UK government calls out Whatsapp for enabling criminals to communicate in secret
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It is highly troubling that this would be being used as a public button, when there is much evidence that UK politicians have no desire, whatever, to actually prosecute the biggest pedophiles in their state - those within their own ranks.
It's called "talking to somebody behind closed doors."
If we want to stop criminals from being able to access neutral services, surely we should be starting with running water, supermarkets, restaurants, and anyone else who supplies food or drink. That would put a stop to the problem much more quickly.
The reason governments do this is that due to the Internet, for the first time in human history, humans can have access to truly secure telecommunications. I'm pretty sure that before they could just phone tap/bug their way to all the communications they wanted to follow and this is proving harder today. That's why they're making so much noise about it.
It will be a fight to keep the (favorable for individuals) status quo, but in my opinion the status quo is an evolution over what we had say, 40 years ago.
The horse has bolted, it is not possible to prevent (good or bad) people communicating securely?
In the grand scheme of things phone tapping is a relatively new affair. Before the general availability of phones you needed actual human snitches to spy on dissidents and deviants.
Even once phones were widely used oppressive regimes still needed a huge number of human agents because not every conversation happened on phone.
Physically spying on others is both dangerous and expensive, which is why it's usually done selectively.
All of that changed with the general widespread use of digital means of communication: Not only do most dissident, potentially 'dangerous' conversations take place in digital media but those conversations are also easily available for governments to harvest and draw upon to whatever end.
The common user is currently entrenched in two walled gardens for almost all of their activity, and banning encrypted communications for 95% of the population is now feasible, and perhaps quite likely. That sucks.
I would honestly love to see UKGOV try that. There wouldn't be enough popcorn in the world for what a disaster that would be on every level.
Most people would switch to something that is compliant with government legislation, very quickly. Because most people don't know or care what encryption is, they just want to talk to their friends.
Just last week I saw a non-technical colleague side-loading Messenger Lite from an APK mirror site as it is not available through the Play Store in the UK.
WhatsApp even have a direct APK download on their website, cutting out the middleman.
All you have to do is prove a certain person is a criminal. Innocent until proven guilty, due process, the justice system - any of these minor details ring a bell to Amber Rudd?
Therefor, this article certainly is nothing but propaganda.
edit: also, if i could have worded that better ?
Regarding guns, no. Even police officers don't have them.
- Not all want that responsibility, even if they don't routinely have to carry
- It's expensive to train them
Criminals rarely have guns in the UK so enforcing the law with firearms is not usually necessary.
It's traditionally been the job of the Police to uphold the law with the consent of the People.
It's the job of the Military to extend the will of the Politicians by bringing violence to enemies of the State.
By further militarising the Police, it implies the People (or sections of) have become enemies of the State, which is not a great situation to be in... also this is why a lot of British people consider US Police Departments to be insanely trigger-happy.
We have specialist armed police units for times when weapons are required, and most of the time they are not.
Regular police carry tear gas spray (or perhaps pepper spray?) and tazers as a matter of course.
Saying "police don't have them" is a bit misleading.
This policy of banning end-to-end encryption is beyond stupid. They won't stop a single terrorist from using end-to-end encryption.
But I think they know this, too. They just don't want everyone else's conversations to be secret either.
automatic weapons have no civilian use case
for example, you could find out who associated with a terrorist by their location history.
Once you have a known event, then you can use the information that you know about that to start asking more questions.
Proximity is an obvious one, who was near or in contact with the alleged terrorist in the hours, days, weeks beforehand. Were there recurrences of close proximity amongst those individuals previously not considered persons of interest.
This methodology is precisely the same as how fraud and money laundering risk is mitigated. Once you work back from a KE (known event) to build up the pattern of related activities you can use this as a signature on observed future behaviour to try and identify future activity that you'd like to investigate more closely or act on.
/s
Why should only criminals be entitled to privacy?
Everyone here wants "everyone should have privacy, and if criminals get it too, then so be it; after all, criminals could get privacy some other way anyway".
Nor do I mind that GCHQ can probably listen to all my calls and certainly not that they use meta-data to look for links with organised crime (eg terrorism).
My impression would be that in the UK outside of fora like HN that position would be pretty common.
Tell homosexuals in the 60s that they shouldn't care if GCHQ can read their messages. But who cares about poofs, right? They're mentally ill anyway.
If you're US American you wouldn't consider me middle-class.
Did we return to the 60s?
Your parent comment said "Everyone here wants [...]", which may or may not be true, my sole point was that in the UK I doubt that's a majority viewpoint in all sectors of society.
But thanks for laying in to me with your sexist, racist prejudice, and attempts to smear me by putting words in my mouth, it surely adds a lot to the conversation. /s
"When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights."[²]
-- ¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/just_days_left... ² https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/edward-snowden-new-yorker-...