[HN Gopher] Signal president says company will not comply with U...
___________________________________________________________________
Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. 'mass
surveillance' law
Author : danboarder
Score : 393 points
Date : 2023-07-15 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| semiquaver wrote:
| Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new
| technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and
| practices available to analogous predecessors must remain
| available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining
| cryptography) but they don't feel the same way about public
| benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being
| replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???)
|
| It also seems like there's a tendency to relitigate battles that
| are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto
| wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by
| legal means were pretty decisively defeated.
|
| It's sad that precedents should only accrue to one side's
| benefit.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Well yes, they do. Encryption is a real issue for the mandate
| of a government, and also a real solution for other parts of
| the mandate of a government.
|
| It's not like we (as the broad community) are engaging with
| empathy. Even if there is maybe no great solution to the whole
| dilemma, it would help the entire thing, if we stopped camping
| on one side so entirely.
| int_19h wrote:
| Empathy is for persons, not for legal entities.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| All kinds of advantages go to one sides benefit.
|
| Can we set up an automated monitor on all the traffic cams and
| licence plate readers and facial recognition systems just to
| catch cops and politicians breaking laws or just to track their
| movements and associations the way they do to everyone else?
| Can we access the same cam footage that the state uses to
| accuse you of something, to clear you instead?
|
| Only occasionally and incompletely.
|
| For instance you might have access to whatever they submit as
| their proof, but they had access to the full footage and from
| many sources, and if you had that same access, maybe you'd find
| proof that you were elsewhere at the same time, or that the
| subject came from somewhere that isn't your house, or see them
| getting dressed just before going to commit the act, or was
| even the very cop bringing the charge, or show the greater
| context that when you drove through that red light, you had
| already waited 10 minutes and the light was actually broken, or
| the lights were out but the timer/switing mechanism was still
| ticking over so the cam just assumed the driver was shown a red
| light, etc.
| flir wrote:
| Ambient sousveillance. You'd have to get a critical mass of
| people who care enough to buy the hardware, deploy it, and
| release the video though.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I'm only talking about equal access to exactly the same
| whatever the state already has access to, not anything new
| or extra.
|
| The surveillance already exists, and is already being used
| only against you, rarely for you.
|
| If you or I shouldn't have unrestricted access to it, then
| neither should anyone else. If it is to exist, and anyone
| is to have access to it, then so should you and I.
| semiquaver wrote:
| I wish that I could believe this was possible. In pretty
| much every government on earth such a scheme would be made
| illegal on some pretext well before attainment of said
| critical mass.
| flir wrote:
| Plenty of private entities are already recording like
| crazy, so I assume it's the publication bit that you're
| thinking would be made illegal?
| [deleted]
| zirgs wrote:
| Wire-tapping didn't happen automatically. A judge had to
| authorise it during an active criminal investigation. Client
| side scanning would be equivalent to wire-tapping everyone at
| all times. This was something even totalitarian regimes could
| not do.
| derefr wrote:
| > but they don't feel the same way about public benefits or
| rights associated with other technology that is being replaced
|
| When the government creates a law within recorded history --
| something like a wiretapping law -- then the spirit of the law
| is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is
| that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the
| government to do a thing for the benefit of the public under a
| certain circumstance. So if technology changes, the spirit that
| the original law was defined under is expected to be upheld by
| the court when interpreting the law to suit cases outside its
| original scope.
|
| The problem with "legacy" common law -- things like "being able
| to transact anonymously using cash" -- is that there _is_ no
| clear "institutional memory" of the spirit that created the
| law. The people who invented "using gold coins as a common
| exchange for barter" weren't _thinking_ about anonymity -- and
| so it 's not clear whether anonymity is a _necessary_ or
| _desirable_ part of the spirit of cash transactions, something
| the public would desire to be preserved in a replacement
| system; or whether it 's just an "implementation detail" of the
| way cash _happened to need to work_ given technology, something
| that would make no sense to port over to the new system.
| [deleted]
| domador wrote:
| Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law
| be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in
| the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of
| that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time,
| but won't necessarily be that way to future generations.
|
| Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are
| like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the
| future you'd like to be able to edit the source code and
| recompile it, not blindly patch the binaries.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Quite often, we can't even get lawmakers to include the
| concept of inflation into the laws, so any fine or penalty
| with a set amount ends up being decayed into nothing over
| time.
| smugma wrote:
| That's more aligned with countries that follow civil law
| work. They define the law and what it covers.
|
| In contrast, common law is more open to interpretation,
| changes over time, etc.
|
| Yes, this is super generalized, but the dichotomy explains
| two very different approaches to how countries approach
| their writing and interpreting of laws.
| logicchains wrote:
| This is one of the reason common law countries are
| generally wealthier than civil law ones, because
| precedent is stronger in common law, so it's easier to do
| business (less uncertainty).
| derefr wrote:
| Okay, so what do you do with laws that already exist at the
| time your country is founded, which 100% of the public
| wants to keep, but has no justification for?
| int_19h wrote:
| You pass a law saying that such and such existing laws
| remain in force temporarily and set up a commission to
| study them in detail, figure out what's actually
| important, and author new model laws as needed for the
| legislature to consider. This can be dialed from
| piecemeal replacement to a wholesale rewrite.
|
| Something along these lines is how most modern states
| handled it in practice, if you look at e.g. former Warsaw
| Pact states.
| semiquaver wrote:
| Surely if 100% of the public wants something they can
| articulate _some_ justification?
| derefr wrote:
| Inevitably: "we've always done it exactly this way until
| now, and it's worked, and we'd rather just keep doing it
| exactly this way, without having to re-think it from
| scratch."
|
| Where "this way" includes all sorts of implementation
| details that _may or may not_ be important.
|
| Think of a baker in some kind of baker's guild, who was
| taught as an apprentice various techniques for how to get
| the best rise from their bread, before any scientific
| understanding of what those techniques are doing. The
| baker wants to keep following their various _rules of
| thumb_ , because they know they'll produce the best
| bread. They don't know _why_ the rules-of-thumb work;
| they just know that whenever they 've accidentally
| diverged from them, they get less puffy bread.
|
| Now, replace "baker's rules for baking bread" with e.g.
| "common-law rules around easements and rights-of-way in
| property disputes."
| rcarr wrote:
| To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time
| two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it
| seems to me like someone is taking the function of the
| contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the
| body that alters what's returned. Having something like
| this would be akin to having the original ticket
| specification to look at which is obviously handy when the
| inevitable disagreements arise between users, developers
| and stake holders. It may also prevent the law from getting
| needlessly complex with endless if statements.
| staunton wrote:
| > To me, the law and programming seem very similar
|
| If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court
| hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely _on purpose_ because
| real life is far too complicated to write down every
| eventuality and also it 's easier to build political
| consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who
| interpret the law based on precedent and common sense.
|
| A succinct way to see the difference: You want your
| computer to do _exactly what you wrote in the code and
| nothing else_. This is not true of legislation. You want
| people to do _anything that 's not explicitly forbidden_
| and tolerate them doing things that are technically
| forbidden ad long as they don't really cause too much
| harm, which means laws are written keeping in mind that
| the system has and needs slack.
| rcarr wrote:
| > If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court
| hearings.
|
| Er no. The law existed long before computers did.
|
| > Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life
| is far too complicated to write down every eventuality
| and also it's easier to build political consensus for
| vague laws.
|
| This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all.
| Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company
| knows that the feature requests never stop piling in
| either because the computer program will never be able to
| handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model
| either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw
| which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge
| and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw
| code decide what the return value is.
|
| > A succinct way to see the difference: You want your
| computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and
| nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want
| people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and
| tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden
| as a way to introduce slack into the system.
|
| No, because you're assuming here that the law directly
| controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual
| purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be
| no crime because once a law was written, everyone would
| abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and
| there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to
| ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or
| discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of
| the law is for evaluating the actions of people after
| they have done something. People are run time variables
| that are inserted into the law function, they are not the
| code themselves.
| int_19h wrote:
| That slack works both ways, though. It's also common to
| have a situation where the law is expected to be
| "judiciously applied" - sometimes the politicians pushing
| for it even make pinky promises to the effect of, "this
| is only for really serious crimes" - and then in practice
| it gets applied much more broadly.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any
| law be included as a preamble to that law 's text and be
| used in the interpretation, application, and future
| adaptation of that law._
|
| I agree, and it mostly is. I'm pretty sure it is always
| recorded when a congressman speaks about a bill, plus they
| always show dissenting opinions of the SCOTUS.
|
| However, one major problem is that language changes with
| time. Words go out of favor, and change meaning. Sometimes
| they change their meaning to be the exact opposite.
| Sometimes there are contenpary dictionaries with
| conflicting definitions.
|
| I think all laws should have an expiration date, and have
| to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again over
| the generations.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > I think all laws should have an expiration date, and
| have to be debated, and possibly reworded again and again
| over the generations.
|
| Until "thou shalt not kill" gets held hostage by a
| senator who wants a subsidy for a coal mine.
|
| Exempt those kinds of laws - murder, theft, false
| witness? Congrats, you have a de-facto theocracy.
| lrem wrote:
| I believe that Sweden publishes laws as both the letter and
| separately the spirit. The former providing the rules, the
| latter what thought process led to making them that way.
|
| It might have been Norway though. One of these two.
| nradov wrote:
| US courts sometimes look to records of debates in the
| legislature when deciding how to interpret a particular
| law.
| kortilla wrote:
| The wiretapping law did not have the intent of eavesdropping
| on arbitrary conversations (it is orthogonal to bugging
| peoples homes). It also did not allow mail to be opened.
|
| The "spirit of the law" argument is bullshit here in
| tenuously trying to expand wiretapping to decrypting text.
| hammock wrote:
| > The people who invented "using gold coins as a common
| exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity
|
| What makes you say that anonymity wasn't a concern? I have a
| hard time believing that claim without any substantiation.
|
| Anonymity in market participation and transactions has been
| an important consideration for millennia. Anyone who has
| watched Jasmine put on peasant clothes and visit the market
| in Disney's Aladdin can understand that
| hgomersall wrote:
| Because money from the get go was an instrument of the
| state as the historical record shows pretty convincingly. I
| suspect anonymity was a concern, just that they would have
| loved to eliminate it, not encourage it.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > What makes you say that anonymity wasn't a concern? I
| have a hard time believing that claim without any
| substantiation.
|
| Because the inverse claim, "people using gold coins
| thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried
| about the anonymity of their transactions", is absurd.
|
| It's not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia
| ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a
| large population literally didn't exist, and wouldn't exist
| for almost two thousand years. People relying on gold coins
| couldn't possibly conceive of a world where people's every
| transaction could be reliably tracked.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _It's not like the alternative to gold coins two
| millennia ago was a traceable currency_
|
| There actually was, predating gold coins in fact. What
| people did was carve notches representing quantities into
| sticks. The sticks were then split down the middle such
| that they could be lined back up to verify that both came
| from the original stick and the notches lined up. One of
| these halves would then often be entrusted to local
| officials for safekeeping. When people wanted to settle
| accounts, they could meet up with their half of the
| stick, light them up and make new cuts.
|
| (Of course this doesn't prove that gold coins were
| created to facilitate anonymity.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
| avianlyric wrote:
| I don't see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous
| transactions. It's just a basic way to create an
| arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door
| key.
| derefr wrote:
| The authorities holding the sticks are acting as a public
| ledger, in that _they_ bear witness to person A
| originally handing them half of stick A -- and they could
| write that association down, if they like (picture a
| little tag saying "person A" wrapped around stick A in
| their stick storage closet); but even if they don't write
| it down, they may just remember the person, remember the
| probably-pretty-unique-looking stick, and mentally
| associate the two.
|
| Then, when person B comes around with the other half of
| stick A, they won't know all the hands it passed through
| in the meantime, but they'll at least know that person A
| and person B were connected through some chain of equal-
| value trades that didn't require "breaking" the stick.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Funny thing, when I read the beginning of your comment I
| assumed you would claim that the people that agreed on
| the standard knew everybody on the market and would
| believe anonymity was impossible. Instead you got there
| with inevitable.
| hammock wrote:
| >The inverse claim, "people using gold coins thousands of
| years ago for common exchange were worried about the
| anonymity of their transactions", is absurd.
|
| Can you explain why? I have already given a historical
| example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one
| based on similar true accounts)
|
| The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track
| every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that
| they "couldn't possibly conceive" of a similar accounting
| of transactions
| varenc wrote:
| How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented
| _practical_ tracking for every day transactions? Is there
| a single historical example of this being done in the
| pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people
| /household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency
| is several orders of magnitude more records. I can't
| really think of any practical way this could have been
| done, especially when assuming some people would be
| adversarial to the tracking (which are exactly the
| transactions you'd want to track)
|
| Not saying they didn't see anonymity as a desirable
| property of transactions, but I don't take this as proof
| that they definitely did.
| hammock wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
| avianlyric wrote:
| A tally stick is anonymous. There's nothing about a Tally
| stick that links it to any particular individual.
|
| To argue that a tally stick can be used as an effective
| way to track people is to also argue that any physical
| key can be used to track people. After all a key and
| Tally Stick operate on the same principle, and yet I
| don't think anyone is worried about a government tracking
| them by their dumb metal house keys.
| _jal wrote:
| If you're actually asking,
|
| https://online.maryville.edu/blog/history-of-accounting/
| [deleted]
| 23B1 wrote:
| This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most
| important documents when understanding the intent of the
| Constitution and Bill of Rights - and simultaneously the
| least read!
|
| I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect
| of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended -
| I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' - I just mean that
| any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the
| public square discussion, nobody has read these very
| important contextual documents and it is maddening.
| pierat wrote:
| The Federalist papers are the equivalent of a Medium blog
| post. And I will treat them as such.
|
| Edit: Evidently I've pissed off enough people who drink the
| red-white-blue kool-aid. -3 at the moment.
|
| These newspaper publishings were expressly for the
| solidification of power at the federal level, and the
| weakening of the states. And only look closer at what the
| "federal" powers were about, and it was all about
| "secur(ing) the existence of (their) people and a future
| for white children." (cite: 14 words)
|
| Hamilton/Madison/Jay and others knew if a strong federal
| law reigned supreme, his and other founders' slaves and
| their current wealth would be greatly solidified. And right
| he was. And all those slaves also gave 3/5'th a vote per
| human they enslaved. While many of you say it was for
| "selfless reasons", my only response is a great big belly
| laugh.
|
| So perhaps, I was wrong calling these an equivalent of a
| Medium blog post. No, instead they'd fit right in on the
| Daily Stormer or Stormfront (2 neonazi publications). Those
| are the types of "rights" these founders were fighting for:
| the rights to own another human as property.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Maybe a blog post that Tim Berners Lee wrote during the
| standardization of HTTP.
| rainsford wrote:
| I agree with your general point that the Federalist
| Papers aren't quite the same as a _random_ blog post. But
| to extend that analogy further, if I 'm implementing
| HTTP, should I base my implementation on things only
| found in a blog post by Tim Berners Lee?
|
| Don't get me wrong, the Federalist Papers are important
| historical documents and provide unique insight into the
| minds of the authors. But they're not laws, and treating
| them as if they have actual legal significance seems
| wrong.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| You are equating a blog post to a paper written by a
| small group of citizens that dared to risk station,
| family, and life, to pursue a dream for a nation (not
| selfish ends), which put them directly in the cross hairs
| with the superpower of the time?
| rfrey wrote:
| > Evidently I've pissed off enough people who drink the
| red-white-blue kool-aid.
|
| You haven't pissed off anyone. People are downvoting
| because your comments sounds like they're coming from an
| edgy 14 year old who wants to shock his parents. You've
| clearly never given any thought to political philosophy,
| and your comment gets pushed to the bottom so it won't
| waste other's time.
|
| I'm not American, I do not admire American nationalism or
| jingoism. Nor do I admire people who spew nonsense in
| order to look like rebels against the man.
| derefr wrote:
| There seems to be a function missing from government. _All_
| governments, AFAICT.
|
| Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the
| constitution) -- effectively by applying a hierarchy of
| "countermanding orders" -- to suit the changing interests
| of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only
| downstream of legislation. The executive can make
| regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with
| the law.
|
| But at the founding of any given country, something else
| usually happens: certain rights and laws that are _already
| recognized intuitively_ become _enshrined_ into the country
| 's constitution. Things are written down into law not as a
| representation of a _shift_ in public sentiment, but as a
| _recognition_ of _existing_ sentiment, and the desirability
| to formalize that sentiment as law to protect it from
| encroachment by legislation.
|
| Usually, this is done in the form of "representative
| anarchy": the people who establish a country are the people
| everyone rallied behind to overthrow the previous country;
| and because of this, they have very good knowledge of what
| rights their constituents were demanding that the previous
| government wasn't giving them.
|
| There's no _trivial_ way to map this "representative
| anarchy" process of self-evident-rights information-
| gathering into an equivalent process that would occur
| within an established continuous government. But that
| doesn't mean it's impossible.
|
| For example, there could be a government department charged
| with 1. doing a kind of embedded journalism to figure out
| what issues "the people" are beginning to care about, that
| the law's stance on has no clear basis, because those
| issues were irrelevant when the constitution was enshrined;
| and then 2. coming up with referrendum-like polls to gather
| data on said public sentiment; where if the polls indicate
| a need, then at that point 3. the data will lead to a
| _mandate_ for a constitutional amendment enshrining the
| public 's desires to be created and put into force, which
| stands until this has successfully occurred; where 4. it is
| then up to the legislature and the supreme court to work
| together to _draft_ the amendment; but 5. the ability to
| ratify the amendment is not in the hands of the legislature
| or the courts, but instead, this department will assemble a
| federal grand jury with participants from all states, which
| has a veto over each draft, and a congressional-subpoena-
| like ability to summon and retain the services of arbitrary
| legal experts to interpret the draft. (In est, this is
| trying to get as close as possible to having the public
| write the amendment themselves, with the legislature+courts
| being forced to "do the hard work" but not having any
| power over the result.)
|
| But exactly how such a system would work isn't really my
| point; my point is that there is currently no such system,
| and that this is perhaps a problem. In fact, it is perhaps
| _the_ problem -- the problem that leads to governments
| founded with public support increasingly failing to address
| the interests of the people over time; and so, to
| governments being overthrown and new countries being
| founded.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > "representative anarchy"
|
| That's a nice alternative name for "democracy".
|
| Anyway, the problem is that when governments get old,
| interests get entrenched, and it begins to act against
| the democratic mandate. Any stable organization with some
| power can not solve this problem and will only make it
| worse.
|
| Ideally, elections should be a way to insert instability
| into the system and avoid this. But those were subverted
| in a series of ways and the instability just isn't there
| anymore.
| norir wrote:
| I like this idea. A somewhat related idea I've had is
| that instead of giving the supreme court ultimate power
| to overrule and/or reinterpret existing legislation they
| instead would be given power to call a referendum. Each
| justice would have the ability to attach their own
| revised version of the law to the referendum and there
| would be a voting process to determine which version of
| the law to accept as canonical. This would prevent the
| kind of situation we have right now where the court is
| controlled by a minority group that is imposing its views
| with impunity. So long as there is but one voice on the
| court that represents the majority public interest, the
| public can win out (provided elections are free and fair
| of course). Right now, regardless of where you fall
| ideologically, it is clear that the structure of the
| court can be exploited to impose a vision of the country
| that does not reflect the wishes of most of its citizens.
| Even those who feel ideologically aligned with the
| supermajority court should be concerned with the tact
| they are taking. It's destabilizing and planting the
| seeds for the institution's demise.
| notahacker wrote:
| The problem with referenda that the function of the
| Supreme Court isn't writing new laws but settling
| individual cases according to existing law. The reason
| why this has wide reaching implications is because other
| courts are bound to follow its legal arguments as
| precedents with other cases (and because Supreme Court
| justices can _sometimes_ rule that a particular law is
| inconsistent with the constitution, which they do at
| least in theory with the intent of preserving the
| constitution rather than creating a new law)
|
| The public is clearly not bound to even attempt to be
| consistent in its opinions from case to case, and if it's
| all over the place in its verdicts and might well be
| accepting or rejecting a verdicts for different reasons
| from the justices (maybe they think the legal arguments
| about privacy in the original Roe vs Wade were weak but
| also think women should have an inherent right to
| abortion that legislators haven't provided them with),
| it's difficult to see how lower courts can be bound by
| it.
|
| There's also a big question of who gets to vote,
| particularly for the cases where a state law is argued to
| be in violation of the federal constitution, which tends
| to be the more controversial ones...
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem is that existing law in many cases (that end
| up in SC) is simply too vague to be a meaningful
| expression of intent. In those cases, since the judges
| are still required to rule one way or another, we end up
| getting those tortured decisions where a big effort is
| made to contort the law into some interpretation that
| would allow for a ruling.
|
| In my opinion, if SCOTUS is split 5/4 (or even 6/3) on
| anything, that should be taken as prima facie evidence
| that the law is unclear and needs amending. At that point
| we should require all the deciding judges to make a
| write-up for each opinion in the case detailing the
| requisite changes to the law that would make _all_ judges
| to rule unanimously in favor of that opinion. These can
| then be submitted to the legislature or a referendum or
| whatever, but either way some decision needs to be made.
| logicchains wrote:
| >This would prevent the kind of situation we have right
| now where the court is controlled by a minority group
| that is imposing its views with impunity
|
| You're completely missing the point of the supreme court.
| It's explicitly not a democratic institution; it's
| purpose is to protect the constitutional rights of the
| minority from the tyranny of the majority. The other two
| branches are democratic; isn't that enough for you?
|
| Surely you see the point of the US being a republic; rule
| by law, not by men. In your vision of the supreme court,
| if the majority decided they wanted to lock up some
| minorty and send them to gas chambers, the court couldn't
| do anything to stop them because the populace would vote
| for it in a referendum. That kind of thing has happened
| countless times in history in countries that didn't have
| a strong court system capable of protecting people's
| rights from the tyrrany of the majority.
| hammock wrote:
| That's what Constitutional amendments are for, and it's
| happened 27 times in the history of the US, most recently
| in 1992.
|
| The corporate media doesn't typically like to talk about
| that process since it is a threat to the entrenched
| powers that be.
|
| The ombudsman of the American people is their state
| legislatures.
|
| We have sovereign states in the US. Let's not add any
| more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived
| problem with itself
| derefr wrote:
| > That's what Constitutional amendments are for,
|
| Yes, you'll note that I said "the data will lead to a
| mandate for a constitutional amendment." My point is that
| the mechanisms that create and ratify constitutional
| amendments are broken _for this purpose_ ; not that we
| need a thing other than constitutional amendments.
|
| Given the actual way bipartite or tripartite governments
| (at all levels -- from municipal to federal) function in
| the real world, constitutional amendments only happen
| when there's a need to use an amendment to _overridingly
| countermand law_.
|
| Constitutional amendments are almost never used for their
| original designed purpose -- to _pre-empt_ the ability to
| create law -- because the legislative process is purely
| reactive, never proactive. Legislatures the world over
| only act when either corporate lobbying interests or
| outraged citizens _demand_ they act.
|
| The thing I'm saying doesn't exist, is a _proactive_
| branch of government that turns things that are currently
| "known to be desirable" but not yet "outraged about being
| taken away", _into_ constitutional amendments protecting
| those things, _before_ some law can be made somewhere
| that violates the _implicit, intuitional, self-evident,
| but previously non-applicable_ right that the public
| believes it has. Like a right to anonymity in cash
| transactions.
|
| Until a decade or two ago, nobody ever considered that
| "being able to transact anonymously via cash" _needed_ to
| be thought of as a right. It was simply the only way
| things worked. There were no clear examples of it _not_
| working that way elsewhere in the world to serve as
| object lessons on why you 'd need such a law.
|
| Or, consider prohibition. Did the US really need to issue
| the 18th amendment, struggle for two decades, and then
| issue the 21st amendment to repeal it... when anyone who
| lived in America at any time during the two centuries
| _before_ the rise of the temperance movement, could have
| seen that the public actually seems to consider itself to
| have a self-evident right to ingest mind-altering
| substances -- and thereby, that there should be a
| constitutional limitation on laws which prohibit the
| production and sale of mind-altering substances? Yet
| America _still_ doesn 't have a constitutional amendment
| enshrining that self-evident right. Because there's no
| system for discovering "latent" public sentiment and
| enshrining it. If everybody _thinks_ something, but
| nobody _says_ that thing, then it never becomes law.
|
| (If you think it's dumb to care about what "everyone
| thinks but nobody says" -- why do you think democracy is
| built on secret voting? The public has a lot of things
| they _want_ but aren 't willing to _say_ they want in
| front of others, for fear of reprisal in their local
| social-normative environment -- including who they think
| would best represent them democratically!)
|
| To your other points:
|
| > The ombudsman of the American people is their state
| legislatures.
|
| Legislatures _at all levels_ are purely reactive; and
| therefore can 't react to latent public sentiment, only
| to active demands.
|
| > We have sovereign states in the US. Let's not add any
| more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived
| problem with itself
|
| What about every other democratic nation in the world
| that doesn't have this problem? (I'm Canadian, myself.)
| While America makes a good example for the failings of
| the reactive model for constitutional amendment, adding a
| proactive pipeline from latent public sentiment to
| constitutional amendment would be a change applicable to
| every country with a constitution. Not just democracies,
| actually; even constitutional monarchies.
|
| That being said -- everything I'm saying also applies, in
| the US, to state governments and their state
| charters/constitutions/other founding documents. State
| governments could have such a proactive body just like
| federal governments could. _City_ governments could have
| such a proactive body. Heck, even _corporations_ could
| have a proactive body to enshrine the interests of
| shareholders into the corporation 's charter! (I bet
| there are corporations whose employees _and_ shareholders
| would all prefer the corporation be transitioned to a B
| Corp with certain values held above profit -- just not
| with enough outrage to consolidate a voice to make any
| coherent demands of the board of directors.)
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| That goes out the window with gerrymandering.
| int_19h wrote:
| We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as
| trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate.
|
| And a system that requires a 3/4 supermajority of not
| even the population but the state legislatures (with the
| net effect that some states have a much greater say in
| pushing through or blocking amendments than others) is
| hardly a sane or sensible way to gauge public sentiment
| on such matters.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _We don 't have state sovereignty even on matters as
| trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate._
|
| By the letter of the law, no. But in practice we do. The
| federal government is thus-far unwilling to defend their
| turf on this issue; they have de jure sovereignty but not
| de facto sovereignty. If a government finds itself
| politically incapable of exercising a sovereign power,
| then in a very real sense they no longer have it.
| verisimi wrote:
| What fantasy are you living in?
|
| Have you seen the formation of any countries? Even one?
|
| Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell me
| where - I'll be there like a shot!
|
| > embedded journalism to figure out what issues "the
| people" are beginning to care about
|
| Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to
| think - what do you think propaganda is? Do you think
| that propaganda is something the Russians do, but your
| country doesn't?!?
| derefr wrote:
| > Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell
| me where - I'll be there like a shot!
|
| "Representative anarchy" was my shorthand for the concept
| of "whoever can stand up with a megaphone and get the
| largest mob behind them wins." To do this, the person
| with the megaphone needs to understand what hot-button
| issues will make the mob follow them in their coup or
| secession attempt. In that sense of understanding the
| public, they are acting as a kind of representative. Not
| a _democratic_ representative -- but the same kind of
| representative that you get when someone stands up and
| shouts something in a bar and everyone else shouts
| "yeah!"
|
| Yes, the mob can be manipulated. But the nice thing about
| the breakdown of law and order, is that it _stays_ broken
| until someone who 's good at governing actively re-
| establishes it. If the mob that the new guy used to
| depose the old guy, doesn't appreciate the new guy's
| first few acts in power, then said mob will still usually
| be riled-up enough -- and the new guy's hold on power
| will still usually be tenuous enough -- that the mob will
| just turn around and depose the new guy, too. (Look at
| the War of the Roses for many small examples of this; or
| for a perfect example, at Burkina Faso's two coups in one
| year last year, where the second one was driven precisely
| by the public's lack of faith in the guy who did the
| first coup.)
|
| > Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to
| think
|
| Maybe I chose the wrong word? I suppose I meant
| _intelligence operatives_ -- but not the secret kind.
| Just, people who are paid to go and watch things and talk
| to people, and tell their government department what they
| found out. Census workers, for example! Or the people who
| go into retail stores to get the pricing data for the
| central banks to calculate the Consumer Price Index.
| verisimi wrote:
| I think we have had royalty and "democracy".
|
| I think you have been watching too many films. I don't
| think people act as a mob, overthrowing anyone.
|
| The governance structure doesn't really accept any real
| inputs from you and I. They are a bloodline.
|
| You get to vote in a 'representative democracy' where
| your vote every 5 years is aggregated with 100k+ of other
| to choose one of 2 candidates, who then purports to
| represent you in the thousands of decisions he makes over
| his term.
| derefr wrote:
| I get the sense that you just aren't familiar with any
| nations that actually have coups. Here, a list -- it's
| very, very long, and most entries are from the last 50
| years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_and_co
| up_attempt...
| verisimi wrote:
| Which ones of those do you think are ones where the
| anarchic mob attempts to 'found a new country'?
| kmbfjr wrote:
| What a wordy way to admit to dismissing anyone's argument
| to which you do not agree because "they have not read
| the...".
| 23B1 wrote:
| I agree. Arguments from ignorance should be dismissed.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| For completeness, read the anti-federalist papers too. The
| collective opinion of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay is just
| one point of view.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I guess I don't get why the arguments against the
| Constitution of the time would be useful for
| "understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of
| Rights"?
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The Federalist papers are one half of the story. It takes
| two sides to have an agreement, and it's a mentally
| convenient and lazy task to decide that because the sides
| came to an agreement that favored one of them, that the
| other is completely irrelevant to the discussion,
| ESPECIALLY when the nebulous task of trying to divine
| intent is concerned.
| windexh8er wrote:
| The best part is that the US of A is cool with allowing
| organizations to encrypt things that should be freely available
| to the public (OTA broadcast TV & public services radio
| networks). In the case of OTA broadcast the American taxpayer
| is being abused by having to deal with corporate America using
| open airwaves for profit while those same corporations hoover
| up all kinds of hand outs in subsidies. Yet when encryption is
| in the best interest of the American citizen, and there's no
| lobbyist in some politicians pocket - well, then... Then it's
| not acceptable because: enter national security / child porn /
| drugs as an inarguable rationale.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| All governments will trend towards tyranny if left
| unsupervised. Imo western democracies have been entirely
| subverted by an imaginary left/right conflict, where you end up
| with exactly the same thing no matter who you elect. The voting
| population is so completely engrossed with their contempt for
| either the detestable "left wing" tyrants, or the detestable
| "right wing" tyrants that they can't see the side they end up
| supporting is just as corrupt as the side they hate, and almost
| identical in every way except rhetoric.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that's demonstrably false. I don't have much
| experience or knowledge of politics outside the US, so I can
| only speak to US politics.
|
| The American right and left are _very_ different when it
| comes to policy platform, and electing one or the other
| actually does have a measurable difference on what ends up
| happening to people in the country. This is especially true
| when we consider minority groups.
|
| I agree that both sides are mainly interested in
| consolidating power and increasing the scope of government's
| oversight of people's lives. But even if I use your
| terminology, the "left wing tyrants" and "right wing
| tyrants", if one or the other were given complete control of
| the country... well, the country would look _very_ different
| after some time, depending on which side were given control.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > But even if I use your terminology, the "left wing
| tyrants" and "right wing tyrants", if one or the other were
| given complete control of the country... well, the country
| would look very different after some time, depending on
| which side were given control.
|
| Well this is actually demonstrably false. Biden currently
| has the house and the senate, Trump has the house, the
| senate and the Supreme Court, Obama had the house and the
| senate... The rhetoric between these two sides is
| substantially different, but the governments they produce
| are very similar. They implement some token fraction of the
| policy platform they were elected on, and otherwise just
| plow through the same old policy agenda every time. Who's
| opposing this Tory Online Safety bill in the UK?
| Technically Labour is, but only because they think it
| doesn't go far enough...
| int_19h wrote:
| In US, "having" the Senate has been mostly meaningless
| since filibuster became a standard feature of every vote.
| And without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate you
| really can't do all that much regardless of the platform.
| Not only that, but the issues that are most prominent in
| the rhetoric tend to be the more polarizing ones (which
| should come as no surprise, since that's exactly the kind
| of stuff that rallies "your" voters to the polls), and
| thus are the least probable to actually push through by
| getting votes from a few defectors on the other side.
| immibis wrote:
| Right/left is not imaginary. Whoever told you that wants you
| to think it's imaginary, so you won't bother to oppose them,
| because you think the opposition to them is just as bad as
| they are.
| semiquaver wrote:
| Political thought is a high-dimensional space. Many of
| those are correlated along an axis that people call
| right/left.
|
| When someone says that right/left is imaginary, what they
| are often really saying is that they prioritize dimensions
| in that space that are not strongly correlated with the
| right/left axis.
|
| Or they've observed that policy changes after a change in
| government are less extreme than they hoped and chalk that
| up to corruption or insincerity rather than checks and
| balances in an adversarial system.
|
| Tribalism being what it is, people can mistake the forest
| for the trees and think that the convenient shorthand we
| have for a correlated set of values is more strongly
| defined (more "real") than it actually is.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| It's imaginary in the sense that no matter who wins an
| election, you're going to end up with substantially the
| same government every time. If you're so concerned with
| political tribalism that you can't see how utterly corrupt
| your own team is, then you've simply fallen for the
| distraction.
| immibis wrote:
| In some ways yes, in other ways no. If Hillary had won in
| 2016 the USA would still be a capitalist dystopia, but it
| would be a capitalist dystopia where women and
| transgender people had rights, and inflation would be
| slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as
| Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair
| if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020
| most of the bad political things happening in Florida
| would be happening to the whole country.
|
| Besides, the Democrat party isn't left.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Its really quite surprising just how many American issues
| come down to this. Much of the identity-politics driven
| discussion of late can really just be boiled down to liberal
| vs conservative / right vs left.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I have noticed that people who are steadfast in positions
| and don't listen to reason and subscribe to 'identity'
| politics on both the left and right differ mainly in where
| they were raised and by who raised them. The Berkeley folk
| who mandate it illegal to burn wood in your own fireplace
| have more in common with people who think trans people
| should be forced to live as the gender defined at birth
| than they do with people who think we should listen to each
| other reasonably and have empathy.
|
| The problem is that when one set of people get weaponized
| by folks who are legitimately nefarious and or criminally
| stupid and mentally ill, there is not no moral stance which
| is effectively 'I don't like some people on one side so I
| will let the demonstrably dangerous people take the power
| and do what they want'.
|
| Do you have a solution to this? Because otherwise giving
| 'both sides are just as bad' speech is borderline
| negligent.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'll start off by saying I don't have a solution.
|
| But if I don't have any alternatives, I'd much rather
| have the "you can't burn wood in your fireplace" people
| in charge than the "force people to live as the gender
| assigned at birth" people.
|
| One of those people is pushing policy that ultimately
| saves the human race from making the planet
| uninhabitable, while the other is imposing their small-
| minded religious worldview on people who have nothing to
| do with them.
|
| And this is the thing that bothers me so much with the
| "both sides are just as bad" argument. Yes, agreed, they
| are, when it comes to listening to each other with
| empathy. I totally get that frustration, and I'm sick of
| the left/right culture war; both sides are to blame for
| perpetuating it.
|
| Further, I think it's unfair to say that these two groups
| have more in common with each other than people who can
| listen with empathy; you're just comparing two unrelated
| axes of commonality.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I agree with you on all points.
|
| I was straining to think of a good example of the 'left-
| wing authoritarian' but I have definitely experienced it,
| and apart the location of birth they are the same exact
| people who are just as intolerant on right.
|
| On aggregate all humans operate pretty much the same
| everywhere in the way they think and operate -- the only
| difference is experiences and culture. That was the the
| point I was making -- we are never going to be rid of the
| people responsible for throwing wrenches in the political
| works.
|
| Tangent: I think the only way this gets fixed is by
| putting a benevolent AI in charge of everything.
| jdechko wrote:
| "Don't tell me what to do." Brought to you by the party
| of telling people what they should do.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| What's happening right now is much worse than the first crypto
| wars. In that case the government was just trying to gain
| occasional access to suspected criminal communications, usually
| with a warrant. Systems like the Clipper chip even codified
| mechanisms to limit access to communications. What's happening
| this time around is very different: policymakers are demanding
| the ability to perform real-time scanning of messages, without
| a warrant. This is technically very different and also has very
| different implications for privacy down the line.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in
| the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal
| means were pretty decisively defeated.
|
| I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four
| years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman
| publicly described the same system, and only got around to
| declassifying this in 1997.
| Canada wrote:
| Did it really invent RSA, such that there was any actual
| capability of performing asymmetric encryption or signatures?
|
| I thought it was more like, one guy there had a pretty good
| idea that it was possible that he wrote about, but never
| developed it into anything practical.
|
| Am I mistaken, and the whole working system was described?
| throw0101a wrote:
| A PDF scan of the paper is now available, so you can judge
| for yourself:
|
| * https://web.archive.org/web/20180928121748/https://www.gc
| hq....
|
| IANAM (mathematician), but the formulae look RSA-like,
| though given the compute at the time, it may have been
| (too) expensive to try implementing.
| derefr wrote:
| The "pretty good idea" (Ellis' "non-secret encryption") was
| published about in 1969. Clifford Cocks found a workable
| _algorithm_ for it -- using prime factorization as the
| trapdoor function -- in 1973. No _cryptosystem_ was ever
| developed around the idea, by Cocks or GCHQ in general;
| they just sat on it as a classified secret. Then, in 1977,
| RSA was independently invented and published as both an
| algorithm _and_ a full cryptosystem.
|
| I would definitely say that Cocks and RSA both
| independently discovered what we refer to as the RSA
| algorithm. We should maybe call it the Cocks-RSA algorithm.
| throw0101a wrote:
| For the record, GCHQ created RSA in 1973 and then DH in 1974:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-
| key_cryptography#Histor...
|
| DH _qua_ DH was invented in 1976, and RSA _qua_ RSA in 1977.
| bpye wrote:
| I do wonder what the capabilities of GCHQ are today - I
| guess it'll be interesting to see in 50 years or whenever
| it is assuming it gets declassified...
| Sai_ wrote:
| What does qua mean here?
| yuliyp wrote:
| I'm assuming "by": as in those algorithms were created by
| the people whose names are now associated with them in
| those years
| throw0101a wrote:
| There is "RSA" as implemented by GCHQ in 1973, and there
| is "RSA" _as RSA_ like we generally know it by the three
| folks that it was named after. There is "DH" as
| implemented by GCHQ in 1974, and there is "DH" _as DH_
| like we generally know by the two folks that it was named
| after.
|
| The concept "x" _as we (generally) know x_ is what _qua_
| means. (Because words can mean and point to potentially
| many concepts.)
| hkt wrote:
| "as"
|
| He means DH, as in Diffie Hellman, was not the first
| approach to key exchange. The difference is that in the
| UK we did what we usually do: we squandered an amazing
| innovation and let some other country benefit from it.
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >It also seems like there's a tendency to relitigate battles
| that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s
| crypto wars
|
| They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is
| overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a
| British law ought to keep that in mind (https://docs.cdn.yougov
| .com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil...). Even on the most
| contentious parts of the bill:
|
| _Do you believe it should or should not become a legal
| requirement for the following to scan messages and posts on
| their platforms for child sexual abuse?_
|
| [Private messaging services]
|
| This should be a legal requirement -> 60; This should not be a
| legal requirement -> 21; Don't know -> 18
|
| [Social media sites]
|
| This should be a legal requirement -> 79; This should not be a
| legal requirement -> 10; Don't know -> 10
|
| Likewise on E2EE over 70% of respondents agree that ability to
| access them is warranted. So the framing in the discussion as
| if this is solely the British government against technologists
| is completely off, it's also taking a position against the
| British public.
| immibis wrote:
| The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not
| necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending
| all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Given that according to the last question on that survey
| the public also overwhelmingly (~90%!) supports holding
| senior managers personally accountable and punishable by
| law should firms fail to comply I think it's fair to say
| they want authorities to have the ability to enforce these
| measures. The GCHQ has nothing to do with it.
| kelnos wrote:
| Maybe not, but even the more mild option of Apple/Google
| doing a local scan of the device, and then secretly sending
| some sort of result to Apple/Google to take some action, is
| also pretty awful from a privacy perspective.
| bpye wrote:
| Isn't that basically the plan Apple had, and scrapped, to
| scan for CSAM on device?
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem with all of this is that these poll questions
| don't leave room to allow people to understand the
| implications and consequences of taking one of the positions.
|
| Let's say the question was written something like this:
|
| > _Do you believe it should or should not become a legal
| requirement for the following to scan messages and posts on
| their platforms for child sexual abuse, even if such scanning
| would also compromise the security and privacy of all law-
| abiding users of the platform?_
|
| I obviously can't say for certain, but I think that 60% and
| 79% would drop, at least some substantial amount. Even if the
| "should not" positions wouldn't go up, I think it would muddy
| the waters enough that many new people would fall into the
| "don't know" camp.
|
| The problem is that the polling just presents these questions
| to evoke a "oh, obviously I'd want this, to protect the
| children!" sort of reaction. The "but think of the children!"
| thing is almost a joke or cliche at this point, but it is
| _disturbingly_ effective at shutting off people 's critical
| thinking, causing them to agree with whatever the argument
| is. On top of that, media reporting around these issues never
| gives the pro-privacy angle enough consideration. And even
| when it does, it's usually in small "nerdy" publications that
| most people don't read. I'm also of the opinion that many
| people just can't and won't understand, adopting the
| fallacious "if I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to
| hide" position.
| safety1st wrote:
| Then these governments have forgotten that they serve at the
| pleasure of the people. We permit them to exist specifically
| for the purpose of protecting our rights, not expanding their
| own. The rights we possess are inherent and automatic because
| we're human beings, they are not granted by government or
| anyone else, and if a government fails to aid us in preserving
| them, that government is no longer legitimate.
|
| Jefferson said all this far better than I ever could:
|
| "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
| created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
| certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
| and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights,
| governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
| powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any
| form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
| right of the people to alter or abolish it."
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| We live in an era where increasingly it is the government who
| picks the voters rather than the voters picking the
| government. Whether it is through immigration policy,
| favoring certain areas over others, or trying to throw up
| restrictions on voting, across the political spectrum there
| is a dedicated effort to shape the electorate to be friendly
| to those in power remaining in power.
| p1esk wrote:
| Increasingly?
|
| When and where it was ever any better?
| raincom wrote:
| Selectorate theory (which is described for the lay people
| in "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost
| Always Good Politics") talks about your points: picking
| voters through (a) immigration policy (b) restrictions on
| voting, etc.
| godelski wrote:
| > Governments seem to want to have it both ways
|
| I think it even goes a bit deeper. Surveillance in a democracy
| is a double edged sword and arguably the edge facing yourself
| is sharper. You want it so you can keep a close eye on your
| citizens and manipulate or adapt to their moods. But on the
| other side, adversaries are also equally capable of doing this
| (as NK demonstrates, software is a cheap form of warfare).
| Often adversaries who are more than happy to team up and pool
| resources. They're just sharpening the edge pointing at
| yourself. It really is a dangerous game to play.
|
| I know red teaming is harder than blue teaming, but I really
| believe that the NSA's primary objective should be defense
| rather than offense. Especially as we're talking about the
| modern era of LLMs which will be used to convincingly sound
| like humans and influence people at mass scale, defense just
| becomes even more important. The mice are running wild and our
| cat is too fat and lazy to catch them. That was fine when we
| were ahead of everyone else, but now that they've caught up our
| cat needs to get off its lazy ass and do its job.
|
| > anonymous cash transactions => ???
|
| This was actually the first hint that I had that
| cryptocurrencies were a scam. That people were more interested
| in flashy than secure (e.g. zcash). I'd love to live in a world
| with fast anonymous digital _cash_ but I'm not sure that'll
| happen and not sure it'll be blockchain based.
| immibis wrote:
| Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war"
| far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual,
| real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping
| bombs on London, but the ends are the same.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but
| the ends are the same.
|
| They're very much not. Wat a complete nonsense.
| 23B1 wrote:
| You're right - in the short term.
|
| In the mid- to long-term, I'm not so sure.
| hammock wrote:
| What about those new movies?
| 23B1 wrote:
| What about them?
| [deleted]
| hkt wrote:
| Far more people need to say this.
|
| Remember folks, this week Boris informed the covid inquiry he
| has "forgotten" the pin to the phone all his WhatsApp
| messages from that time are on.
|
| If it was one of us, they'd use the bit of RIPA that carries
| a minimum two year sentence for not giving up an encryption
| key or password when asked to by the police.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| When you say those words people think you are a building-
| burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a
| commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich,
| as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class
| war.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Who is 'they' in this context? Even borderline schizo far-
| right conservatives on the vast majority of sites seem to
| agree, at least in part, that the class war plays some
| part.
| vasco wrote:
| I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How
| do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!
| immibis wrote:
| Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get
| money by making other people who work give you theirs
| (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?
| vasco wrote:
| I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from
| that job I've bought a house I rent to a local
| association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty
| much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all
| the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement
| account buys.
|
| So I'm both? Who do I fight for?
| immibis wrote:
| Well, I suppose you get to decide whether you want to
| fight for the slaves or the slave owners.
|
| I will remind you that fighting for the slave owners
| never led to anything good.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| This is the problem with trying to fit a political
| doctrine written more than 100 years ago by an academic
| who spent most of his time in libraries into modern life.
|
| There is a reason 'it was a good idea so I wrote it all
| down, thought of everything, and then forced everyone to
| do it' has never worked.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| You don't need to follow everything to a T to grasp the
| fact that 99.99% of us exist to feed the capitalists, the
| ruling class, to keep them satisfied.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I'm sorry you think that your life is only meaningful in
| that it provides labor to capitalists.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Do you mind pointing out where that was stated or
| implied?
|
| Anything and everything I do is to satisfy my own
| curiosity and desires, but that's only because I got
| lucky. Everyone who didn't get lucky, well, they have to
| slave away in jobs that may not be fulfilling, or are
| menial, etc; and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Other people's lives are meaningless then, but not yours.
| Got it.
|
| PS: Have you ever considered how paternalistic your view
| is?
| int_19h wrote:
| Where does most of your income come from?
| vasco wrote:
| From work, but I hope at some point it switches around.
| So I'll be a good person until then, and after that I'll
| become a bad person it sounds like
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Unless you are born into generational wealth, you are by
| construction a Prole.
|
| If you need to or had to work for a living until you
| could afford not to, then you are a Prole.
|
| Whether you choose to "betray" this class - and fight in
| support of the people who make the rules, the slave
| owners, those who play god without permission - is a
| different thing.
| vasco wrote:
| Only dummies think in classes. People are people.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The obvious response is to own it and be an actual commie.
| Join a revolutionary party, organise in a trade union, set
| up mutual aid, learn self defence, etc.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I am all for this, the problem is that that behaviour on
| their end shuts down any discussion and mutual aid
| becomes harder.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| You don't have to lead with it necessarily. I don't, but
| I don't hide it either.
|
| People pay attention to their material interests. In most
| cases, you can get through to working class people
| despite ideology. Can't win everyone over either and
| that's ok too.
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem is that most large left-wing movements tend
| to be about highly centralized socialism that is _at
| best_ soft authoritarian (and in practice tends to
| quickly devolve into something much worse). I understand
| why - once you take away the cudgel from the people who
| currently have it, using it yourself to quickly solve
| problems is just too tempting. But it does mean that many
| (most?) of those parties are not a viable solution.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| [dead]
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| This is the lasting legacy of Apple's CSAM photo scanning
| debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian
| tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity.
|
| Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
| nerdbert wrote:
| These laws were in the works for ages before Apple proposed its
| CSAM scanning tool.
|
| That was an attempt to get out ahead of it and neuter the
| pressure for those laws. But there was so much opposition that
| Apple's strategy failed.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Nah, this has been coming (and inevitable really) since Snowden
| prompted the tech companies to introduce e2e messaging.
|
| Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU
| Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The
| want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse,
| and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E.
| Apple provided the answer for the how.
| deergomoo wrote:
| The UK government has been trying this for _years_ , long
| before the Apple CSAM thing.
| clcaev wrote:
| Don't forget to https://signal.org/donate/
| boomer918 wrote:
| E2E apps and fully encrypted phones prevent the police from
| executing legitimate search warrants. This has never been the
| case with traditional communication mechanisms, e.g. phones,
| mail.
|
| I agree that privacy is important, but it's not absolute, by law.
| So what we're saying is E2E apps are more important than current
| law we have, and we want to invalidate the ability of the police
| to investigate crime.
|
| How can that make sense?
| efnx wrote:
| What folks are saying is that requiring a backdoor in
| encryption for "blessed" individuals is wrong. I can tell from
| your comment that you trust cops. Not all of us do (at least -
| not all of us trust all cops) and so we don't want ANY cops to
| have a backdoor through EVERY encryption, for fear of what ONE
| of them may do, or ONE person in their chain of trust may do.
| boomer918 wrote:
| Sounds like we need to change the law to make privacy
| absolute, which of course will prevent legitimate crime
| investigations. We can't have it both ways here.
| efnx wrote:
| > which of course will prevent legitimate crime
| investigations
|
| It would not prevent legitimate crime investigations, it
| would only keep that specific information obscured.
| nerdbert wrote:
| You think no nefarious actors have ever used coded messages or
| even one-time pads to communicate via phone and email before
| the digital age?
| kenmacd wrote:
| > e.g. phones, mail.
|
| What about all the in-person conversations. Seems those might
| be considered just a bit more traditional than phones
| conversations, and haven't been subject to those same search
| warrants.
|
| > So what we're saying is E2E apps are more important than
| current law we have, and we want to invalidate the ability of
| the police to investigate crime. > > How can that make sense?
|
| (*proposed* British online safety legislation)
|
| Let's expand on that then: how can it make sense what humans
| can have in-person conversations that are not subject to search
| warrants. These e2e-private-in-person conversations prevent the
| state from investigating crime.
|
| If police should be able to always access your digital
| information, would you support the same in the case of non-
| digital information. Should building codes be updated to
| require microphones be installed in very room?
|
| If you're not in support of microphones in every room, then
| please tell me why the conversation between two parties, be
| they lovers or criminals, should lose it's ability to be
| private the moment it crosses the internet?
| Jigsy wrote:
| I personally won't use Signal because "Requires my phone number?"
| = Nope.
|
| But good on her for sticking with her principles.
|
| I did decide to use Session as a result of this bill, though,
| since that routes through a Tor-like system.
| wnevets wrote:
| If you outlaw encryption only outlaws will have encryption
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| This is part of the war against the lower classes. The ruling do
| not want to be excluded from the 'know'.
| b1n wrote:
| I wonder if the Signal app would be automatically uninstalled
| from existing iOS and Android devices?
|
| Hopefully the signal ban will demonstrate to enough people that
| they don't really own the phone in their pocket - if they don't
| control what's on it, they are just renting it.
| pstuart wrote:
| Perhaps the proponents of this can demonstrate how it works and
| make sure all their communications are scanned and sent to a
| "trusted party".
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Leave the UK and never come back. I don't know why more tech
| companies not do this when a government gets uppity about what it
| thinks they can and cannot do.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Well yeah that's basically what she's saying Signal's gonna
| do...
| jononomo wrote:
| How can the Signal app "exit the UK market"? Can't people just
| use the app anyway?
| leesalminen wrote:
| There's a couple ways:
|
| - Signal could just ban all UK IP addresses from accessing its
| messaging servers. Your encrypted messages still pass through
| servers controlled by Signal, Inc.
|
| - UK government could require ISPs to deny access to Signal's
| messaging servers.
|
| Of course, one could just use a VPN, set up a VM in a third
| country and run a Signal Proxy Server, etc.
|
| It was hard enough getting family/friends to download/use
| Signal, as its UX is sub-par compared to alternatives.
|
| If you start telling them they have to use a VPN, or run a
| server, etc, that will kill the network effect in UK.
| godelski wrote:
| I've also tried to urge the Signal community to develop
| things like a mesh networking because it can really help
| prevent such actions. I saw another user suggest an airdrop
| like functionality as a means to make the mesh networking
| features "fun" or at least of high value to users. I've given
| up on that community though and Signal just moves too slow.
| Moxie argued that they should maintain control because the
| ecosystem is moving but I'm pretty confident the ecosystem is
| moving a hell of a lot faster than they are. Realistically it
| looks like Apple is starting to become a better privacy app,
| except it isn't cross platform and likely never will be.
| immibis wrote:
| Signal gets banned from the Google and Apple stores for UK
| users
| cwales95 wrote:
| Related post from 10 days ago which goes into more depth on this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596610
|
| TL;DR: UK government wants to degrade public's right to privacy /
| encryption under the guise of "but think of the children!"
| squarefoot wrote:
| > under the guise of "but think of the children!"
|
| Hah, then it's the usual scaremongering that recycles the same
| old excuses again and again.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/D93heEo.jpg
| zirgs wrote:
| What about the privacy of children? I don't want some creeps
| reading their messages.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Well, consider what job a creep who loves to invade
| children's privacy would have.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| One could easily argue that bullying in school is a much more
| widespread threat to children and the government is okay with
| that.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I've always wondered why politicians in America take similar
| stances (outside of a few like Rand Paul). Even a wild card like
| Trump should see how unpopular some of these policies are. Are
| the intelligence agencies really that influential?
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem is that they aren't as unpopular as you think. Once
| the government and media trot out the "think of the children"
| and "law and order" narratives, with a helping of "if you've
| done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", a lot of people
| support legally mandated broken encryption.
|
| It's a lot harder to explain to the average voter the negative
| consequences this has on privacy, in a way that will actually
| make them upset about it. And many mainstream media agencies
| don't even bother to try.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| Maybe before, or in the aftermath of 9/11. But we haven't
| seen a major candidate even attempt this since Rand never
| gets higher than a few percentages. I'd love to ask Obama why
| this wasn't the case.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > Are the intelligence agencies really that influential?
|
| More like: Is the general public really scared of terrorism?
| ciwolsey wrote:
| For other UK citizens:
| https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634725
| dijit wrote:
| Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions _ever_
| actually help? I can't think of one that I've followed up to
| the debate that has been successful in anything except getting
| a solid "no" from the sitting government.
|
| Direct action, enough to be villainised by the media, seems to
| be the only way that politicians will actually listen -- though
| even then its a massive uphill struggle.
|
| God, I feel so unrepresented.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _God, I feel so unrepresented._
|
| American here, but I feel the same way. I live in California,
| and I'm left-leaning, but I feel like I have no voice. This
| state -- and my city -- have so many problems, but I don't
| feel like I have any effect on the politicians who are
| failing to solve them.
|
| And that's bad enough without getting into how powerless I
| feel to affect anything at a national level.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > God, I feel so unrepresented.
|
| The Tories have been in power since the year before I could
| vote.
|
| I'm not 100% on the same page as Labour by any stretch, but
| I'm yet to experience government as an adult that isn't in
| total opposition to almost all the values I hold.
|
| I was a teenager from a poor working class family then, I'm
| now a homeowner earning a comfortable wage. I still think
| they're dishonest, self-serving cretins.
| Jigsy wrote:
| > _Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions
| ever actually help?_
|
| No. Honestly, online petitions aren't worth the paper they're
| written on.
| Aachen wrote:
| In the Netherlands, a petition was required to force a
| national referendum. Online or offline doesn't matter. You
| needed to reach some percentage of the Dutch population in
| signatures, I'm not sure about the exact number, but they
| did and we had a referendum on mass surveillance and people
| voted against.
|
| That's when the government decided these things are kind of
| a nuisance and abolished the whole concept of referenda,
| even advisory as they were
|
| I love the ruling party
|
| But anyway petitions aren't necessarily useless, also for
| media attention on a topic if it goes well
| motohagiography wrote:
| Her television interview with the former(?) minister responsible
| for this abomination of a law was urgent and necessary. These
| legislators know what they are doing, and that it is unethical.
| Let Signal leave the UK market. If the people want freedom, let
| them take it themselves. Perhaps before this generation of young
| men are rounded up for another one of history's meat grinders in
| Ukraine, as a means to further reduce domestic resistance to the
| new agenda.
|
| What new words can be written that would suddenly enlighten the
| managers of that government and deter it from its course of fully
| atomizing its citizens? I'd suggest the greatest service Signal
| could do for the people of the UK is to suspend operations in the
| market preemptively. Turn into the torpedo. The thing about
| totalitarianism is that the longer people believe they are safe
| from it, the deeper its roots dig in.
| ahzhou wrote:
| Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft
| in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird,
| unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I
| encourage you to make one point and to make it well.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Respectfully, I'm not interested in influencing the beliefs
| of people who have done nothing so far to preserve privacy
| and can be relied upon to repeat tropes about conspiracy
| theories. However, I can rely on them to shut off and
| continue to do nothing while I equip those who understand
| what's at stake with succinct insight from decades working on
| the issue.
|
| I'm interested in reaching history's actors while sharing it
| with anyone else who might be one and not know it yet, and
| knowing a few, they understand precisely what I'm referring
| to when I say the end state of totalitarian movements
| requires a liquidation mechanism via war. This is what public
| discourse is for. I'd encourage you to offer a criticism you
| didn't hear from television.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| As long as conscription laws remain on the books, it should
| never be taboo to worry about those laws being put into
| practice.
| etothepii wrote:
| I don't think you understand anything about the British
| system if you think that "removing laws from the books"
| matters at all.
|
| As demonstrated by COVID regulations in emergency the law
| can be changed very quickly.
|
| Modern armies (like NATO members) have really got very
| little to gain by conscription. Being a modern soldier has
| very little to do with being cannon fodder.
| ghklqa wrote:
| Modern warfare against insurgents, where CNN broadcasts
| the night vision green victory footage.
|
| Unfortunately, in Ukraine both sides are cannon fodder
| again because modern anti air defenses are so good that
| the fighting relies on 155mm howitzers again. Which NATO
| has just run out of and has no capacity to manufacture in
| sufficient quantities.
| meepmorp wrote:
| I don't think the point was that it is or should be taboo
| to talk about the possibility that conscription laws would
| be used, just that the particular context in which it's
| been brought up makes it weird. It sounds like fringy
| conspiratorial silliness, especially considering the utter
| lack of any evidence that western countries are considering
| actual combat operations in Ukraine. Or maybe a bit of
| propaganda.
|
| It's reasonable for people who want to seriously address
| the very real and legitimate problems with this kind of
| "wiretap" legislation to not want extraneous issues
| derailing the discussion, as having their concerns
| conflated with more conspiratorial-sounding ones makes them
| far easier to dismiss.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I had _defense readiness_ classes in high school back when
| there was still debate in my country whether to phase out
| conscription (which eventually happened) and our teacher, a
| retired colonel(who was against phasing it out), told us
| one thing that stuck with me:
|
| Conscripts are only good for defense - they know the area
| and the local language/customs. Additionally, they stand to
| lose their friends, family and possessions, so they're
| motivated to do something about that.
|
| None of these advantages apply on the offense.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Her television interview_ [...]
|
| Channel 4 News segment:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
|
| The MP, Damian Collins, "who formerly served as a junior
| Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for
| Digital, Culture, Media and Sport":
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Collins
|
| Reminder:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks very much for posting that interview. I thought it was
| good (and honestly impressed that it was quite respectful
| communication all the way around, as opposed to so often what
| I see as "debates" on TV), but I admit I got super frustrated
| to the point I could only watch half of it because nobody
| wanted to clearly admit to the other side's quite obvious
| point.
|
| I think the Signal president was making great points, but she
| definitely was avoiding a clear response when asked about "If
| people are sharing CSAM on your platform, you wouldn't know
| about it, correct?" and "If people are violating your ToS,
| how would you enforce that?"
|
| Obviously, the clearest direct answer is "Correct, we would
| have no way of knowing what content is being shared on our
| service." She complained about "circling the drain on the
| issue", but the reason they were circling is that she didn't
| want to say that sentence. And I get it, in today's day and
| age news organizations love to take a quote out of context
| and make it the headline ("Signal president admits they can't
| enforce their ToS against illegal material!!")
|
| But debates like this are a waste of time when both sides
| refuse to admit the obvious implications of the other side's
| points:
|
| 1. The Signal president was making very clear there is no
| "halfway" encryption, that it either works or it doesn't, and
| the bill required a back door. The government minister was
| pretending and talking loads of BS about what "options the
| regulator has", even while conceding the point that you can't
| have a backdoor that only "the good guys" can use. What an
| exercise in cognitive dissonance.
|
| 2. The Signal president obviously knew "Yes, people can share
| CSAM on our service and we can't directly know about that
| content", but (and I think for good reasons) didn't want to
| say that obvious point out loud.
|
| This debate would make more sense if both sides would just
| admit there is no "halfway compromise" to this issue. I agree
| with another comment that Apple really fucked up by thinking
| their "fingerprinting" approach was technically viable, and
| that somewhat poisoned the well in this debate.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| The marketing around this issue is problematic and it's
| keeping people from clearly discussing the issues. The
| authors of the UK bill chose to focus on CSAM
| _specifically_ so that they could hamstring the debate.
| That so much of the interview focused on "terms of
| service", generally understood to be something so technical
| that most people don't even read them and likely
| unenforceable in court should be a warning sign to us all.
|
| I believe Meredith Wittaker was correct to avoid addressing
| the Signal TOS and how it is implemented. This would open
| the door to the whole "client-side CSAM scanning" (chat
| control) discussion which would be even more tedious.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/clientside_scanning_
| c...
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| What country doesn't have a 'heinous and disgusting past'?
| Why so focused on the sins of the father?
| tptacek wrote:
| We're asked not to write things like this here.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| >being ruled by a family
|
| Nice hyperbole. Western monarchs have no real political
| power. They're just figureheads whose wealth is continually
| financed by the state. Which is stupid, but they're not
| rulers of anything other than their own lavish properties.
| CaptainMarvel wrote:
| Utter rubbish.
|
| Prime ministers have long held weekly audiences with the
| monarch.
|
| The monarch has the right to review legislation before it
| is put to parliament.
|
| That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your
| lifetime, on this side of the century.
|
| These are just three examples from the top of my head.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The monarch cannot lawfully overrule parliament. The
| monarch is entitled to review legislation and express an
| opinion, but they _must_ act on the advice of parliament.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
| borski wrote:
| > That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your
| lifetime, on this side of the century.
|
| I have no bone to pick, not knowing anything about the
| royal family, but do you have any examples of this
| happening?
| avianlyric wrote:
| There's a number of UK laws with odd carve-outs for the
| royal family. A notable one is the Equality Act where
| there is a carve-out that allows the Royal family to
| discriminate with its hiring practices in a way that
| would be illegal for any other organisation.
|
| I don't think there are any examples of significant
| changes to provisional laws, but certainly tweaks to make
| sure the royal family doesn't have to keep with the
| times.
| borski wrote:
| Oh, sure - that I'd believe. The royal family has
| historically been the prototype for "above the law."
|
| But I meant I wasn't aware of any cases in which (in our
| lifetimes or relatively recently) the royal family had
| put their thumb on the scale of a law and had it modified
| in a way that changed it for the general citizenry of the
| UK.
| rcarr wrote:
| They've vetted over 1000 that may conflict with their
| interests.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-
| vette...
| borski wrote:
| You missed my point - on any of these 1000 or more, did
| they change anything or stop them? If not, then it's
| largely just procedural, at least in effect.
|
| That's my point.
| rcarr wrote:
| Yes.
|
| > The Queen successfully lobbied the government to change
| a draft law in order to conceal her "embarrassing"
| private wealth from the public, according to documents
| discovered by the Guardian.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-
| que...
| borski wrote:
| Thank you! That's the dumbest shit ever, lol.
| rcarr wrote:
| lol you should try living here, it tests your sanity
| borski wrote:
| Is there anywhere that's not true for?
| rcarr wrote:
| Well as far as political systems go, Switzerland seems
| the gold standard from what I've read. And if you can
| deal with the cold then the Nordic nations seem pretty
| good, particularly Iceland. As for general day to day, I
| quite like the look of the laidback Mediterranean
| countries and la dolce vita rather than whatever the fuck
| the UK is about nowadays.
| borski wrote:
| Switzerland is impossibly expensive, and immensely
| bureaucratic. The Nordic nations are lovely but so cold.
| Iceland is one of my favorite countries ever. But I could
| never live there.
| rcarr wrote:
| > Switzerland is impossibly expensive, and immensely
| bureaucratic.
|
| Expensive yes but their system of government is
| absolutely superb.
|
| > Switzerland's voting system is unique among modern
| democratic nations in that Switzerland practices direct
| democracy in parallel with representative democracy,
| which is why the Swiss system is known as a semi-direct
| democracy.[2] Direct democracy allows any citizen to
| challenge any law approved by the parliament or, at any
| time, propose a modification of the federal Constitution.
|
| Plus those mountains are bloody beautiful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland
| avianlyric wrote:
| Sorry those are three examples of what? They don't shout
| unconstrained political power to me, they don't even
| shout political power at all.
| flerovium wrote:
| The British government has been oppressing the people of the
| British isles long before and after the empire...
| immibis wrote:
| I wasn't aware the Russian army was recruiting from the UK?
| Xarodon wrote:
| Are we just being obtuse now? Is that what we're doing?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| The alternative is the UK drafting people to fight in
| ukraine, which also makes 0 sense?
| mcpackieh wrote:
| _Obviously_ the concern is an escalation of that war
| which pulls NATO into the conflict fully. I don 't
| believe that's a likely scenario, but being deliberately
| obtuse isn't the right way address that somebody
| expressing that concern.
| immibis wrote:
| Russia nuking NATO? What is Signal encryption supposed to
| have to do with it?
| nmtag wrote:
| The argument that was made (and that was not central to
| the post at all, despite everyone jumping on it) is the
| slow erosion of freedoms that may lead to less restraint
| also in foreign affairs.
|
| UK politicians have been periodically demanding NATO
| engagement, though this one is from 2022:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/davis-
| ellwood...
|
| Ellwood seems to be the UK equivalent of Lindsay Graham
| and has recently made similar noises.
| ciwolsey wrote:
| I think he's genuinely confused, and as a citizen of the
| UK, so am I..
| grayhatter wrote:
| responding to hyperbole with hyperbole is appropriate isn't
| it?
| int_19h wrote:
| Wagner does.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It's good that Whittaker is taking a stand, but it would be nice
| to not have to take her word for it. Reproducible builds would
| help, but I don't think we have those on iOS yet?:
|
| https://community.signalusers.org/t/add-reproducible-builds-...
| nicce wrote:
| It is up to the Apple to decide to provide packages as
| unencrypted for everyone to access and verify. Once they do
| that, yes.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I'm still banking on the hope that governments incompetence at
| dealing with other issues transfers to this one and delays it
| long enough for someone with some sense to come into office and
| rip it up. You'd hope that they'd at least try to deal with the
| cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine first.
|
| Then again, Labour and almost all the major opposition parties
| have been quiet on this, not really doing the job of opposition,
| so even with that delay I'm not sure how much will change.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The water flowed under this bridge 20 years ago. This whole
| discussion seems like it's happening in the wrong decade.
|
| The issue now is that it's so easy to collect circumstantial
| information that is constantly leaked by GPS-enabled apps,
| searches, card purchases, clicks, cell phone tower data, etc.
| that governments don't really need the actual contents of
| messages any more.
|
| I'm still glad Signal exists, but it's part of a very complex
| world of privacy and not magical armor.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I wore a "this t-shirt is a munition" tee back in the day. With
| a quarter century of hindsight, I think encryption as a privacy
| tool may not have been a solution, but a sedative that
| prevented the smartest people from seeing how bad things really
| were and applying their courage to those problems.
| somat wrote:
| Somewhat relevant xkcd.
|
| https://xkcd.com/504/
| chmod600 wrote:
| What would we have done differently?
|
| All this stuff is really convenient. Would we have really
| said "no" to turn-by-turn navigation? Avoided online
| purchases? Used cash for most of our transactions? Printed
| things out so we don't use the internet while outside?
| motohagiography wrote:
| You could have recognized that if you even think you need
| Tor and Signal to protect yourself from your own
| government, you need to organize politically to install
| representatives who ensure you don't think you need those
| things.
|
| We overlook that young people with tech jobs in the 90's
| humiliated a lot of their peers, ones who went on to pursue
| messy politcal careers instead of business ones. Those
| peers learned to hate the knowledge that gave a lot of
| economic advantages to tech people, and the principles we
| ultimately used to morally justify it. Privacy, freedom,
| and anonymity separated us from the all against all power
| game of elite competition that ran on gossip, compromise,
| narrative, and mainly a lot of guile.
|
| As art, I think the season five finale of Rick & Morty
| captured the dynamic pretty well, where Sanchez represents
| the freedom and security of competence and technology that,
| more concretely, allowed a lot of genX to disengage from
| the messy political game represented as the family life of
| people who didn't have the benefits those skills conferred.
| While he shares them, in the world of the story, they are
| still always his.
|
| The evil Morty character is a millenial child politician
| who believes he can have all those benefits for himself
| immediately and today instead of waiting to develop and
| inherit them with time - if he just decieves and betrays
| Sanchez and destroys the world in which his story (history,
| get it) represents the ideal he has to live up to to
| recieve them. Evil Morty the politician doesn't want to be
| a steward, he wants to be his own god becase the one his
| grandfather represents is humiliating to him.
|
| Where we are now is that we have these politicains who are
| actuated by the shame of their impostor syndromes and their
| envy of the true popular desire that the products of
| competence provide. These X'ers can't get a 100 person
| rally going, but some hacker in a basement can do some
| magic and suddenly actuate the desire of billions like some
| kind of rockstar without the gatekeepers.
|
| That's what this legislation is about. It's the coup de
| grace by a resentful pretender elite who have been taken in
| by people older and much more dangerous than they could
| ever have percieved.
| jemmyw wrote:
| I think that's an over analysis. Sweeping statements
| about how each generation thinks sound a bit daft. I
| don't think UK politicians have any shame or envy.
|
| This legislation comes from politicians believing that
| the general populace would vote for a government that
| places catching criminals over having e2e encryption. I
| doubt those legislating have a grand surveillance of the
| masses plan, or much in the way of philosophical thought
| at all. Now we're trying to convey to the general public
| that will be the consequence one way or another even if
| it's not the intent.
| int_19h wrote:
| To be blunt, I don't think the majority of the populace
| actually want those things, or at least don't mind the
| current state of affairs. And then it doesn't matter how
| much you politically organize - a superminority in a
| democracy doesn't get much say either way. OTOH if you
| evolve the tools, they keep working regardless of what
| the law says (even if the law specifically prohibits such
| tools).
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36018465
| kelnos wrote:
| I think the problem is a pretty old one: you can't use
| technology to solve social problems. Encryption as a tool
| is great for some particular kinds of privacy, but using
| encryption to "fix" privacy was misguided from the start.
| Privacy is a policy problem; we need laws on the books that
| prevent both governments and companies from collecting and
| using data about us.
|
| Rules like the US Constitution's 4th amendment, and laws
| like the GDPR (and to some extent, CCPA/CPRA) aim to do
| that, but neither goes anywhere near far enough. 4A often
| gets interpreted narrowly by US courts, to the benefit of
| law enforcement. And the GDPR enforcement mechanisms are
| far too clunky and -- at least from what I've seen so far
| -- don't work particularly well. Not to mention that, for
| it to be truly effective globally, the US would need a
| federal-level law to match it.
|
| Encryption alone doesn't matter. If your social and
| political climate is not oriented toward privacy, your
| privacy tools can simply be made illegal.
| Teckentrup wrote:
| What does exit the UK market mean here though?
|
| Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google
| Play?
|
| Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But
| for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK,
| right?
|
| I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything
| more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking
| within specific states?
|
| Doesn't this just stop less motivated or technical folk getting
| signal... But for anyone motivated, or with nefarious intent, I
| don't see how this prevents anything the bill targets as a harm.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's more symbolic than anything else. The Signal folks don't
| really care how _effective_ this action would be. Sure, they
| can pull the app from the app stores for the UK region, disable
| any accounts registered with a UK phone number and /or block
| connection attempts from UK IP addresses. Some people will work
| around it, but many won't have the technical know-how to do so.
| The end result that's important, though, is that the Signal
| Foundation will be able to announce "due to anti-privacy laws
| enacted in the UK, Signal can no longer provide service in the
| UK".
| consumer451 wrote:
| > What does exit the UK market mean here though?
|
| Maybe just disable all accounts registered with +44 telephone
| numbers?
| leesalminen wrote:
| Signal could block all UK IP addresses from accessing its
| messaging server. UK could require ISPs to block access to
| Signal messaging servers. Both of these are fairly trivial (my
| understanding is that UK already forces filtering on ISPs for
| e.g. pornography).
|
| Of course you are correct that anyone motivated and/or
| technical enough could still access Signal. However, their less
| motivated/less technical contacts won't be using it any longer.
|
| The government is basically asking the bad actors to self-
| identify through their continued use of Signal.
| int_19h wrote:
| Why should Signal block UK IPs anymore so than China IPs,
| though? If anything, I hope that they have a page on the
| website specifically for UK users explaining the law and how
| to break it by installing the .apk directly.
| leesalminen wrote:
| One could interpret "leaving the UK market" in such a way.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| So perhaps a new UK-focused app that everyone sideloads?
| leesalminen wrote:
| Except for iOS users, which is roughly 1/2 of all people in
| UK (according to a quick search).
| JoeCohen wrote:
| Imagine when your most effective countermeasure you have against
| encryption is authoritatively demanding others don't use it.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > "You cannot create a back door that only the good guys can go
| through,"
|
| Alright, technical argument here. This is false and tech talking
| heads are spreading this lie for ideological reasons.
|
| You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific
| targeted client.
|
| Now, if Signal said this is unfair because competitors won't also
| backdoor their app then I am with them. What the UK should
| probably have done is to force phone makers as opposed to app
| makers to facilitate a backdoor.
|
| Signal can scan messages before encryption and report to the
| authorities just fine. Whatever the UK government desires, Signal
| should accept it as the will of the UK people, especially given
| that politicians' stance on this has been public and endured
| election cycles.
|
| I do get their stance, people will stop using them if they cave
| in and the UK gov should know that as well.
|
| I don't know UK law but dragnet surveillance is illegal in the US
| but targeted warrantful requests to backdoor apps is lawful.
| Hizonner wrote:
| > You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific
| targeted client.
|
| Distinction without a difference. Either way, the total system
| is delivering the same plaintext to the same third parties.
|
| On edit: and, just to be clear, they want the apps to scan for
| specific hashes from a master list, and/or apply ML to find
| "suspicious" material that's NOT in any lists, on EVERY client,
| not just "targeted" ones. That's true for the UK "Online Safety
| Bill", for the EU "chat control" or "anti-CSA" proposal, and in
| fact for the practical effect they're trying to get in the US
| with the "Earn It Act", "Stop CSAM Act", and to some degree
| with the "Kids Online Safety Act".
| badrabbit wrote:
| Ok, so what's your point? Mine was to alleviate the burden on
| Signal. Fact is, this can be done and done well. Real harm is
| happening and this popular bandwagon is part of the problem,
| not solution.
|
| Find a better way for govs to have an advantage against CSAM
| and other boogeymen. Technical people are supposed to find
| optimal technical solutions, not pretend to be technocrats or
| underdogs fighting against governments who are all unjust and
| out there to get us.
| int_19h wrote:
| So, technical people are supposed to "just follow orders"?
|
| Nope. If what the government is trying to do is unjust in
| my own ethical judgment, then I have no obligation to help
| them find an "optimal technical solution" to do it - on the
| contrary, I have a moral duty to make it as hard as
| possible for them to do that.
|
| The usual argument is that if we don't "help" them, the
| regime that's actually enacted will be much worse all
| around. Which is likely true, but also exactly the point -
| let them be heavy-handed and incite more popular resistance
| that way. We'll see how much of the public still supports
| all this stuff when the "for CSAM only, pinky promise" tech
| will start being routinely used to bust them for stuff like
| drug use.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > So, technical people are supposed to "just follow
| orders"?
|
| No, just be honest about technical matters. You can
| refuse to publish your software entirely or ideally in
| this case, make it available only outside the UK and let
| UK users seek it out on their own or use vpns. You can
| also protest the measure and try to prevent the law from
| being passed on ideological grounds.
|
| > on the contrary, I have a moral duty to make it as hard
| as possible for them to do that.
|
| So long as you are not being dishonest because then why
| would anyone trust you with anything else. You can comply
| with laws by doing it well or simply refuse to
| participate in publishing software there. What is
| happening now is they want to publish software there but
| refuse to obey the law of the land. What kind of law do
| you get to follow, only when you agree with it?
|
| > We'll see how much of the public still supports all
| this stuff when the "for CSAM only, pinky promise" tech
| will start being routinely used to bust them for stuff
| like drug use.
|
| That's sort of my point. You can disagree with it
| ideologically, saying it will be abused. But if the
| people trust the government and think preventing CSAM is
| more important then it is their right to self-determine
| and find out for themeselves and repeal the law later on.
| You are not the people's nanny, they made their bed.
|
| Perhaps we can talk about phones without app stores and
| OSes people can use whatever unbackdooree app they want
| then?
| maqp wrote:
| >You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific
| targeted client.
|
| So how are you backdooring the client that -- where ever you
| download it from -- can be dumped from the phone and compared
| against self compiled client with a cryptographic hash?
|
| Introducing intentional, ubiquitous vulnerabilities is also a
| terrible idea, because exploits for those can leak or be stolen
| (that has already happened, see Shadow Brokers case), and
| that's catastrophic in operating systems, because they're
| massively scalable.
|
| Rootkits injected via such vulnerabilities can covertly make
| systems so that the vulnerability and backdoor are unpatchable,
| and that would be a catastrophic scenario.
|
| >Signal can scan messages before encryption and report to the
| authorities just fine
|
| Writing a script that comments out the lines of code for such
| scanning, and that compiles the application from source is
| trivial.
|
| People write E2EE layers on top of existing messaging apps. One
| example is OTR plugin for Pidgin/Gaim, another is CryptoCat
| that at one point had a system that operated on top of Facebook
| web UI.
|
| The genie is out of the bottle, and the bad guys are willing to
| go the distance to get secure comms. Bin Laden was using
| airgaps. Criminals are buying crypto phones (that ANOM case was
| fun example of smart targeted attack though, maybe that can be
| used to catch some criminals in future too). What's left is the
| security of normal people from banana dictatorships, mass
| surveillance tools etc. When you backdoor privacy tools, that's
| who you'll get, and if that's who you're going after, then you
| have no right to wield such power.
| badrabbit wrote:
| > Introducing intentional, ubiquitous vulnerabilities is also
| a terrible idea
|
| No e2ee app has compromised device part of their threat
| model. People get ratted all the time on their phones bu
| criminals. This is the same thing except the gov is nice
| enough to not look ar everything, just scan for content
|
| > Writing a script that comments out the lines of code for
| such scanning, and that compiles the application from source
| is trivial. People write E2EE layers on top of existing
| messaging apps. > One example is OTR plugin for Pidgin/Gaim,
| another is CryptoCat that at one point had a system that
| operated on top of Facebook web UI.
|
| Doesn't matter. Those apps can be backdoored too. The whole
| OS can. And the gov doesn't mind playing whack-a-mole. You
| can disagree with their policy but I disagree with openly
| collaborating on lying to policy makers on technical facts.
| chacham15 wrote:
| I didnt read that as a technical argument, but as a
| sociological one. If there are two apps, one which is
| easy/legal to obtain, but has a backdoor and another which may
| be harder/illegal to obtain but has no backdoor, which is the
| bad guy going to choose? Unless you can somehow force every app
| to use the backdoor, you cant make the bad guy go through it.
| Therefore, "You cannot create a back door that only the good
| guys can go through"
| badrabbit wrote:
| The proposal is to scan every message and report if only
| there is a match. What bad guy can possibly take advantage of
| that without coercing Signal? And if Signal can be coerced,
| they can backdoor it all to begin with. Call it a feature
| instead if a backdoor if it sounds better lol.
|
| Control of the list which is used to scan your messages has
| the same security properties as the code of signal itself and
| a threat actor that can exploit the system must control both
| that and access the match reporting system (signal servers).
| An actor that controls these does not need to abuse this
| system, it would be easier to just push a rat alongside
| signal.
|
| > "You cannot create a back door that only the good guys can
| go through"
|
| Perhaps for crypto protocols. Software systems do this all
| the time in form of software updates, usage monitoring and
| even unattended remote support accounts. And also, just
| because it might be possible to find a vuln in a system in
| the future that does not mean it is vulnerable at the time of
| design.
|
| Not only are clean backdoors possible, software engineers can
| design them cleanly and make them sound nice and fluffy when
| they are the ones accessing the backdoor.
| [deleted]
| howinteresting wrote:
| It is a moral duty to oppose majoritarianism that
| disproportionately harms minorities, the so-called will of the
| people be damned.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Ok, if you believe that I have no desire to tell you that you
| are wrong on your views, all I am saying is let's be
| technically honest about what is and isn't possible.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > "I think what has happened over the you know, handful of
| decades in which the surveillance business model has interpolated
| our core infrastructure -- to the point that we're surveilled in
| to an extent we don't have a sense of -- is that that choice has
| been made for us," Whittaker said.
|
| This is an honest question: did she mean to say "infiltrated", or
| is this usage of "interpolated" a valid one that I just don't
| understand? I expected a [sic] or an edit from the article.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Definitely infiltrated.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| That's a less common meaning of the word interpolated, meaning
| to change, usually with the connotation of corrupting.
| Typically I see it used to describe text, but it makes sense
| here too.
| phdelightful wrote:
| Interpolate: to alter or corrupt by inserting foreign matter;
| but I have only seen it used this way for text
| bertman wrote:
| https://archive.is/YVkyP
| pacifika wrote:
| Hasn't Apple already shown it's possible to add another party
| silently to an encrypted exchange?
|
| > Passwords: Users can now create a group to share a set of
| passwords. Everyone in a group can add and edit passwords to keep
| them up to date, and since sharing is through iCloud Keychain,
| it's end-to-end encrypted.
|
| So there goes the backdoor encryption argument, it's possible to
| add another member to a group of people with on device access?
| enigmurl wrote:
| Isnt this more analogous to an end-to-end encrypted group chat
| than a backdoor?
| immibis wrote:
| Secretly turning every two-party encrypted conversation into
| a three-party encrypted conversation is a backdoor.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Adding backdoors to crypto algorithms is easy. What's
| impossible is ensuring the backdoors can only be used by the
| good guys.
|
| What's also impossible is ensuring the good guys don't abuse
| their backdoors and thus become bad guys.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Apple is developing the whole OS, they can always snoop,
| because everything is closed source. Also I loud backup isn't
| e2ee anyways
| godelski wrote:
| > because everything is closed source
|
| We have to be clear that closed source doesn't imply
| vulnerabilities. It just means it is hard to check. But we
| are also talking about one of the most researched devices
| w.r.t. security. If a backdoor is ever found, boy will there
| be hell to pay and I'm pretty sure Apple shares will take a
| really big hit. Especially as they've pivoted their marketing
| towards privacy.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Who persuades politicians it's a good idea for the security
| services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely
| certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they're
| being asked to implement.
| immibis wrote:
| Oh, politicians' messages won't be scanned. They'll make sure
| of that. Only the peons will have their messages scanned.
|
| The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack
| your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the
| government to hack _important people 's_ phones.
| zug_zug wrote:
| >> They'll make sure of that
|
| No they won't. They'll never be sure if their data is secure.
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-and-hundreds-of-
| german-p...
| Xarodon wrote:
| Whoever has money and/or political capital and a desire to see
| encryption weakened.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Most of them are what the majority of non-politicians would
| consider "evil".
|
| Those who go into that profession are longing to control other
| people by means of the monopoly of violence that the government
| has.
|
| That MP in the interview is what happens when you give the
| power to knock down doors and arrest people to somone who likes
| to get into argument about ethics with people in the news site
| comment section.
| martin8412 wrote:
| The laws don't apply to politicians, in fact they're explicitly
| excluded.
| Hizonner wrote:
| In practice, they often use the same services as everybody
| else, even for official business that they're not supposed to
| use them for. Sometimes they do that to intentionally try to
| get around archiving and transparency rules. Other times they
| do it because they're clueless and/or lazy.
|
| Those services don't know that an account belongs to a
| politician or that they're using it for exempt purposes.
|
| Politicians are ALWAYS getting nailed by leaks from various
| computer-based communication systems that they use. Most of
| them don't seem to be able to get their heads around how any
| of this work.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The sad thing is that if any hacker was to show to the
| politicians what their actions entail, the hacker would get
| branded a criminal, and the politician's ratings would go
| up.
| rjsw wrote:
| It would avoid losing access to all your messages if you forget
| the PIN for your phone.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I find it interesting they ask for these abilities when I
| suspect GCHQ is in and out of everyone's phones if they want
| to be - certainly the idea Boris's messages can't be found is
| laughable. I am surprised they haven't set up any security
| focused messaging apps that operate as honeypots for the
| monitoring of criminality...
| avidiax wrote:
| The FBI and the Australian equivalent did this already.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/the-fbis-fake-encrypted-honeypot-
| phones-...
| [deleted]
| markuta wrote:
| No paywall:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2023%2F0...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-15 23:01 UTC)