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Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by bigiain on Monday December 17, 2018 @09:12PM (#18704016)
So we should just go ahead and put Orwell's Telescreens in everyone's house so the governments can see what we're plot^h^hannng all the time?

(Looks around the office and sees the Echo and Google Home, remembers how many friends have those and/or Samsung "Smart TVs" in their home, or who have their phones constantly listening for "OK Google" or "Hey Siri". Right. As you were...)

Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by Spooky23 on Monday December 17, 2018 @09:15PM (#18704037)
No.

The state should be able to get a warrant to intercept communications for reasonable cause, and the accused should be able to litigate the validity of the search.

Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by shakna on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @09:24AM (#18706542)
Unfortunately, in the world of crypto, if the state can intercept communications, then it's equally possible that a determined attacker can. Encryption either works for everyone, or it doesn't.

Governments are more powerful actors on this playing field, but they are far from the only ones on the field.

A warrant doesn't expose something your saying to the government, it exposes what you're saying to anyone who might be listening.

We're not talking the equivalent of handing some documents over to the police, we're saying the police are ordering us to stick the documents to the window of our house so that they can see them.

Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by rosser on Monday December 17, 2018 @09:43PM (#18704153)
That's a little hard to do in a world where this kind of thing is done by National Security Letter.
Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by Spooky23 on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @08:10AM (#18706172)
You may notice that I didn’t include any advocacy for NSL in my comment.

Pretending that technology is infallible is a defect equally as bad as NSL with respect to the rule of law.

Obviously no complex IT system is infallible, and now we have a situation that with no legal remedy, the police and intelligence services are compromising or allowing latent defects to remain in order to fulfill their missions.

You never hear about law enforcement concerns with respect to iMessage or Signal, so it is likely that whatever security you think you have from the state is not meaningfully there.

Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by SmellyGeekBoy on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @06:44AM (#18705858)
I'm pretty sure NSLs are only enforceable in the US.
Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by krageon on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @07:37AM (#18706029)
Plenty of other countries have similar mechanisms, where the user is also not informed (because of a court order or similar). The US is certainly not the only culprit here, although they may or may not be the worst.
Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by bigiain on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:55PM (#18720723)
Australian resident with a UK passport checking in here. Australian's are fucked too. And we pretty much copy/pasted our new laws from the UK ones, so UK residents are as well. If Canada/New Zealand have not already passed equivalent laws or are not in the process of doing so, my paranoia about Five Eyes might be a little miscalibrated. But realistically, I suspect its more likely that I'm not paranoid enough, rather than too paranoid...
Re:On Ghost Users and Messaging Backdoors by manicdee on Monday December 17, 2018 @10:03PM (#18704241)
How will the accused know about the search when they aren’t told about it?