Yeah, but I'm kind of tired of having to fight my own government every step of the way. I'd prefer a political solution at this point.
I see this desire raised a lot, in contexts from HN to Valley-mocking pieces on how encryption is no substitute for advocacy. I completely understand the instinct, but every incarnation of it seems to struggle with the same question. Namely: how do you know when you've won?
Restrictions against collecting data on US citizens didn't produce the expected results. Testimony to Congress didn't accurately depict what's collected, even in secret. In the early days, the existence of these agencies was classified to help go around restrictions on existing agencies. Years ago, back in the Puzzle Palace days, the DoJ cited systematic criminality but concluded that they were unable to prosecute it.
So... what does winning look like? What regulation, what testimony, what promise could possibly convince people that a solution had been reached, even for the moment?
Roe v Wade was a clear and unambiguous advance for abortion rights, and the battle lines are now arrayed somewhere different than they were before Roe. The fight isn't over, but it's fairly clear who holds what.
I'm talking about even knowing when you've made progress. If a federal directive came through tomorrow expansively forbidding the NSA from collecting data on US citizens, privacy advocates wouldn't even hope that bulk surveillance of citizens would stop. They know better, because it basically happened, and the definitions of words got rearranged until the program could continue unabated.
Political issues aren't settled until they fade into consensus belief, but it's usually possible to make progress and then defend it. On surveillance and privacy, there's no law or court decision or whistleblower or even prosecution that can guarantee things aren't continuing exactly the way you didn't want them to.
Similarly when it comes to security, privacy, and anonymity the best defense is to arm yourself with mathematical security.And to enshrine our right to those defenses in law. A subpoena only works if there is information that can be handed over in the first place. If strong and private encryption is made illegal then the best defense is still to use that technology clandestinely.
fallacy [1]
>I feel x
isn't an argument. for example: I feel safer with a gun.
fallacy [2]
> ... when every private citizen I interact with carries a gun.
Having the right to carry a gun or the right to encryption does not imply everyone will/must carry one or use it at all times.
With encryption criminals around you can plan attacks, steal your identity, and trade child pornography without fear of the prying eyes of law enforcement ever being able to discover the evidence. That would probably make a large number of other people 'feel' unsafe as well. feeling a certain way isn't an argument.
I 'feel' safer with the right to carry a gun. I can feel safer when everyone has a gun. Therefore morninj's argument does in fact also apply to guns.
Anyone can feel a certain way about anything, which is why it is invalid when trying to construct a logically sound objective argument.
A subjective premise can not lead us all to an objective conclusion.
I feel (part of) the reason your society is in political gridlock is because everyone keeps looking for that mythical "objective" proof that ensures a 100% victory for their side. But that's just another unicorn.
Here are some examples of how both a gun and encryption can be used for the same end goal.
X can secure a financial transaction
X can stop a thief from obtaining my credit card information
X can stop someone from forcibly obtaining my identity
X can stop an attacker from obtaining private data stored in my home.
The only thing I've been able to think of that applies to encryption and does not apply to a gun is:
Encryption can verify that a message actually came from me by decrypting it using my public key.
This is objectively true for encryption and objectively false for a firearm. Also a firearm doesn't really help with anything on the internet except maybe a shady craigslist transaction in a dark parking lot. But I meant to imply that a realistic and suitable physical analogy can be applied.
People will use force to take advantage of your moral stand against violence and make you comply to things you do not agree to.
We both abhor violence. The difference is I refuse to be victimized by it.
Citation needed.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20150708/radical-anti-gun-gr...
http://www.naturalnews.com/047378_murder_sprees_armed_citize...
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/gwinnett-county/video-shows-...
"Best" might be hard to argue but it can be easily shown that you are better off having one when you need to defend yourself.
There's still rule of law, and the executive mostly listens to what the judiciary tells it to do. For all its flaws, some of our institutions work pretty well compared to most places. I cannot think of another country where judges are able to overtake heads of states in substantial policy outcomes.
The infamous one: in its early days, the NSA was ordered to stop surveillance of US citizens. It went before the Church Committee and testified that the relevant sites had been closed for more than a year. This was a lie, bottom to top. The sites were actively operating as those words were spoken, and they weren't closed down until whistleblower James Bamford exposed the lie. https://theintercept.com/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/
There's a list a mile long of similar stories. Court decisions, executive orders, and acts of Congress have bounced off these agencies without result.
I'd like to see examples, but I agree that you're not wrong in general. The agencies do respond to court decisions sometimes. My point is that when legal compliance is a coin flip and there's no way to check for results, you can't be sure that legal decision has changed anything at all.
There, the "opponents" are a subset of society that have a legitimate right to not to agree with the decision and they are acting within the public framework of our governance to overturn a decision.
Here, the "opponents" of strict privacy rights are spooks and crooks in government and international corporations. It is entirely a differnet matter.
Established inherent rights -- specifically the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and protection from unreasonable search and seizures -- need to be protected in context of new capabilities afforded by modern communication, surveillance, and data retention technologies.
Corporations will not pull a dissenting "Roe vs Wade" that would challenge citizen rights. Just let them try that.
Overreaching elements and sub-systems of the government can try and present cases where our (updated) rights present obstacles to their performances of their legitimate legally mandated activities. And there is ample precedence for oversight for such matters.
A technological cold war with government and industry on the technological field is not a realistic option. First of all, it is politically useless since that approach implies that the constitutional framework and our entire system is in effect broken. Second, the "mathematical" bit in the secure and private mediated communication systems is the only element where one could possibly argue for parity in terms of the contending parties' capabilities. Why pick a losing fight when there remains the constitutional field where we have the upper hand, by definition.
[edit: minor cleanup]
But you also set up the infrastructure to fight the good fight forever. Which is what it takes to make democracy work, and work well.
Because everything important is a political issue, whether you want it to be or not. The Superconducting Supercollider, which was as clear a piece of pure science as you could imagine, was killed by politics. End to end encryption could be too.
Honestly, a major reason we are in this mess now is that for decades Silicon Valley has avoided politics and tried to pretend that the federal government does not exist. Now that it can't be ignored anymore, the tech industry does not have any of the civic institutions needed to build broad public support for its issues.
It's a bit more complicated here, though, since so much of this activity is clandestine. We can't know what rules they may be breaking (unintentionally or otherwise).
What about human slavery?
At this point, winning looks like the people responsible for abusing their power and overstepping their constitutional authority going to jail. And for a long time.
As long as the only consequence of illegal activity that violates the constitutional rights of citizens is being told to stop, there will be continued efforts to chip away and push the envelope for what they can get away with. If it were made apparent that there are personal consequences above and beyond the scope of their jobs, perhaps some of the people in those jobs would more carefully consider the constitutionality of their actions.
What's scary, is some people seem to want that stuff - as long as it's not them getting taken away and thrown in a cell.
The fact no one has done anything major about any of the other surveillance state BS is proof enough of that.
In any case, there are still the negative economic consequence which important alone, but also affect politics.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/donald-trump-muslims-...
> Trump doubles down on calls for mosque surveillance
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26167...
> Trump said Tuesday that he would be "fine" with restoring provisions of the Patriot Act to allow for the bulk data collection, something candidates such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have also called for that was banned with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which Cruz supported.
Well I don't think I'm going to agree given the only person who made it to the GE is a guy who supports surveillance.
TBH it probably wouldn't require that much Orwellian apparatus; you just make the software slightly harder to use than it already is today, and network effects basically ensure that only people who are really interested in communications without government interception (who the government is presumably interested in) are using it. Then you can start doing endpoint attacks, deanonymization via compromised downloads, etc.
The government's -- and I don't mean just the U.S.'s, but most large governments', I think -- ideal for Internet communications is something similar to the telephone network circa 1975. They're fine with privacy between one individual and another (i.e. keeping your conversations private from your neighbors), but they aren't going to be satisfied with any technology that prevents wiretaps by state-controlled apparatus.
I am not exactly bullish on the ability of technology or technologists to resist this, over the long run. Unless there is a widespread and overwhelming realization on the part of individuals that governments shouldn't have this ability, and I don't think that consensus exists even in the liberal West if you frame the question even moderately advantageously to the government, then they will get it. There will always be pockets of noncompliance, and an ensuing cat-and-mouse game, but the steady state will likely be one that deters mainstream usage.
And if we really are seeing the end of Anglo-American geopolitical dominance in favor of countries whose political systems emphasize stability and harmony over individual rights and dissent, then it becomes very difficult to see that consensus ever manifesting itself at a meaningful global level.
RSA Net Income (2011-2015): 426M 320M -306M -115M 79M
Verizon Net same period: 2.4B 875M 11.5B 9.63B 17.88B
ATT Net same period: 3.94B 7.26B 18.25B 6.22B 13.35B
RSA took quite a hit but it could be market as well. I don't know what it's status was pre-Snowden but much of hit comes during year of the leaks. Revenue dropped a billion or two with profits turning to losses but rebounding into $75 million in 2015. Verizon and ATT are doing great. Other companies that are managed profitably that cooperate tightly with Washington are Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Oracle. Their net incomes are in the billions.
So, I think the market data indicates you're wrong even in the worst scenario for working with the surveillance state. Also, the more lock-in the business has, the better it does despite any evil choice it makes. Rule of thumb.
IANAL though, so I digress.
When the Securities Exchange Commission decides that something is a security, it retroactively applies the civil and criminal compliance back to 1934 because it was always a security. I mean, you can argue it in front of a judge if you want, but thats how they established jurisdiction.
Same goes for discretionary tax law at the IRS
or any regulatory agency
I agree its a problem, but if you live your life under your version of reality it is easy to get railroaded in the dragnet
New Regulation -> Future Date -> Ex post facto claims don't happen.
That is the process my original comment intended to imply.
If you are a vast major bank and don't like the SEC you can try not being allowed in the doors of the private buildings of the NYSE, LSE etc.
They have the power not of law but of losing billions
That's not a retroactive application of the law. If they are correct in their interpretation of the law, it was already the law. If they are incorrect, the courts will not allow it (whether the enforcement concerns acts before or after the determination by the SEC.)
The ATF is particularly notorious for this.
Yes, and if that conflicts with what the courts believe the law has always meant, those decisions won't survive contact with the legal system. An ex post facto law is a law creating (or enhancing) criminal penalties for acts that exist before the law is passed. Changing administration interpretations are like changing prosecutorial priorities (and the former comes with a lot more notice and specificity than the latter) -- they only have effect so long as they are within the bounds of what the courts will accept was covered by the law when it was passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
Detailed analysis with appropriate links:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/the_return_of...
Note: I could be really misreading the material due to not being a lawyer or pouring through regs all the time. I think it says all this stuff is still 5A002 (munition) outside the exemptions they compromised on.
Being provably secure is great, but this is a tall order -- there are always conditions to satisfy (solution is secure if A, B and C and governments and other attackers might invalidate those by a tap point, decree, a court action, etc.).
In America, we have had those, and it hasn't helped. We have a First Amendment and a Second Amendment, and yet we have campaign-finance restrictions and gun control.
Political decisions simply don't stand. It's terribly sad.
Consumers aren't interested in buying a "UWB mesh hub" or some such, which wouldn't appear to do anything but drain batteries. But they might, for example, buy a car stereo or security system that uses a wireless device to deliver specific features, and which also happens to help saturate the city with a p2p mesh network.
Likewise with cryptocurrency, most people are not interested in the hassle for some intangible privacy benefit. But a lot of people might be interested in a crypto video game currency that can be easily traded, even between games. Or perhaps a currency-like mechanism to implement quotas on the mesh.
"Mathematical security" can be politically banned, is banned in many parts of the world. You only have the option to use mathematical security because other people have been doing the politics for you.
A strong political regime and support for privacy. Strong technical tools for enforcing those political goals.
Think democracy. We have to fight for democracy over and over, and we have a technical solution in the form of an election process that's designed to make tampering hard and in the form of institutions controlling each other for a good reason. There is no political solution to the risk of putting all your trust in a single person, aka a dictatorship, there is only a technical solution, and that is democracy: A system of government that avoids the single point of failure at great cost.
We are creating absurd amounts of information compared to before. Just because US Gov could access the measly amount of info that was generated before doesn't mean that they should be able to access the crazy amounts created now. It is from a very narrow perspective that anyone can call this a "fundemental weakening of government". Compared to before the internet, they're still drowning in insane amounts of data.
We can also add that if they can access some things, they will manipulate their way into accessing more things. Which means that reducing privacy and security is just optimization for them. And that will have costs beyond the US Government's own doing.
Sure, the current law climate seems to be that they can access it. But that climate was created with pushes from LE agencies and ignorant politicians. You may argue that that has always been the case, but clearly there's increasing demand for this to be decided democratically. So US Gov "giving up" this "right" might be the thing that democracy wants.