[HN Gopher] Bugs in Our Pockets?
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Bugs in Our Pockets?
Author : etiam
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-10-15 13:11 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lightbluetouchpaper.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lightbluetouchpaper.org)
| uniqueuid wrote:
| This is a blog post on a paper [1] by Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson,
| Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Jon Callas,
| Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter G. Neumann, Ronald L.
| Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Vanessa Teague,
| Carmela Troncoso.
|
| To me, the gist is: There is no technical way to make client-side
| scanning psychologically trustworthy. There are many plausible
| policy threats.
|
| So this boils down to: The decisions is with governments (some of
| which are bad) and users (who don't give a collective fuck), so
| governments will begin to decide the fate of these systems.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > "We did not set out to praise Apple's proposal, but we ended up
| concluding that it was probably about the best that could be
| done. Even so, it did not come close to providing a system that a
| rational person might consider trustworthy."
|
| I think there needs to be more pressure on the EU to stop this
| law. Especially considering that they are already talking about
| expanding it to other stuff according to the linked article.
| Terrorism is supposed to be already on the roadmap to be next.
| After that? Fraud? Tax evasion? Pirated media? The databases for
| the latter are already there since social media are already
| required to block them.
|
| I think they should just accept that they can't always intercept
| everything and use targeted police work to make up for it.
|
| It also won't stop the worst offenders: Those making the actual
| content. Because at that point the material is not yet in any
| detection database as it's new. By the time the material is in
| those, the abuse is (sadly) already long done. So it's not a
| particularly effective way of preventing abuse either. It will
| help to stop the consumers of this stuff, but as the war on drugs
| has shown, that's not an effective method as it only raises the
| price and thus the profits for the criminals.
|
| What would work for that would be some machine learning algorithm
| that evaluates any content while you're shooting it on your phone
| and phones the police so they can come running. And for it to be
| forbidden to ever have your phone offline in order to circumvent
| this. That would probably be effective. It would also eliminate
| any semblance of privacy.
| kragen wrote:
| > If device vendors are compelled to install remote surveillance,
| the demands will start to roll in. Who could possibly be so cold-
| hearted as to argue against the system being extended to search
| for missing children? Then President Xi will want to know who has
| photos of the Dalai Lama, or of men standing in front of tanks;
| and copyright lawyers will get court orders blocking whatever
| they claim infringes their clients' rights. Our phones, which
| have grown into extensions of our intimate private space, will be
| ours no more; they will be private no more; and we will all be
| less secure.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Problem is, this is simply assuming that governments can't do
| that already. Anyone thinks that if president Xi wants to know
| who has photos of the Dalai, Apple is going to say no to any
| demand they make? Apple will be more than happy to oblige; they
| will censor, remotely disable apps, and push silent updates
| with location tracking and the like. I am quite sure this has
| already happened.
|
| This is actually why I dislike when "libertarian" organizations
| are all too happy to let the corporations have practically
| unlimited surveillance power, but when the democratically-
| elected government tries to do it on a smaller, specific scale?
| Then no, that shall not pass! Government bad!
|
| Well, I have some news. If your democratically-elected
| government is really ever going to turn Stasi/Fascist, Apple is
| not going to stand up to it, and they are going to be all too
| happy to share your data with them. Your government may right
| now still have some decency left, which means that they send a
| legal request to Apple instead of a secret letter from a three-
| letter-agency, but that is not going to be the case for a more
| evil one.
|
| The solution for sure involves preventing these corporations
| from having surveillance power, _in part by using government
| regulation_ since apparently citizens do not seem to understand
| the problem. A cultural change is also required, so that
| pervasive surveillance by corporations stops being seen as
| normal. Then when the government wants to do it they will have
| to roll their classy-old own spy tech, rather than just asking
| for the data to any corporation.
|
| This is yet another area where the market, "vote with your
| wallet" or "self-regulation" by the corporations themselves is
| not going to cut it. They need to be forced to avoid having
| access to this much data about their users.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| It's not about whether governments _can_ do it, it 's how
| easily it's accomplished.
|
| If it's as simple as the stroke of a pen, then it can and
| will be easily and frequently abused. If it's _technically_
| possible, but it requires diverse favours to many individuals
| and unusual behaviour and lots of manpower, it 'll rarely be
| considered and barely ever accomplished.
|
| A turnkey service, provided by an arm's-length organization
| like a corporation, is an almost irresistible lure. Good
| value prop for Apple, too; this'll generate favours for them,
| at least at first, when governments want the system used for
| this and that.
| kragen wrote:
| > The solution for sure involves preventing these
| corporations from having surveillance power, _in part by
| using government regulation_
|
| Well, certainly it is necessary to prevent those corporations
| from having surveillance power, because you're right that
| it's irresistible for governments to abuse it; but I suggest
| you find a strategy that doesn't rely on your opponent
| surrendering while he is in a superior strategic position.
|
| (While I disagree with your comment, I think it adds to the
| discussion, so I deplore the vandals who are downvoting it as
| if it were spam.)
|
| Historically, the motto has been, "Cypherpunks write code."
| Today, that's not enough; we need hardware.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I do agree that (seemingly paradoxically) privacy regulation
| is the key to preventing overbearing state and corporate
| spying.
|
| The paper actually has a few nice things to say on this.
| Among other passages:
|
| > Economics cannot be ignored. One way that democratic
| societies protect their citizens against the ever-present
| danger of government intrusion is by making search expensive.
| In the US, there are several mechanisms that do this,
| including the onerous process of applying for a wiretap
| warrant (which for criminal cases must be essentially a "last
| resort" investigative tool) and imposition of requirements
| such as "minimization" (law enforcement not listening or
| taping if the communication does not pertain to criminal
| activity). These raise the cost of wiretapping.
|
| > By contrast, a general CSS system makes all material
| cheaply accessible to government agents. It eliminates the
| requirement of physical access to the devices. It can be
| configured to scan any file on every device.
|
| I think the economics-based approach is very valuable here,
| especially because it is comparable across forms of
| government.
| h2odragon wrote:
| In "Ma Bell" times, they explicitly owned the instruments by
| which one connected to the phone network, and leased them too you
| for a monthly fee.
|
| We're coming back to that, but now we don't know who "owns" which
| rights to which use of our device and there's little hope of,
| say, legal redress where no "one company" is responsible.
| avivo wrote:
| It's crucial to distinguish between "client-side scanning" that
| reports to authorities and "on-device context"[1] that might use
| similar client-side/on-device technology to identify a piece of
| content--but does not either censor or report to authorities.
|
| Different use case, same underlying technology. Former is often
| very problematic, while IMHO the latter is almost universally
| helpful (for where it is applicable; e.g. not CSAM, yes misinfo).
|
| [1] https://aviv.medium.com/client-side-context-a-defense-
| agains...
| vardump wrote:
| We truly don't own our devices.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Just depends on what devices you buy. The options where you do
| own them are getting better and better.
|
| https://frame.work/
|
| https://puri.sm/
|
| https://pine64.com/
|
| https://system76.com/
|
| etc.
| vardump wrote:
| Yeah, been eyeing Framework laptops for a while.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| It is very overbearing to have this on what is essentially a
| cloud storage service. Especially when they also make it a lot
| more difficult for third-party cloud storage services to function
| effectively (being able to run in the background automatically
| when charging, etc).
|
| Now, if they wanted to implement this solely for "shared albums",
| that's a different conversation.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Fwiw the original paper was submitted 11hrs earlier:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28873435
| anonymousiam wrote:
| "We did not set out to praise Apple's proposal, but we ended up
| concluding that it was probably about the best that could be
| done. Even so, it did not come close to providing a system that a
| rational person might consider trustworthy."
|
| The best that could be done would be to not do it at all.
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