The 2019 heat was directly implicated in the deaths of at least 15 people. Five died in France, four in Germany, three in the United Kingdom, two in Spain, and one in Italy. Nine of these were drownings, attributed to people cooling down, and another involved an exhausted farm worker who went unconscious after diving into a pool. The three who died in hot air were aged 72, 80 and 93. Approximately 321 million people were otherwise affected by similar temperatures in the same countries.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2019_European_heat_wave
Edited for clarity
> Netherlands reported 400 excess deaths in the week of the heat wave, a figure comparable to those recorded during the 2006 European heat wave.
Netherlands is considerably smaller than the other nations.. Most put these spikes as a portion* that would have died in the next days weeks, or months lowering statistics later in the year and a portion that would not have.
(Edit) A paper putting the 2003 heat-wave death toll at 70,000: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S163106910...
*The term from the 2003 paper is harvesting and there were little to no signs of it.
That is not correct whoever wrote it. just do a google search: heatwave 2019 total deaths
CNN reports already 1500 deaths in France only. This is a link to a news site where they estimate a higher count, although I of course cannot verify the correctness of the source: https://www.vox.com/world/2019/6/26/18744518/heat-wave-2019-...
Backdooring a communication is only done to safeguard a government's power under the pretense of security.
Further away from democracy, leaders are purely self serving, successful corruption is seen as a sign of intelligence and whistle-blowers, far from being heroes for pointing out maleficence, are threatened with execution.
And indeed, institutions eventually shift to working solely for the benefit of themselves and the people in charge. Mostly because any that don't are undermined until they do.
I had this thought yesterday as I read about several prominent politicians in Canada, including the prime minister, actively participating in the climate 'protests' that occurred yesterday. Who were they out there protesting? Themselves? They're the ones with the power to change things. Why were they outside with signs instead of in their offices doing something about it?
Those 20 senators (from Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas) are answerable to the demands of their constituents. Those people are not asking for Climate Change Policies. It has nothing to do with money, but the values and culture of the constituents.
It is incredible how HN and majority of the supposedly 'smart' crowd completely fail to understand the dynamics of how policies and laws are passed or made in this country or anywhere else.
It is also incredibly stupid to paint all politicians with the same brush, because if you are an immoral, evil politician you'd exactly want that situation. "All politicians are the same", "All media is the same" is the foundational strategy of bad actors.
Also, so what if the bad actors want us to believe that all politicians are the same? What if it were true that they're all the same and evil? Would it still be "incredibly stupid" to accurately assess the state of affairs?
See for example: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/30/excess-winte...
I think it is. The problem is, denying us access to safe communication is not going to make is more safe, but less.
I don't think it is quite as simple as this (I'll preface this with saying I don't think we should have backdoors and that I wish we had STRONG encryption everywhere). I think the problem is that different departments have different goals. It is very clear that the CIA and NSA's jobs would be easier if there was a magical tool that let them backdoor in and no one else. The police and FBI would have an easier time doing their job if encryption wasn't a thing. That's definitely true! The issue is who is watching the watchmen? That's why we need checks and balances (specifically by people that understand the tech). These departments are so focused on their goals that they lose track of the fact that introducing backdoors actually creates more work for them (and thus actually makes their lives harder). But as humans we're always focused more on the task at hand and less on the over arching tasks (we're notoriously bad at dealing with large scale multifaceted problems). It all really comes down to these departments thinking "if we had this tool it would be possible that we could have stopped this" (which possible is the key word, because we've seen that they can't. There's just too much data. You're just adding more hay to the haystack). The failure really is at the checks and balances stage, that those watching the watchmen don't understand the motivations nor the consequences, and thus let them do as they please. Agencies running the checks and balances are supposed to be suspicious and critical, not friendly. But these agencies aren't getting the funding nor can they attract those that are tech literate, so there's a feedback loop that is only getting stronger. What I'm trying to say is that there's this long chain and things are broken at many stages and that if a single stage was fixed there would be significant improvement. Basically solving at any single stage will help stop the feedback loop.
tldr: The intelligence agencies should be smart enough that they would know that backdoors will backfire on them. But they clearly aren't. There's also a huge failure at the checks and balances stage where these agencies are getting approval which creates a feedback loop and without solving this the problem will continue to grow.
There are ZERO people from the pitchfork community who understands the pressure of working in keeping a community, region or country safe. If there is a terrorist attack, the pitchfork people have to answer to ZERO questions, while CIA/NSA/Police will have to answer 'Why didn't you do something".
It is so easy to sit in their comfortable offices and homes and philosophize about privacy when you have no skin in the game.
> It is so easy to sit in their comfortable offices and homes and philosophize about privacy when you have no skin in the game.
And I definitely agree with this. But that's also why I made a big point into that lack of encryption actually gives these agencies more work (if we look at history). The problem is exactly what you note though, there will always be failure and we ask why they can't stop near impossible things to stop. Post hoc analysis is always easier than in situ.
“One who is elected by the common populace to facilitate business at the cost of logical reasoning, human rights and the natural world.”?
While I’m sure one or two exist, I can’t actually think of a politician in the US, UK or Australia who doesn’t fit into the definition somehow. Again, there would be a few good ones, just not enough.
Back in '90s I used a nym e-mail to receive e-mails anonymously and with no traces.
In a few words - e-mails are encrypted with your PGP key and posted to Usenet groups, where you scan all messages and extract only those signed&encrypted with your key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonymous_remailer
Yep, there are 1000 and 1 method of communicating securely. Governments are just using this as an excuse to wiretap popular messaging services for general surveillance.
Unless they'll get away with making everyone dumber, they shall fail.
This is not how it works. As long as enough people are not bothered, they will succeed.
I'd love to hear about either a possible alternative government structure in which there are no politicians or a way to attract the smartest people in governments.
When you consider the societal fallout and everything that has transpired since, the most insane part to me is that by its very occurrence, 9/11 itself already prevented the next 9/11. The "next 9/11" was to crash the fourth hijacked plane into a high value traget; the plane on which the passengers fought back which was crashed in Pennsylvania WAS the next 9/11. This was a tactic that was apprehended and adapted to before the day was out. It worked three times on one day, once. An update to the mental calculus of common folks was all it really took. If we had successfully prevented it re-shaping our society, it would have never, ever, ever worked again. This newfound understanding of the rules coupled with a straight-forward countermeasure like reinforced cockpit doors would have closed off that vector of attack entirely.
19 malevolent people acting in 2001 have colored nearly two decades of policy for America. I remember two particular circulating ideas from the time: "they're attacking our way of life" and "they hate us because we are free." The latter was much more divisive and so people spent much more time arguing with each other about it. Meanwhile, whether intentionally on the part of the attackers or not, the first was very effectively accomplished.
Maybe if there had been no 9/11, the agencies charged with protecting Americans would have still been seduced by the ease with which modern technology enables broad surveillance. Maybe hoovering up all the data is too good an opportunity to pass up. Regardless, I yearn for, and still miss the end of history. Our hubris has been rewarded with interesting times.
If a legislator is not technically up to speed, considerable tax payer money goes towards hiring people in government to do the research and the explaining. Some high level advisers may come from organizations with a private agenda and after a few years of working within the goverment these experts pop right back to their industry jobs and we don't hear of them anymore.
Ultimately its the same need in whatever form of government we want – we need people we can trust.
The intention being that politicians are aware that they must be consistent with their words and actions throughout their term otherwise they will lose their seat.
Some months before the last big bail out legislations, in my state we had a US Senate candidate who was new in our political scene, appeared as a local man with a law degree from our state university, and he spoke about how the working people struggled with unemployment, delinquencies etc, as he knew middle class issues and can change the ways of Washington. PBS featured him and I still remember the interview they aired from his kitchen in a middle class home. I am among the people who voted him in.
A few years after this election I checked his voting records by chance and I realized that he had voted almost always in favor of the bailout system. I wouldn’t have known this by just reading the news or watching cable. In the next election cycle he won handily, this time supported by organizations with cash to blanket our news with favorable lines for him. That’s how life works I guess.
Of course he did not win because the other candidate was much better qualified and rural voters knew him en masse (he’s the one that signs checks for all the citizen stewards of oil fields), but I found it hilarious that people would flame me for not voting for a figurehead (president) but be a-ok to vote in some no name hack to manage our schools because of big money advertising in elections
In all seriousness this is the aim of all historical anarchist movements. Despite the propagandization of the term "anarchism", that philosophy has a long history of attempts and writers and thinkers, and it has more often than not "failed" when a powerful state entity violently disbanded the efforts or killed prominent leaders. In other cases anarchism has not failed at all but has existed in tribal communities in different ways long before european thinkers wrote on the subject.
In particular anarcho-communism or the more detailed Communalism of Murray Bookchin (The Next Revolution, 2015 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239261/the-next-rev...) looks totally plausible to me.
The biggest issue with state-less society is the conflict with the existing state powers this philosophy creates. However the method of governance has found success in present day Mexico with the Zapatistas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww46lxIc6-w As well as Rojava in Syria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcndZ0nZ0mo
So the core problem is that humans don't make great rulers. Not are we good at selecting rulers.
Individuals are the flaw in the system. And a government without stupidity, means a government without humans.
Thus... http://bit.ly/2nsTLdE
But in that system, how do you allow leniency for the 40 year old single mother of 5 who accidentally switched lanes without using a turn signal?
Individuals also represent humanity in the government. We are not a nation of robots.
https://youtu.be/rgUs5wtXgL4 (the video is a bit dated unfortunately)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12...
Funny story about that, those used to be considered controlled munitions [0].
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...
As of 2009, non-military cryptography exports from the U.S. are controlled by the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Some restrictions still exist, even for mass market products, particularly with regard to export to "rogue states" and terrorist organizations.
Militarized encryption equipment, TEMPEST-approved electronics, custom cryptographic software, and even cryptographic consulting services still require an export license.
Furthermore, encryption registration with the BIS is required for the export of "mass market encryption commodities, software and components with encryption exceeding 64 bits" (75 FR 36494). In addition, other items require a one-time review by, or notification to, BIS prior to export to most countries. For instance, the BIS must be notified before open-source cryptographic software is made publicly available on the Internet, though no review is required. Export regulations have been relaxed from pre-1996 standards, but are still complex. Other countries, notably those participating in the Wassenaar Arrangement, have similar restrictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
We dislike it even though we would be forced to do the same thing in their position. We dislike it because we aren’t the ones in power. Again, as it goes in the jungle, life isn’t always fair.
However, I don't care if it "keeps us safe". It's just wrong in so many ways
The "terrorism" rationalization provided for this surveillance has nothing to do with reality. The United States government is not in any way involved in fighting the source of jihadist terrorism, and the state responsible for 9/11, Saudi Arabia. They are allies, and Trump's cabinet is now attempting to arm Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons. The actual intent of this law is to surveil whistle-blowers and journalists. WhatsApp messages have already been used in the case against IRS whistle-blower John Fry, who exposed the Donald Trump-Michael Cohen hush payments.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/report-trump-rushing-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCo-0EAu5Oc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-SjxsGHOI
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/04/whistleblowers-surveilla...
Those apps that provide end-to-end encryption are a problem and they are working on solving it.
Claiming that they should not be able to wiretap lawfully (or even otherwise) is a rather naive view of the world and lawful wiretapping does not imply dystopia.
Are they though? There will always be a means to communicate without surveillance. Backdooring encryption is fundamentally incompatible with privacy, and will be abused - at scale.
For any real cases, the security services have a multitude of other ways of getting the information they need regardless - for example, they could gaining physical access to the target's phone and backdoor/bug it, or swap it out with a backdoored/bugged one.
The real problem with backdooring or outlawing encryption is that it lowers the bar to entry for governments - it makes it too easy, and such sweeping powers will be abused.
That's a very bold claim.
Lawful wiretapping exists because it is accepted (and reasonable) that privacy should stop in specific circumstances, e.g. a criminal investigation.
As I wrote before seeing this in black or white is naive. Wiretapping is useful for society. The key is to have proper oversight.
By the way, to lawfully wiretap a phone the authorities only need the phone number: The operator will then duplicate all traffic transparently and on the fly. Bugging a phone really means illegal/covert operations these days...
When a weakness is introduced into that defense, even if it's a secret key held only by trusted governments and only (they promise) to be used in emergencies, that key is a method of attack that anyone, anywhere can use against everyone. The only defense is that the secret key remain secret, and there are an endless number of ways it could be comprimised, ranging from human error, phishing, or plain old brute forcing. A single key for all Whatsapp conversations is a valuable enough prize for criminals all over the world to invest serious money in custom hardware to crack it.
Currently, encryption schemes like Whatsapp's rely on generation of new keys for every message, making the value of attacking any one message limited. Without this defense, Whatsapp will be cracked, sooner or later. And once someone publicly reveals that key, every single message sent before that point becomes compromised. Maybe even publicly exposed. Would you be okay with that? Exposing your private message history to the internet because governments wanted to snoop?
If there is a key which decrypts everything, then there is a risk it can be stolen or guessed and used to decrypt anyone's messages. This risk does not exist in current, properly designed systems.
Any government which wishes to add a backdoor to an E2E encrypted messaging system must understand that they will be HEAVILY undermining the security and privacy rights for all users of the service which has the backdoor.
Whatsapp decided to go for E2E encryption for commercial and marketing purposes following all those privacy scandals.
They did not have to. They could have gone with P2P encryption, i.e. that their databases could have stored messages in cleartext. That way authorities would not have needed to ask for any backdoor. As already mentioned, this is how cellular operators work (that's obviously something governments wanted).
I think we might see legislation brought in in the future in order to force this.
Okay. Let's just get rid of E2E entirely and let Facebook mine not only our metadata but also the content of our messages. Nice plan.
> let Facebook mine not only our metadata...
Don't use Facebook, then.
Yes, but if you make it too easy, oversight fails or is worked around with legalese, and the powers are abused at scale.
> Bugging a phone really means illegal/covert operations these days
My view here is that it should be difficult - the security services should only be able to intercept someone's communications with a legally obtained warrant to do so (the oversight you mentioned); then powers are far more likely to only be used where the is a credible threat.
Here's a case where the courts say that police surveillance was not correctly authorised: https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKIPTrib/2018/IPT_17_93_H.ht...
I hold the opposite view: that the idea that the evolutionary trajectory of the internet seems wont to continue to allow "wiretapping" (and, for that matter, the existence of a capricious state tout court) is the naive view.
The state is looking increasingly obsolete every day, and moves like this are significant leaps forward in solidifying that conclusion.
The implementation of AES in popular CPUs? Yeah, who knows.
Politicians, generally, are not hypocrites. That implies the guise of good faith. Do you really think the biggest beneficiaries of terrorism are likely to be honest with you? Humans just like being told what to do and what to fear and whom to be mad at, and politicians make eager use of this role.
From the government's perspective, they are to keep "us" safe. It's easier to do that if no one's safe from us. :)
Granted, that's a little over-ominous because the government's mission statement is to keep its people safe, and it's also elected by its people. Either of these two facts changing is the way bigger danger; backdooring centralized services is stuff that happens in the meantime either way.
Even if this or that individual politician gets voted out, or even ten of them, it won't stop the machine's influence. They're still the ones who decide who the replacements can be chosen from.
Strangely, HN is also very much in favor of the administration’s trade protectionism.
Yes. Absolutely. That's the only logical endgame.
That's pretty far detached from real rocketry.
A similar metaphor for computing would be the allowed use of a LeapFrog system, rather than a computer.
'My cryptography hobby is going pretty well, I just practiced a Caesar cipher on my LeapFrog.'
(neither a LeapFrog or a model rocket being a practical equivalent to their big relative.)
If the goal is to catch malicious people that are trying to hide their communications, then outlawing encryption won't work. But it will give the government a good excuse to spy on people.
I don't think this is the right analogy - instead, I think a better statement would be "you can't outlaw random numbers".
A random number and the ciphertext output of a secure encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable.
I don't think I am being naive to think that even in our wildest dystopian nightmares there is no real path from (current jurisprudence in five-eyes jurisdictions) to (random numbers being illegal).
And you can bet those people do understand encryption.
As far as Slack goes... I trust them as much as I trust Discord: I do not.
Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally if not mistaken. Strong encryption is open source as you've pointed out. There's no law against using those open source libraries, nor any discussion to try to censor/outlaw them, AFAIK.
Policing the airwaves and internet pipes hardly qualifies as some major abuse of human rights, particularly when the best that the Intercept/Snowden crowd can come up with regarding things like "Parallel Reconstruction" is "abuse" of "surveillance power" to catch, e.g., methamphetamine traffickers [1].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
edit: Downvote due to disagreement? This seems to be the mantra of HN in recent years.
The leaders of today are not the same as those of tomorrow - sweeping powers to invade anyone's privacy and communications could easily be used for nefarious purposes. I don't trust our current leaders with such powers, much less potentially worse ones.
> Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally if not mistaken. Strong encryption is open source as you've pointed out. There's no law against using those open source libraries, nor any discussion to try to censor/outlaw them, AFAIK.
Do you really think things will stay this way?
It seems to me that TFA is just the next step on a slow, but steady, march towards an authoritarian nightmare - once they've worn us down some more, there will be serious moves against encryption (it's happened before, and politicians have been bringing it up a lot in the past 10 years or so).
Paul Graham:
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
News Guidelines:
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
But I always always downvote complaints about downvotes, such as your edit.
I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.
That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.
Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.
Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.
That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.
Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.
If you are US citizen maybe, for the rest of the world. Definitively not.
Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilians in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is not an example of "respect of humans rights".
This is a good point, I think. The US has an appalling record on human rights (aside from your examples, arming terrorists and overthrowing democratically elected governments spring to mind) - as long as we're talking about the rights of non-Americans.
Some of those individuals were guilty of little more than political activism but experienced real harm (e.g. deportation) thanks to surveillance overreach.
Which in practice is done by using machine learning [1] on huge data sets gathered with that global surveillance enabled trough Five Eyes.
Because the army of humans that could manually sort trough those zettabytes of data has yet to be cloned. All that ends up in the fancy-sounding "disposition matrix" [2] aka the USGs kill-list. It's just systems upon systems doing their thing and nobody is directly responsible or accountable for anything that ends up happening, like when yet another 30 Afghani farmers get "splatted" by accident [3].
Considering how this has been going on for close to two decades, and the US has a very convenient way going about the casualty statistics [4], I guess these Afghani farmers are just another rounding error in the "war on terror". Figures, because before that they were mostly considered biometric cattle [5] and lab-rats for fantasies about "full-spectrum surveillance" [6].
Note: Under Trump, the USG now even stopped releasing their shined up drone statistics. So it's pretty much impossible to know the full scale about what's still going on to this day.
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/us-drone-strik...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
[5] https://www.wired.com/2010/09/afghan-biometric-dragnet-could...
[6] https://we-make-money-not-art.com/big-eye-kabul-surveillance...
I mostly remember the headline, Google does the rest of leading me back to the article.
I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, are hell-bent on creating. They denounce China and Russia for their human rights records in one breath, and seek to strip us of privacy and personal rights in the next - the hypocrisy is simply staggering.
What's perhaps even more frightening is that so many people believe that moves like this are to keep us safe, will keep us safe.
This can not end well...