‘Five Eyes’ Nations Quietly Demand Government Access to Encrypted Data

I suspect you're correct. However, the systems we design must be strong enough to deal with the inevitable lone wolf or corrupt regime. If we rely on average people with good intentions being the only people in power we will fall to the first outlier to show up. This isn't a matter of pessimism or distrust. It's a matter of us having to be successful at defending every attack, every time and them only having to succeed once. All it takes is one. You design the system not for the authorities you hope to have in power but for the one's you fear having power.

Governments have many tools, the most powerful of which is physical coercion, to gain access to data they have reason to believe exists. I want the serving and execution of a warrant to be expensive (and legible, except in the most rare, unique - and thus highly regulated - circumstances). If it is expensive then it will have to be targeted - resources aren't infinite. Making these powers trivially cheap and unnoticeable when exercised will only lead to widespread abuse and unwarranted violations of privacy as we have seen time and again whenever dragnet surveillance becomes cheap, easy and accepted in a population.

Nation States already have the power to inject silent updates and "hack" foreign agents -- everything they're asking for under these new laws. They generally do not need to break encryption or gain encryption back doors. They do full take on the data before and after it is encrypted and decrypted. This, for the most part, is expensive and thus targeted, for sophisticated intelligence targets. Governments now want to expand this power which has been traditionally reserved for targets which pose grave national security risks. Governments want to apply a military tool to civilian police investigations - effectively militarising police surveillance of all citizens. Are sufficient effective checks and balances even possible for such a powerful capability?

Add to that, the fact that governments want us to pay to create and maintain this surveillance directly, thus hiding the true cost and scope of their investigatory activities - and a means by which we can challenge the implementation of such a system lawfully, by compelling all private companies to build in vulnerabilities on demand. Worse, once those vulnerabilities are in place in a system, all users of that system are vulnerable, not just the targets of an investigation - in effect, making all users, except for just the first one on that platform, cheap and easy targets. Eventually, this facility will be built into every system at design time - it's just another regulatory requirement; and even that barrier, the first target, will be gone.

The fact that they want to use these extremely powerful, hard to detect tools and techniques, developed for covert surveillance against foreign powers who pose a national security risk, against us common citizens should be concerning. The fact that they are attempting to push the burden of creating these tools onto the public, the public against which they will be used, and in so doing, make exercising this power extremely cheap and - beyond the first target on a platform, anywhere - effectively free should be downright terrifying.

Again, it's not about malintent; it's about protecting from the outliers - the abusers - because, while the abuse of a single individual or community can be extremely harmful to that individual or community, widespread abuse of such an investigatory tool is almost entirely impossible to fight. These tools defeat the very means by which people organise resistance against oppression: free, open and private communications.

We should think very carefully lest we put a surveillance ratchet in place that will become very hard to coordinate against by its very nature if abused. Given the history of "exigent powers" becoming normalised introducing such a system seems extremely dangerous.

This is not true at all. That is the smoke screen they have put up, but the real intent is to institute pervasive surveillance and have more power over people. They're lazy and have decided that defeating encryption is the easiest way to bypass the effort required to investigate crimes properly.

Attributing this policy drive to altruism is truly naive wishful thinking.

And, of course, once the group has managed to squash the voices of it's individual members it is open to exploitation by external forces, like money from lobbies (designed to sway the group) or bribes to individuals (often in order to get the few who disagree to align with the group).

Some of the people in government and law enforcement want to decrypt data to protect people from threats. Some of these groups are looking at their authority and seeing it erode, they are looking to decrypt data to preserve that authority. As we have seen in practice, others are looking to extend their authority (as in the case of projects like Echelon, etc.) by having real-time access to people's data.

While you might be able to agree with some of these people some of the time, I strongly doubt you can agree with all of them all of the time. And if you find that you cannot agree with all of them all of the time then, in my opinion, they probably should not have the ability to decrypt any of your data.

I think we all would do well to remember that while government and authority love to talk about pornography, child abduction and terrorism the vast majority of people have nothing of the sort on their phones or computers. Protecting the data that everyone has should not be forgotten (financial, private, corporate, etc.)

>Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

-- C. S. Lewis

While I agree with your general point about not ascribing malign intent (at the very least, the misunderstanding about the security implications of weakening decryption seems primarily a case of Hanlon's Razor to me), but the "making half or less what they could make isn't convincing to me. There are those who'd happily sacrifice raw dollars for the power of being able to decrypt

True, but those directing and financing them are. Sorry but this is exactly how being in power works. You don't spy on common people because you want to arrest them all now, but rather to keep an advantage position "just in case". Power is all about maintaining an advantage position with respect to an adversary or a potential one. Should you one day, say 10 years from now, become a political figure, the pictures someone collected 5 years ago of you dancing naked and stoned in a disco would instantly become a tool to be used to either destroy your political career, or use it for their gain through blackmailing. Knowledge is power. AI training aside, gathering all possible information about everyone is how Cardinal de Richelieu would get something enough to hang any of the 7 billions people living on this planet, or have them work for him 24/7.

Many of these people are willing to take a lower salary to help others but history has shown that many, many others take lower paying jobs in government because it affords them power over other people.

This may be true, but even if so it is irrelevant. You do not need evil intentions from hundreds of thousands of worker bees to make something ugly. Just a few politicians or leaders on top are sufficient. I suspect in WW2 Germany most factory workers making gas chamber equipment were diligent, hard working, family loving fellows who did not know the full use for the product they were building.

And yes, I do not trust politicians who lie to the public "for its own good". I think most of those are in it for the power.

People who are known for running the largest spying operation known to man, with utter disregard for privacy. People who oversaw dark sites? You tell me.

> these people are making half or less what they could make in the private sector

But they couldn't get the same level of access, they couldn't see what their ex is doing, for example.

That's "in it for the power".

Power doesn't look the same from the inside. Basically nobody (except college-age Mark Zuckerburg) goes around saying "I'm an evil Machiavellian genius that's going to fuck over the world for my personal benefit." Instead, the feeling of having power, from the inside, is the feeling of being able to make decisions for other people for their own good. It's the ability to deal with people as abstractions who should want things, whether they actually do or not. People can't be trusted to invest their own money, so we need regulations so that only the wealthy can invest. People don't know what they're searching for, so we need to correct their queries for them. People want lower prices, so we'll give it to them by turning the screws on our suppliers. People would collapse into chaos without law and order, so we enforce it.

Sometimes the powerful are even right in their views - after all, very often that's how they got to be in power in the first place. But that doesn't stop them from being resented, because the resentment stems from the fact that they are making decisions for other people that those other people neither consent to nor really want. Someone who is actually "not in it for the power" is someone who says "I trust you to live your own life how you want, as long as it doesn't prevent me from living how I want."

Could be, but you're making a VERY dangerous assumption about their lack of gullibility.

Technology is a difficult field to understand - just look at all the asinine content filtering proposals to get a feel just how out of their depth well-meaning politicians can be. Now think about encryption, an inherently much more difficult subject. The same, or similarly well-intentioned, politicians are going to be completely out of their depth. They can be goaded, led and nudged towards a goal they do not, and indeed can not understand.

Make no mistake. This proposal and its talking points are being fed to the talking heads by parties who want to outlaw end-to-end encryption.

The politicians talking about this are probably innocent of malice, but they sure as hell are guilty of heinous ignorance.

I looked into contracting in the UK for a national agency a couple of years back. The day-rates they proffering were almost double a London day-rate (before negotiation; I can only imagine what could have been secured). There's a deeply invasive interview process but they would cheerfully pay outrageous amounts to secure talent (and I wasn't even particularly good!). I assume not many people have the skill-set they're after and even fewer pass the checks. Perhaps it's different in the US but that was very much the state of affairs in the UK circa 2015

they have a level of surveillance that orwell could not have imagined. orwell imagined hidden microphones and highly visible cameras. we have all of those things and far more.

you see, if they negotiate 10000 times and they get 1% of what they want each of those times, things move in their direction and eventually they have more than what they originally wanted.

With mass surveillance I get the idea they know they get 99% of what they ask for, and even more, they mock us because they know they can circumvent the remaining 1% easily through parallel construction.

Remember those NSA slides where they mock the public for willingly buying smartphones that can be tracked everywhere? Yeah, we're the morons, not them who openly lie to the public and redefine language itself to make what they're doing not a crime against humanity.

It's as if they installed cameras on every street and mock people for driving, except of course, that too is now practically normalized under the guise of "safety".

Of course, if the government was competent then we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place…

You assume that they work with the same enthusiasm on the projects we benefit and on the projects they benefit.

The problem is not so much the _initial_ justification. It's the inevitable "control creep" [1]. When something bad happens, they'll just go "hey we have this vast surveillance network in place, why don't we just re-use it for XYZ". That is the fundamental reason why people need to be so vigilant and militant against mass surveillance. Whatever the initial justification was for putting it in place is irrelevant in the long term.

[1] Control creep is where the data generated for one form of governance is appropriated for another

And doesn't even work, people use fake number plates.

"I wish they'd fund health" How do you know they're state funded cameras?

>It's just a happy coincidence that the security services also get to monitor more and more movement in the country.

Automated and near-perfect enforcement of minor civil infractions sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me.

I think you've got the scope creep backwards. They get all these systems in place by screaming about security and terrorists then say "well since the system is already here let's use it to keep our citizens on a tighter leash". Then they justify it vilifying these people who commit minor civil infractions as criminals when in reality they're your neighbors.

…

At least, that’s the good outcome.

Maybe Apple could fork the iPhone line with devices that retained nothing locally. That ran entirely in RAM, working with minimal data from iCloud. And which fully wiped RAM whenever not in active use. Basically like Tails.

Because the former, I absolutely agree with you. I’m imagining the latter.

And actually, your comment makes no sense. Controlling exits shows where traffic goes. Exits don't connect directly with users, but rather through middle relays, and either entry guards or bridges. So adversaries either need data from all three relays in circuits, or they must control both ends, and be able to signal through circuits. That's how CMU researchers pwned users and .onion sites, using the relay-early bug, which allowed intra-circuit signaling.

It's dangerous to scare people away from tor on the basis that it might have vulnerabilities, because anything else is certainly worse.

Arguably, "becom[ing] the child porn network" is the only proof that you can't be compromised. Because assholes will eventually migrate to the most secure options.

It doesn't need to be as easy to onboard and use. Freedom from censorship and surveillance is worth an awful lot of inconvenience in initial setup, and more people learn that every day.

Eventually, the elederly, uninformed governments are going to die off, to be replaced with younger governments. Still uninformed, but hopefully less tyrannical.

> offshore private messaging will become a thing.

This won't have to happen. Just because the law says there has to be a backdoor doesn't mean open source software developers will comply. Develop your software anonymously, release it anonymously, and run it wherever you want. It doesn't need to be a service provided by a company in a foreign land, it can just be software you run on your own computer.

Google's staggered updates to Chrome are updates sent to specific targeted users. The iOS App Store (and Google Play store, I believe) has an opt-in beta program that also sends betas to specific targeted users.

> If vendors are forced to abuse updates in this way then users are going to demand a certificate transparency-like system to stop the abuse.

But yes, leveraging users' trust in the update system is a risk that needs to be factored into the debate.

I always thought this would be a neat use of Ethereum: a smart contract publicly stores the hash+url of the latest version of $softwareProduct (and maybe also the hash+url for the latest beta release, etc). The software would only update to a version named by the smart contract. The smart contract would only allow the application developers' addresses to be able to update the published hash+urls. The smart contract could have arbitrary logic here, like to allow the developers to add new addresses that can publish new versions, or to implement voting logic so a majority of the developers have to agree on publishing a new version, etc. In this system, it's not possible to secretly push a malicious update to one user.