong story about encryption, but there is a reason we don't require home, car and safe buyers to give law enforcement a master key. Yes, some bad cops might steal, but what is worrisome is that the bad guys might get the the kes. That's exactly what they are asking for here: a master key.
For more information about how to interact and influence your government (it is, after all, made up of us, at least in the US -- and in other places too, but I'm American so I focus on that), check out Take Back Your Government[0] by Robert Heinlein.
If you're so scared about your government that your activity might get you thrown away for life and it doesn't involve murdering someone, then you need better government, not better security because those kinds of governments will just say you murdered someone without any proof and lock you up or kill you anyway if they don't like you.
Better government and better security are not mutually exclusive. You can work towards both simultaneously, and claiming that one negates the other is a logical fallacy.
Government exists solely for the purpose of negating security and life of bad actors who want to take away your rights. That is it's function, via the social contract.
That can only be broken in one of two ways. Either people don't care enough or they grow so distrustful of it that they don't participate in it or keep it in check.
When things like that happen you get elected officials decided by less than 40% of the country, anti-maskers, and asymmetric warfare in the streets to combat "the man". It's untenable.
I see heavy security with zero recourse by anyone to break it and anonymity is the top single problem with the Internet, not the lack of it.
We should all have to log on with our identification through a blanket "know your customer" law like they do to combat money laundering in banks, and our country of origin at least should be displayed. Other than that... You want encryption? Fine, but if your id links you to 4chan offshoots planning domestic terror attacks i should be able to report your address to the authorities and there should be social repercussions for bad behavior. And I need to know if you're Russian or from the US and that you're human before I engage in US politics with you.
Music got worse since Napster, Sean Parker was the guy who got Zuckerberg funded, Google is evil, and John Perry Barlow is dead.
I respectfully disagree with most of this. The last part was a bit all over the place though, not sure where exactly you were going.
Others who know history much better than me are far better equipped to debate against your position. If you really want a challenge, I would invite you to reply to the top comment in this thread by Jon_Lowtek to help open a discussion on the deeper merits of your position. For me personally, your arguments aren't very persuasive.
I'm saying that the big giant corporations and the giant governments we used to fight against died or became completely ineffective to do their jobs and the only thing that happened was giant corporations took their place that are far more unethical than what they replaced... Funded and led by the same people who were once the underdogs!
I am aware of history as much to know that the Internet was designed by a bunch of people who talked on Ham radio and wanted a secure place to sell drugs to each other without being caught by the fuzz. They hated Ma' Bell. That's why it's designed the way it is. Then later it became the RIAA and the rest. I know all of that and if anything that's hardened my position on this, not decreased it. We don't live in the 1960s or the 1990s anymore, and what's worse is everything the people said during that time about how society would be if we went "full retard' into "fight the man" hipsterism and the subsequent deregulation of everything actually happened. Nobody laughs at Al Gore or Tipper these days, or Lars Ulrich for that matter.
Do you like musicians making a penny on a song leaving no room for art just lowest common denominator crap, the rise of the marxist/fascist camps that are hurling what was once a promising country that was getting over it's growing pains straight into 1920s/30s Germany at lighting speed, the totally unfiltered and unmoderated filth that is 4chan, etc? Or do you just ignore it because "some day blah blah blah dictator might take control" yet we are the closest we have ever been to a dictatorship because of faceless social manipulation technique where we have no clue who or where anyone we talk to is, whether they're paid, etc?
Not everyone is an engineer out looking for how things work. It's the same error the founding fathers made with the enlightenment thinking everyone is going to become smarter if you just opened everything up. It's complete baloney, people will just use the power vacuum to seize it for themselves because they make the most noise. Nobody cared about Aaron Swartz except the hacker community. Snowden sold out to the Russians from the beginning. And you're sitting there still in the year 2000 when all this stuff was new and the only ones who spoke were nerds and we all agreed on basically everything.
The point is that everything that this theory set out to solve, became worse. More nationalistic, more poor musicians with even bigger giant platforms controlling their art, more corrupt, more propagandized, etc. Not less. Everyone knows it. The other point is that instead of tearing stuff down and engaging in subversive activities for the same ends, maybe it's time to focus on making the systems you have better. Not turn it into some weird mix of The Matrix, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. They're just as bad of an instruction manual as 1984 was to be honest.
This implies that said governments are bad. Or have the perception of it.
You know who benefits from VPNs, privacy, and security?
The proud boys. Russia. China. Steve Bannon. And their bots, that's who. They are a threat to civil society at present, and they're using that very privacy and security to organize to destroy the thing you're trying to "protect" by drinking Barlow's kool-aid.
I prefer the idea of internet governance via third party instead of the state. Flip it on it's head, where instead of government spying on everyone, we're in control of the surveillance democratically through consensus. But there needs to be some kind of governance of some kind.
What i don't get, yes you can force Facebook to implement Backdoors, but how would you do that with a opensource project like Matrix or even the full opensource Android?
>- block access ala GFW, ensuring that most people will have difficulty accessing it or using it
depending on sofistication of that solution you could imagine some forms of tunnelling to be efficient against that (IP-over-X). Then of course due to the complexity this workaround will be used by a tiny fraction of users.
>- block access to any data you cannot decrypt or from an endpoint you cannot backdoor
steganography would be a solution to this, you can decrypt the cat pictures I'm exchanging with friends but you may not be able to notice that those images have hidden content (which may also be encrypted)
>- do nothing, knowing that most users will avoid using anything that isn't one of the major web platforms
this seems to be a guaranteed-to-succeed solution. Probably much better than
>- run some kind of propaganda campaign on the evils of using unsanctioned software (supporting terrorism etc.)
since there is always a risk that this may backfire and encourage resistance in some groups
>go after creators and ensure some kind of backdoor is inherent to the project
>shut down projects by exerting pressure on developers
The developer probably just going to the press with that, no need to damage your own private centric project, sure the NSA can say they never did that so the developers can ignore it OR they openly say it was them, then the project just can change the country.
>run some kind of propaganda campaign on the evils of using unsanctioned software (supporting terrorism etc.)
>do nothing, knowing that most users will avoid using anything that isn't one of the major web platforms
Those are probably the only viable solutions, but on the other hand it's pure marketing for the product, like banning telegram in Russia.
It's only important to break thinks like matrix if you want to catch dedicated criminals. If you're just trying to sway elections and blackmail people then Facebook (WhatsApp) , Gmail, etc more than covers what you need.
Plus if you really really want to know what's happening there, call the NSA. They'll send a few chaps to join the matrix dev community. Or they'll use other tools to access the machines in question. And you can do that to the 0.01% of people that actually switch after mainstream tools become insecure in a way you can't when there are billions of people using encryption by default.
One of the key revelations from Snowden was that all that stuff that seemed far fetched or paranoid to us, wasn't just happening, it was routine and much more advanced stuff was also going on.
It's also much easier to target Matrix etc when you don't have to target all of Facebook because you have a backdoor there. Reducing the NSAs workload by 99% makes the other 1% much easier because they have 100 times the resources to spend on it.
You should also consider as a swiss citizen that US law is increasingly world law. If you sit in Switzerland and contribute to a project banned by US law, they may well have you extradited to spend the rest of your life in a US prison. They're doing that to Assange right now. They've done it to others as well. Locking up foreigners is quite in-style in the US at the moment... I haven't read the bill, so I don't know what the criminal sanctions are for failing to provide backdoors...
So to hide a backdoor in a opensource software it's the best solution to tell the world that you (the NSA) is actively working on a Project? Like SELinux? Man do you think they are stupid? They work on those projects to make their own infrastructure more secure, don't you think every one looks on their fingers/commits?
>You should also consider as a swiss citizen that US law is increasingly world law
That's Bullshit, was probably half true in the Cold War era but for sure not today.
> They're doing that to Assange right now.
That's England, you know those little dogs of yours.
Per the links above, they didn't tell anyone, Snowden outed them.
In the cold War it was true of the western world and the USs use was limited because the US wanted to look gentle and reasonable. Today it's true for most of the planet and the US wants to look tough.
If you don't like the Assange case (I agree the brits are lap dogs, but that case actually got kicked off in Sweden and was handled under EU law much more aggressively than the in UK), try the FIFA case. The US ordered Switzerland to arrest and extradite foreign nationals, many had never set foot in the US for trial, Switzerland obeyed...
I don't like any of this. But it's time to abandon our innocence. If you're working on any meaningful project in encryption, the NSA are at least aware of you. The US are happy to use covert methods to undermine you if they think its worth it (and the bar is low). If you're important enough (or a DA wants to expense some flights) they'll use overt methods. Proceed at your own risk and don't assume that America banning encryption doesn't make it illegal for you just because you're a Swiss citizen in Switzerland.
>Proceed at your own risk and don't assume that America banning encryption doesn't make it illegal for you just because you're a Swiss citizen in Switzerland
Yeah i stop here...
BTW from your first article about android:
>So, if it’s not looking to plant backdoors, what’s the NSA’s business with Android? Ironically, the agency has been working to make Android more secure.
AND
>It is just as preposterous to think that the best way to gain access to any operating system is to publicly announce that you are contributing to the OS, and make the tainted code accessible to anyone with an interest in it.
So it was NOT Snowden, but NSA itself.
Second Article about Coreboot:
>Myers published a paper about STM last year on how NSA’s STM implementation could work. All Coreboot code, including all the STM contributions from the NSA, are open source, so anyone could verify that there is no backdoor in there -- in theory.
You enforce it on the main providers. For Android, force Google to supply the backdoor (In Google Play Services), for Matrix force the hosted Element.io instance to provide it.
Even if the project is open source and development is distributed, there is often a major entity behind it driving it on which the requirements can be enforced.
Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to express them-self in public, but even more so in private correspondence. A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core.
And yet some still say: but if the state can read all private correspondence it would be so much easier to catch criminals. And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar efficient in fighting street level crime. However for society as a whole, such methods enable a terror of the state that is a crime against humanity itself. They say "but the state will never abuse its power" and i say: it did countless times before. Do not stray away from liberty and freedom for promises of safety made by those that profit from oppression.