Computer literacy 101: to err is human, to really foul up requires a computer.
They don't understand that by requiring the capability for going after domestic criminals, they've given a huge gift to their international adversaries' intelligence agencies. (And given this is about a computer vulnerability, "international adversaries" includes terrorists, and possibly disgruntled teenagers, not just governments).
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/21/meredith-whittaker-reaffir...
If politicians don't understand after such campaigning, it's a choice in willful ignorance, not bad computer literacy.
If I'd known about the idea of "inferential gap" at the time, my own effort might not have been completely ignored… though probably still wouldn't have changed the end result as I still don't know how to show lawmakers that their model of how computers and software functions has led to a law that exposed them, personally, to hostile actors.
How even do you explain to people with zero computer lessons that adding a new access mechanism increases the attack surface and makes hacking easier?
The politicians seem to see computers as magic boxes, presumably in much the same way and for much the same reason that I see Westminster debates and PMQs as 650 people who never grew out of tipsy university debating society life.
(And regardless of if it is fair for me to see them that way, that makes it hard to find the right combination of words to change their minds).
You literally tell them that. That's it. As prominent tech leaders have been doing. They either choose to believe experts, or disbelieve them. Or they could get a CS major. They chose option #2. They ostensibly disbelieve experts because what they're hearing does not mesh with what they want.
But let's be honest with ourselves; it's not that they disbelieve them, or don't understand. It's that they don't care. You are giving these people way too much of a benefit of the doubt. They have the tools at their disposal to remove any ignorance.
As it's not working, QED not "that's it".
> You are giving these people way too much of a benefit of the doubt.
They're hurting their own interests in the process. If they were just hurting my interests, I'd agree with you. But this stuff increases the risk to themselves, directly. I may have even told them about https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-0204 given the timing.
Neither is underestimating your enemy or making excuses for their behavior.
Indeed. I do neither, which is why I left the UK.
It would be underestimating them indeed to have remained there — I foresaw, even then, that a story equivalent to this very headline would eventually emerge.
And it would also be over-estimating myself to think that I could change them after the Act when I could not change them before the Bill.
I oppose that because end to end encryption is still possible by anyone with something to hide, it is trivial to implement. I think governments should just take the L in the interest of freedom.
Traditional warrants couldn't retroactively capture historical realtime communications because that stuff wasn't traditionally recorded to begin with.
> It isn’t necessarily about mass surveillance and the implementation could prevent mass surveillance but allow warrants.
The implementation that allows this is the one where executing a warrant has a high inherent cost, e.g. because they have to physically plant a bug on the device. If you can tap any device from the server then you can tap every device from the server (and so can anyone who can compromise the server).
Which is why the clients have to be doing the encryption themselves in a documented way that establishes the server can't be doing that.
governments should just take the L in the interest of freedom
> they'll need control later on when they start doing seriously tyrannical things.
You mean like when they start jailing people for social media posts? Or when they are going to ban kitchen knives? Or when they're going to hide a massive gang rape scandal because it makes them look bad? Or when they would convict 900+ people on false charges of fraud because they couldn't admit their computer system was broken? Come on, we all know this is not possible.
Many politicians are individuals without any talent who desire power and control, politics is the only avenue open to people like that.
I used to think it was illiteracy, but when you hear politicians talk about this you realise more often than not they're not completely naive and can speak to the concerns people have, but fundamentally their calculation here is that privacy doesn't really matter that much and when your argument for not breaking encryption based around the right to privacy you're not going to convince them to care.
You see a similar thing in the UK (and Europe generally) with freedom of speech. Politicians here understand why freedom of speech is important and why people some oppose blasphemy laws, but that doesn't mean you can just burn a bible in the UK without being arrested for a hate crime because fundamentally our politicians (and most people in the UK) believe freedom from offence is more important than freedom of speech.
When values are misaligned (safety > privacy) you can't win arguments by simply appealing to the importance of privacy or freedom of speech. UK values are very authoritarian these days.
This doesn’t justify his position (it’s stupid) but he doesn’t speak for the current government.
Head of state in the UK is a bit weird compared to countries that abolished or never had a monarchy.
Anyway, back on topic: this is a ridiculous law that is forcing services to erode their security while smart criminals can just use some nice free open-source software somewhere else for E2E communication. And a lot of this is definitely down to lawmakers not understanding technology.
And, to be fair, while I’m generally a small r republican, I’m seeing benefits of having a non politically aligned head of state after J6. While the monarch has limited power, booting out a PM that can’t command the confidence of Parliament is one of them. The question of whether Johnson would accept being dethroned a la Trump was always silly given his consent was never needed.
I guess the US equivalent is the leader of the house being unable to hold their majority together. In some ways the presidential election feels more democratic if a relative outsider (like Trump was) can win. But a 2 year lead up is crazy.
One of the benefits of a constitutional monarchy is the head of state did not campaign for the position.
It wraps ultimate power up in a contradiction, you have it but you can’t use it. Sure, technically you could but it would be your last act.
Another important aspect, the for and against is currently split between parties, so there’s somewhat of unification factor between parties on that divide as well.
It gets a lot of hate, because it is imperfect, but I don’t think it gets its fair shake. My views more of, if it ain’t broke is it really worth the risk changing it.
It was used in Australia in the 1970s
Obviously pedos on the interwebs are bad, but hey as long as it's just anime they're whacking off to I don't care too much. But the real abuse, that's done by - especially in the UK - rich and famous people like Jimmy Savile. And you're not gonna catch these pedos with banning encryption, that's a fucking smokescreen if I ever saw one, you're gonna catch them with police legwork and by actually teaching young children about their bodies!
Jimmy Savile was a vile predator. He was protected by the inane customs of the British ruling class.
He was not alone among the toffs of England.
But do not be mistaken. It is not just the rich and powerful where you find sexual predators. They exist at all levels of society, all genders, most ages (I will except infants and the aged infirm....)
Jimmy Savile was a symptom of something much darker, much worse and widespread.
In the UK if you're raped by someone famous you'd be an utter idiot to say anything unless you're loaded or have a massive amount of hard evidence. You couldn't have a me to movement in the UK because everyone who came forward would be sued into bankruptcy. This is why so many people knew about Savile but no one said anything.
It is the victim on trial, many times.
What on earth are you talking about?
Charles III is head of state, and before that, Liz II. The monarch absolutely does not get involved in politics.
The monarch picks the Prime Minister, no? That seems pretty involved.
They have a ceremonial role in confirming them. Like they do with every law that Parliament creates. If they ever actually practically exercised this theoretical power it would be the end of the monarchy.
The Members of Parliament choose the Prime Minister. The role of the monarch in confining them is purely ceremonial.
That's an awfully generous assessment on your part. Kindly explain just what "technical literacy" has to do with the formulation you note. From here it reads like you are misdirecting and clouding the -intent- by the powerful here.
Also does ERIC SCHMIDT an accomplished geek (who is an official member of MIC since (during?) his departure from Sun Microsystems) suffers from "technical literacy" issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983717
Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here. Tech illiteracy -> what you got to hide there buddy?
Is this clear?
>> Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here.
> The comment's clarity was not questioned.
My password manager vault isn't exactly something to hide in the political sense, but it's definitely something I would fear is exposed to heightened risk of compromise if there were a backdoor, even one for government surveillance purposes. And it's a reasonable concern that I think a lot of people aren't taking seriously enough due, in part, to a lack of technical literacy. Both in terms of not realizing how it materially impacts everyday people regardless of whether they're up to no good, and in terms of not realizing just how juicy a target this would be for agents up to and including state-level adversaries.
As for Eric Schmidt, he's something of a peculiar case. I don't doubt his technical literacy, but the dude is still the head of one of the world's largest surveillance capitalist enterprises, and, as the saying goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I have a feeling the politicians already know partial cybersecurity isn't an option, and don't care. Certainly, the intelligence community advising them absolutely does know. We don't even have to be conspiratorial about it: their jobs are easier in the world where secrets are illegal than in the world where hackers actually get stopped.
Not with physical security either, I'm afraid.
In the world of cryptography it's... a bit harder to do something similar. In the best case they can come up with a key escrow system that doesn't suck too much, force you to use it, and hopefully they don't ever get the master keys hacked and stolen or leaked. But they're not asking for key escrow. They're asking for providers to be the escrow agents or whatever worse thing they come up with.
This isn't accurate though, and leads us down the path of trying to prevent these bad laws from a technical perspective when we should be fighting the principle of the bad law not just decrying it for being "unworkable".
It is possible to construct encryption schemes with a "backdoor key" while still being provably secure against anyone else.
This creates precisely the "partial security" you describe: Criminals can't crack the encryption, but the government can use their backdoor-key.
But like those who argue online age-consent schemes can't work, it doesn't help to argue against the technical aspects of such bad laws. The law, particularly UK law, doesn't care for what's technically possible. The bad laws can sit on the books regardless of the technical feasibility of enforcement. Eventually technology can catch up, or the law can simply be applied on a best endeavours / selective enforcement approach.
No, it doesn't. Now criminals just have to get the key. These schemes have been tried many times. They've been discovered by actors that shouldn't have access to them.
Please don't go around advising government leaders and organizations. This is exactly the problem solving capabilities of governmental leaders that security experts are decrying here in this thread.
I honestly though get you're comment was going to go along the lines of perfect physical security can only be perfectly secure from everyone, including the people it shouldn't be. We constantly see the hacking oh physical locations. The big things keeping some orgs from being attacked: redundancy, observability, and ENCRYPTION WITHOUT BACKDOORS!
However, nothing prevents keys from being stolen by someone else. In a normal cryptosystem the security of the key is entirely up to you; but in a "law enforcement accessible" system now you have to worry about the feds getting hacked, too. And since the feds will have backdoor keys for many, many users; there is much more interest in stealing those keys.
Physical security has a different set of tradeoffs. Notably, you have to actually be physically present to manipulate and defeat a physical lock, which is what I was alluding to. Even then, it provides an example of how easily a backdoor can be compromised. The Travel Sentry system exists to allow TSA employees to unlock and inspect luggage. There are seven master keys in total; copies of which are spread around thousands of airports with tens to hundreds of TSA employees each. Suffice it to say, the master keys leaked decades ago and you can buy them off Amazon for a few bucks. Any such backdoor key will need similar levels of access to government employees and will likely leak for the same reasons as the TSA keys. Except that the consequence of an encryption backdoor key leaking will be much higher than someone being able to open luggage locks.
Politically, there is also an argument that we should be able to keep secrets from the state. Certainly, there is a reason why we have a 4th Amendment, and it is not because searches and seizures just so happen to be inconvenient.
As for age-of-consent checking, the problem is that existing age verification services would be able to track everyone who accesses an age-verified site. Which, given today's legal climate basically demanding age verification for everything[0], would give the verifier access to your whole browsing history.
Physical age verification is relatively privacy-preserving: I present my ID and that's that. The government that issued that ID does not learn where I presented it, because it's an offline credential. The people I'm doing business with do learn my identity, and they could sell that information, but that's something they didn't need an ID to do (so we should pass a law to prohibit that).
[0] There is also a political argument that the 1st Amendment precludes age verification on social media - aka "don't censor kids"
First, pedos know everybody hates them, so they take measures normal people wouldn't in order to avoid detection, and then backdooring the tech used by everybody else doesn't work against them because they'll use something else. But it does impair the security of normal people.
Second, there aren't actually that many pedos and the easy to catch ones get caught regardless and the hard to catch ones get away with it regardless, which leaves the intersection of "easy enough to catch but wouldn't have been caught without this" as a set plausibly containing zero suspects. Not that they won't use it against the ones who would have been caught anyway and then declare victory, but it's the sort of thing that's pretty useless against the ones it's claimed to exist in order to catch, and therefore not something it can be used effectively in order to do.
Whereas industrial espionage or LOVEINT or draining grandma's retirement account or manipulating ordinary people who don't realize they should be taking countermeasures -- the abuses of the system -- those are the things it's effective at bringing about, because ordinary people don't expect themselves to be targets.
Hmm? Hell has depths. Your yard might be a little too short to measure them? In that case, just think about this: rape is probably most common in prisons, where you will send innocents the moment this dragnet thing glitches.
hopefully the US turning from leader of the free world to Russia's tool will give them the kick they need to realise that just because you trust the government now doesn't mean you trust the next government or the one after it.
However, Google did only start moving to protect location data from subpoenas after people started to worry that location data could be used as a legal weapon against women who went to an abortion clinic, so your larger point stands.
This is exactly like saying that President Trump has nothing to do with the actions of the executive branch agencies today.
when a clown moves into a palace, the clown doesn't become the king - the palace becomes a circus.
President Obama sold himself as a Constitutional scholar who would set right the civil liberties overreach of his predecessor.
You aren't going to convince sane people that his executive branch agencies sought to gut the fourth amendment without his being aware of it, despite months of extensive press coverage.
The demand for encryption just exploded, in a legal gray area (city, state, and federal laws seem to be in conflict here) it's just a question of whether the government allows the supply to follow.
So much humour in one short phrase.
Do you really believe your propaganda or is it just absentmindedly parroting pro permanent war talking points?
It's truly repulsive how imperialistic warmongerers like you pretend you're "the good guys".
This seemed strange to point out. It’s not really any more or less “paternalistic” than most western nations including the US.
> The crimes would be just as criminal had they been done in person at a local bar (or any other physical location).
I agree. Where the US differs is that because of the US's 1st amendment it's _not_ a crime to say those things even in a bar.
Anyway, all of that to say that americans are arrested for posting things on the internet, despite what people claim.
Meanwhile their country has slid into fascism. Sad and tragic.
What is a "paternalistic state". I studied Latin so obviously I understand pater == father but what is a father-like state?
What on earth is: "authoritarian support across all parties".
The UK has one Parliament, four Executives (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales) and a Monarch (he's actually quite a few Monarchs).
Anyway, I do agree with you that destroying routine encryption is a bloody daft idea. It's a bit sad that Apple sold it as an extra add on. It does not cost much to run openssl - its proper open source.
I suppose a paternalistic state functions to satisfy the needs of the people, and to define those needs. The people get what the state says is best for them.
All our main political parties have an authoritarian slant so these policies have rarely received long-lasting opposition. Literally every government in office for the past 30-odd years has presented legislation like this.
By the way, there is no 'England' executive; it's the government of the United Kingdom, which handles all matters not devolved, in England and the rest of the UK.
This is a very good point, and in the recent months we have been witnessing that people in government, or aiming to become the government, are definitely not the good guys. So, even if what they are asking would be limited to just governments (which it wouldn't), they can't claim they are the good guys anymore.
On the authoritarianism: these laws are always worded in such a way that they can be applied or targeted vaguely, basically to work around other legislation. They will stop thinking of the children as soon as the law is put into play, and it's hardly likely that pedo rings or rape gangs will be top of the list of priorities.
On the technical literacy: the government has the mistaken belief that their back door will know the difference between the good guys (presumably them) and the bad guys, and the bad guys will be locked out. However, the only real protection is security by obscurity: it's illegal to reveal that this backdoor exists or was even requested. Any bad guy can make a reasonable assumption that a multinational tech company offering cloud services has been compromised, so this just paints another target on their backs.
I've said it before, but I guarantee that the monkey's paw has been infinitely curling with this, and it's a dream come true for any black or grey hat hacker who wants to try and compromise the government through a backdoor like this.