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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I can understand the willingness to reduce the privacy of self and others in order to ensure that the law is able to prosecute those involved in heinous crimes. Our current political environment though involved a president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. What is to stop them from going after the private communications of those same opponents in the name of targeting "Corruption".

Encrypt it, end to end, the government does not need to be able access all private communications of private citizens. There are other means of investigating potential crimes.

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On top of that, so these crimes didn't exist before mobile phones? They just want to sit in the ivory tower and see everything. I'll also agree to this the day after Barr hands me his unlocked personal phone. I promise not to disclose anything I find.

You may be radically underestimating the degree to which the Internet has made it possible for people who abuse children to share content. In some cases, these crimes truly couldn't be perpetrated without the anonymity of the Internet, and the existence of these clustered communities of pedophiles encourages further abuse/exploitation.

I love the Internet, and my career is in security. But we as a security/privacy/technology community truly need to look hard in the mirror about how we are allowing and perpetuating lifetime harms to children and women.

Terrorism exceptions, like San Bernardino, don't ring with as much impact as the CEP argument.

> terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Encryption or not, if "bad" people can access illegal content "good" people can too. It might take actual work instead of passively reviewing the private communications of every person innocent or otherwise, but it's not made suddenly impossible.

Exactly. And we have evidence of similar behavior occurring.

COINTELPRO was a thing that actually happened and should be brought up every time privacy rights and government surveillance is discussed

Also, warrantless tapping of glass:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...

Indeed the "anit-corruption" drive is widely considered President Xi's method to consolidate his power in China ("Flies and Tigers"). It's an only slightly more subtle version of double speak, accuse your opponents of exactly what it is that you are doing, so if it ever leaks you can point and say "see what he's doing too!".

Xi Jinping in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...

bin Salman in Saudi Arabia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017–19_Saudi_Arabian_purge

Ultimately there's nothing stopping criminals from using any number of E2E alternatives. Short of banning open source software, there's nothing the US government can really do here. Forcing Facebook to leave in a government backdoor will just send all the criminals to other services or even to roll their own.

Under the Constitution the government doesn’t have a leg to stand on to either ban crypto or ban open source software. Certainly no more than it can ban algebra, Elvish or volunteer work.

> Encrypt it, end to end, the government does not need to be able access all private communications of private citizens.

Law enforcement and security agencies need to be able to access any communication. This does not mean that they should monitor all communications.

They can eavesdrop on any phone call. They do not eavesdrop on all phone calls.

The problem with E2E encryption is that it prevents eavesdropping even with the standard legal safeguards (warrant, etc), while not being required for the privacy of users. It is only effectively a marketing tool to convince people to use services from providers they don't trust, although, of course, since they control the app they can still in principle access the data.

The police have more than enough data to do their jobs without having sweeping surveillance powers.

Even with E2E the police can get warrants for the devices which is usually more than enough to access data.

They just want an easier job, it’s not a major roadblock. When police jobs being easy is a good sign that privacy has been completely destroyed.

One of the points of eavesdropping is that the target is unaware of it, which enables the police to gather more evidence about more people.

E2E is not required for privacy. There is also a difference between privacy and the right to privacy, and a guarantee that no-one will ever be able to know what I'm doing.

There is no absolute, including absolute right. It's all about balance: We have a right to privacy but the police may search our homes and eavesdrop on our communications in strict, specific circumstances because that's in the public interest. The idea is simply to have the same online.

If someone could magically build a system that allows for the communication to be eavesdropped only by the allowed government agency, my objections would be dramatically reduced. But that's not the way tech works. Building one backdoor makes the entire system, and all users, vulnerable to a whole host of other malicious actors, including hostile foreign nations and unscrupulous hackers. We live in a world today where anyone can be hacked, even major institutions and corporations like NYTimes, Yahoo and Sony. We desperately need systems that are more secure, not less.

Backdoors are needed because a system uses E2E encryption.

If the system uses only P2P encryption then no backdoor is needed, which actually makes the system more secure to external threats. It is then for the provider to allow access to data only to "allowed government agencies" according to the law, which is how mobile phone networks work.

"Law enforcement and security agencies need to be able to access any communication." Why?

The solution to this would be to compel the company to push an updated version of the app to the target device, and thereby intercept traffic only from the target of the warrant, while maintaining E2E encryption for everyone else. (Of course, some will complain that even this ability to surveil is too much, and all encrypted messaging should be open source to avoid this possibility, but to me it's far preferable to leaving open the potential of hoovering up everyone's communications.)

> Law enforcement and security agencies need to be able to access any communication.

I don't agree with this -- but I think this does strike at the very heart of what the debate is all about.

'Law enforcement and security agencies need to be able to access any communication.'

Why? And while we are at it, why is this such a given that they need it.

"president openly calling on foreign governments to investigate his political opponents."

We're just going to completely ignore the last administration spying on their political opponents?

Politifact seems to think that "Obama tapped Trump" thing was a myth [0]. Are you referring to a different thing that I'm not aware of?

[0] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/mar/21...

I don't recall that happening, although I do remember the Obama administration being concerned that the Trump campaign was being targeted by / cooperating with the Russians. Seems that looking into that is a legitimate use of government power but I guess that is going to depend on where you fall on your view on Trump.

But if it was true, seems to be another reason to allow End 2 End.

Unless this was essentially a "but her emails" post.

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