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Comment by joshpadnick | Hacker News Reader

I'm also deeply concerned about "backdoors for the good guys". Beyond just worrying about who else could get access, the "good guys" really just means government, and my comfort level with the current Trump administration using their "good guy" backdoor for a noble purpose currently sits at zero.

All that being said, how do we the tech community solve Theresa May's problem? Her philosophy is "if we knew more, we could have prevented this." Is that the right philosophy? Is there some other mechanism to authorize "legitimate" access to encrypted data?

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>All that being said, how do we the tech community solve Theresa May's problem? Her philosophy is "if we knew more, we could have prevented this." Is that the right philosophy? Is there some other mechanism to authorize "legitimate" access to encrypted data?

there's absolutely nothing substantiating her claim. terrorists seem to have done just fine in the absence of encryption -- the bataclan attackers coordinated with ordinary sms. governments still make this push _all the time_, witness the doj going after apple after san bernardino.

the UK is literally the most surveilled society in the history of the world in terms of communications of its inhabitants intercepted by its own government, comparable perhaps only to the stasi. this is mode of action is not working. two attacks in two weeks, and their answer is "the same but more"?

> there's absolutely nothing substantiating her claim.

yes, and this is very weird. She must have a chain of reasoning going on in her head before opening her mouth, right? We always only get the conclusion, that is: "we need more access". Any normal person looking for a solution to a problem would generate loads of ideas and then, when pitching an idea, present the pros/cons of their various ideas to finally argue why they have chosen solution x. We don't see any of that wrt to this topic.

The chain of reasoning is:

- I want more power/money/whatever

- suerveillance can give it to me

- I just need to pass the bill once to get it to work for years in my favor

- they have to reject it at every attempt I try to pass it

- therefor I should try to pass it everytime the news let me do a bold claim

- nobody is going to do shit against it anyway

> She must have a chain of reasoning going on in her head before opening her mouth, right?

Control thoughts -> No bad thoughts

But that's not reasoning. That's jumping to conclusions.

Quite!

> We don't see any of that wrt to this topic.

There are countless studies that get conducted every year by universities, think tanks, NGOs and journalist style organisations on this topic. And these are tabled in parliament, reviewed by ministers and debated in intelligence committees and within cabinet. In Australia for example we have Senate Estimate Hearings which are freely available online for you to watch.

To think that governments are not exploring every avenue in order to protect their citizens is a bit ridiculous.

> There are countless studies that get conducted every year by universities, think tanks, NGOs and journalist style organisations on this topic.

Could you name me one credible source that advocates the banning of encryption? At Harvard, for instance, they concluded that banning encryption is futile. [0]

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/worldwide-survey-of-encrypti...

no terrorist attacks: "it's working! we can't tell you details but we caught ALL the terrorists, and there were lots! But they're crafty, you know - expand the surveillance so we can keep up!"

terrorist attacks: "we told you so! expand the surveillance!"

> the UK is literally the most surveilled society in the history of the world in terms of communications of its inhabitants intercepted by its own government

China?

Also even if that's technically true due to digital surveillance, I'm still pretty sure virtually everyone would choose it over the DDR. But why not go with hyperbole! It's not like it feeds into a narrative that everyone who takes this stuff seriously is paranoid...

> terrorists seem to have done just fine in the absence of encryption -- the bataclan attackers coordinated with ordinary sms

Even if the UK somehow managed to illegalize use of AES and other "professional" encryption algos, it would still be trivial to communicate using simple innocuous sounding code words over plain SMS. There's practically no way to detect it. The entire effort is futile from the very beginning.

Same for steganography. You can embed messages in pictures of lolcatz.

Next step, mandatory JPEG (re)compression (q=50) for all social media pictures.

That isn't even nearly enough. Text messages take very little space and can easily be embedded in very low quality images.

You can't allow images, sound, or video at all if you want to prohibit steganography.

So will you be able to prove that you are not using steganography when the authorities accuse you of using it?

I mean, will they be able to prove that you are? That's usually how it works.

Not anymore. They can force you to provide the keys for the jpegs from your wedding even if you don't have anything encrypted in them. Just the police suspecting you of a crime is enough.

You can hide messages in whitespace. Think badly formatted MS Word documents of The Brothers Karamazov by F. Dostoyevsky.

It seems people like to believe that the terrorist would simply obey the law and not use encryption.

In reality, if a terrorist used encryption, they most likely would use a non-backdoored encryption no matter if it's legal.

> Her philosophy is "if we knew more, we could have prevented this."

What is there to solve? This statement is wrong in its core. Its like you looking at blew up grenade and scratching your head "how can we put this back together".

There is nothing to fix. Since they yelled "Allah Akbar", they were clearly motivated by their religion and "holy war on infidels". Unless you can read people's mind, I don't find access to their communication relevant if they've been practicing said religion since crib times and one day simply decided to go and stab few people with knifes.

For this to put in motion, you don't need a cellphone or any sort of communication at all!

Yeah.. there you go!

Explain THIS, May:

"Another fanatic slips through the net: Killer jihadi, 27, 'radicalised by YouTube' was known to police and filmed arguing with officers after unfurling an ISIS flag in a park in a Channel 4 documentary" [1]

How on earth open plain-text communication will help prevent something that alread is clearly in their FACES??

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4571902/London-Bridg...

May or may not, Theresa...

The portrayal of governments as "good guys" has always seemed pretty absurd to me. The reality of it is that they're just the other bad guys, with slightly different but still ultimately self-serving goals.

When "collateral damage" in the form of death and suffering inflicted upon innocent people is shrugged off as the cost of achieving your goals, you're still a terrorist no matter what those goals are and which flag you plant atop the mountain of bodies.

The problem is that "government" is poorly defined. Local governments, involving and affecting only people that you know personally, and operating with some form of consensus, are generally good. But at any greater scale, governments will likely be co-opted by criminals. Or at least, people with self-serving goals. It's a hard problem, because local governments need somehow to organize for defense.

> "if we knew more, we could have prevented this." Is that the right philosophy?

No. This philosophy is essentially saying that in order to make it easier to find all the needles in the haystack, we need to add more hay.

It's a ridiculous notion if you actually stop and think about it.

> I'm also deeply concerned about "backdoors for the good guys". Beyond just worrying about who else could get access, the "good guys" really just means government, and my comfort level with the current Trump administration using their "good guy" backdoor for a noble purpose currently sits at zero.

You call out the current Trump Administration...

Do you think the Obama administration was any better? Do you think the "other side" is more trustworthy? Especially considering all the scandals that surround the last 8 years?

Why do you think the Left is more trustworthy than the Right?

I wouldn't berate someone over thinking this, even though I agree with you that the Left is not more trustworthy than the Right. Frankly, it's better to point out that, if you give government additional power, that power will be used by both Left and Right, so you'd better be able to trust everybody with it.

If the state gave each and every civilian a colonoscopy every year, we could prevent deaths by noticing medical conditions earlier. Probably more than terrorists kill currently. But it's a complete non-starter because it infringes on so many human rights like self-ownership. Same goes with our private conversations. This line must never be crossed.

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/bowel-cancer-screening/Pages/In...

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