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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname.

They're not. A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption.

However.

You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone.

It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape.

Nevermind the false dichotomy. The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. Such situations rarely present themselves. (We rarely condone murder in the name of the betterment of humanity: some tried, didn't go so well.) End to end encryption (and metadata hiding while we're at it), is such a situation. The harm, though hard to perceive, is significant, affects everyone, and can potentially grow into full blown totalitarianism (possibly enforced by incentives rather than violent policing).

Preventing that is totally worth killing a few children… or at least spend resources on properly policing the problem, like going undercover.

Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

View on HN

> You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone.

It's not just a matter of "many small harms > few large harms" though. Not having privacy can lead to severe harms.

If the bad guys break into a system that allows them to effectively wiretap everybody, now they can snoop around and find blackmail targets. "I know what you did, have sex with me or everyone will know. Or send money. Or give me your employee access badge."

Results: Rape, financing child sex trafficking, facilitating an act of terrorism. Or any of the less visceral but nonetheless widespread and significant consequences like major financial fraud or corporate espionage.

And that's just blackmail. What about the suicides of people who get doxxed? Or the people in violent relationships whose abuser is in law enforcement or in a criminal enterprise that has compromised the surveillance apparatus? Or the mental health epidemic which results when people know their communication is exposed to people they don't trust to see their true selves and then self-censor into performance-art conformists riddled with anxiety and loneliness?

Privacy is about keeping perverts in law enforcement from reading the sexting that should only be between you and your spouse, but it's also about keeping the country and the people safe from terrorists and foreign powers, keeping victims safe from abusers and allowing people to satisfy the human need to be themselves in communications with people they trust.

Privacy isn't a trade off against security, it's a necessary component of having security.

> The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. Such situations rarely present themselves.

If you consider "not saving while you could" the same as "killing", it's very common. So much in fact that it has its own WikiPedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

With a cosy link to a letter by the Department of Transportation:

> this guidance identifies $9.6 million as the value of a statistical life to be used for Department of Transportation analyses assessing the benefits of preventing fatalities and using a base year of 2015

https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/2016...

All such value of life logic and cost figures go out the window with cars and alcohol. For our driving and drinks, we’re pretty much A OK with daily carnage.

Our society at large acts just fine with drunk driving deaths; looks like killing people while drunk is less abhorrent to us than trading photos of a teen.

I’m guessing it has to do with sense of purposefulness, malevolence vs. negligence, or identifiability with the commission of the crime?

Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

FWIW, I applaud your willingness to make such a statement. (And no, this is not sarcasm!) Self-censorship is a horrible thing, and I feel like I die inside a little bit every time I catch myself doing it. But more and more these days it begins to feel like even hinting at a willingness to engage in "thought-crime" is exceedingly dangerous. I mean, shit, a woman got passed on for a job because she had a picture of herself in a bikini on her Instagram. Imagine if a prospective employer find a comment online which could even remotely be twisted into saying that some child deaths are a sacrifice that may be inevitable in order to protect an abstract principle like Freedom, or "Free Speech". Zoinks!

Ok let's turn that the other way,

Do you say you want to apply a dictatorship state of global surveillance because criminals are going to use the internet? What about other tech available to them? Are we going to set up a surveillance mechanism in those as well? Scooters? Cars?

Who's going to compile all that data? How is it protected?

It's about the Governance of Information,

and guess what,

I want to be Governing my Data, not some shady politician that got elected for a 5 or 7-year term in some other country.

Every actor in those systems have access to the data of every person that got their info collected.

And yet we are still here with that pedophilia and terrorism argument that, while they are very true, have still evolved and expanded. Even with the Cloud Act and all of the shady agreements

It's an evolution of our sick society, we had that kind of criminality rampant in 2000, we saw that evolve with the net,

But just like the young gangsters that evolve with stolen scooters,

Criminality will always have its sick way.

But dictatorship and global surveillance?

We didn't accept that in the 2000.

And we should never accept that at any cost,

even if it falsely promises to resolve the problem of pedophilia, terrorism, and criminality on those spaces by applying weird unknown algorithms

Technology will always be used by criminals because these are part of the society we build and evolve. They will change their behavior just like all of us; We cannot give up on our freedom and ethics to help catch the few.

And that's what's the problem. I don't care about police retrieving the data of a criminal once a judge has agreed to that, I care when we give them the entire web information and allow them to dictate the behavior of those networks

Not sure why this reply is to what I posted, since it seems to be making a different point. But FWIW, I almost completely agree with what you said there.

>It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing the rape.

But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else.

And ALL of the above assumes that there are no criminal programmers and thus they have no ability to just write their own tools if there isn't something sitting on the shelf. We know with 100% certainty this is also a false assumption.

>But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else.

It's not an assumption at all. The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications used against them in court demonstrates this to be true.

Ephemeral conversation is not new and implicit in a right to privacy assuming it extends beyond your actual corpus.

The only way I understand your arguments to be a justification to break encryption is if you believe we should not have freedom to share privately.

> The fact that people engaged in child pornohraphy have had decrypted communications used against them in court demonstrates this to be true

It only demonstrates that for some people, it's true. What about cases where they were using secure channels and thus haven't been caught/charged?

What about it? Every criminal ever that never got caught managed to do so through using "secure channels" (and thus not getting caught).

Perhaps we should aim for not leaving any piece of space on Earth unsurveilled?

  That's literally a provably false assumption. 
  The second they realize it's insecure (which 
  will take exactly one raid), they'll switch 
  to something else.

It is trivial to prove that the second a criminal realizes a given communication mechanism is insecure they do not stop using it if it is convenient.

Has every criminal in the world stopped using the phone after the first phone was ever tapped?

  And ALL of the above assumes that there
  are no criminal programmers and thus they
  have no ability to just write their own tools

But we know there are more than 0 non-programmer criminals who will not be writing their own tools.

You need better arguments than "if we can't stop all crime with an action it has no value" because it is a silly argument.

They don't need to write up the tools, just to use them, they are widely available

> You need better arguments than "if we can't stop all crime with an action it has no value" because it is a silly argument.

Arguments like "we all need to abandon privacy to maybe, potentially stop some crime somewhere" are equally silly.

Agreed.

Everyone should avoid silly arguments.

You do know software can be downloaded without knowing how to program it yourself right?

> It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape.

This was tried by a Canadian Minister at one point to sell surveillance in this extreme way:

> In February 2012, as Minister, Toews introduced the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act (also known as Bill C-30).[118][119] The bill, which made no mention of children or "Internet predators" outside of its title,[120] would have granted police agencies expanded powers, mandate that internet service providers (ISPs) provide subscriber information without a warrant and compel providers to reveal information transmitted over their networks with a warrant. When criticised about privacy concerns, Toews responded that people "can either stand with us or with the child pornographers."[121]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Toews#Federal_Minister_of_...

The legislation in question went down in flames as plenty of people sided "with the child pornographers":

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

> It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape.

We see politicians regularly choosing to not enact overwhelmingly popular positions like universal background checks in the face of mass murders of children.

How many politicians have done anything to stop the Catholic church from hiding child rapists? This is a much more direct harm and no one who isn't a child rapist would lose anything if we fixed it.

Politicians are already choosing rape and murder when the stakes are much lower.

It is not that simple. Two potential unintended consequences of this no-encryption rule come to mind that might actually not just not help, but in fact make it worse for the victims.

1. They said that FB captures 99% of those illegal activities by themselves. What makes us think that government will be able to capture that last 1% on their own?

2. Encryption gets removed, potential perpetrators move to another platform that uses encryption and doesn't have the capability to catch those illegal activities that FB already catches using their internal systems. Congrats, now those perps that would have been caught (even if FB implemented the encryption) won't be caught at all.

And with the uncertainty that comes to mind with both of those points, one thing that is definitely guaranteed to come is further erosion of personal privacy.

> 1. They said that FB captures 99% of those illegal activities by themselves. What makes us think that government will be able to capture that last 1% on their own?

To stress even more on this point (I have to also FULLY agree with the second), what evidence is there that lack of encryption will even make it easier to capture this 1% more. Pareto is a real thing. I'm not convinced there's an easy answer to capturing the last 1% and that it can be done with minimal resource allocation. That's where I start being suspicious. The back of the envelope math doesn't work out.

I agree, but many will not. So I figured we should address the central problem: increasing privacy automatically means increasing the ability for people to do whatever they want (that's the whole point). We'd be stupid not to anticipate bad consequences. It's just that the benefits are much greater, and we should be able to argue as much, even on TV in front of a potentially hostile journalist.

Facebook relies on the fact that most Facebook messages are not end-to-end encrypted to detect illegal activity. Forget the last 1% – how would Facebook continue to detect the 99% without access to decrypted message contents?

Client-side detection. You can probably argue that it can be evaded easily because it is client-side, but most people won't bother + it isn't like FB has an open API with a ton of third party FB clients.

I spent less than a minute thinking about this, but there are probably tons of other strategies they can employ. People familiar with the domain, I would actually love to hear your takes on this, as the topic is fairly fascinating.

It's an interesting idea. Assuming it's feasible, I wonder whether people would actually want to use a messaging service that's private, except where it thinks it detects illegal activity, in which case messages are copied to the police (and end-to-end encrypted on the way there, of course). That seems practically and logically equivalent to a messaging service which is not end-to-end encrypted but run by a trusted operator.

I feel like, to ensure privacy, we need an equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction: the strategic introduction of a secondary Nash equilibrium that's so bad that it makes it obvious that we should choose the primary equilibrium. Right now, people have no clear sense on what "a gradual erosion of privacy at the hands of the government" really means. We haven't seen a 100% solid example of what any country would do with that power, yet (though China is getting close.)

But imagine if some crazy billionaire set up some sort of autonomous decentralized system that constantly attempted to MITM all the same systems the government likes wiretapping; and then, if it managed to extract any data from that attack, it would find names in that data, and put bounties out on those people on assassination markets (paid from anonymous accounts previously set up by the billionaire.)

Now the choice is between some people dead, and a lot of people dead! Everyone get on board the privacy train!

In a way isn't this what web technologies did?

That is-- pick an insanely fast development cycle where piecemeal/baroque security approaches simply cannot keep up. Eventually you arrive at a place where the whole endeavor become a giant tinder box just waiting to go down in flames. But that forced browser vendors to say, "Ok, let's just assume everything is constantly on fire, cordon everything off into flame retardant boxes, and improve our response time by many orders of magnitude."

If anything ever gets too hot from the thousands of strangers I casually let in the front door I simply move to another building and recycle the burning one.

Meanwhile I treat my Debian install like a prized piece of Shaker furniture. You'd have to be a goddammned 19th century furniture historian with your credentials showing before I let you anywhere near my brittle little museum.

But we aren't "ensuring" privacy; we're inventing whole new forms of privacy. There has never been a private and secure channel to communicate with thousands of strangers across the world. Simply acting like this brand new thing is an obvious and unquestioned good is naive.

At a point in time, simply writing in your villages native tongue and posting it around the world could have afforded the same benefits. Private communication has been the cornerstone of civilisation for many hundreds and thousands of years and will do for many more to come. I should not be vilified for my want of privacy.

This "never before seen" argument cuts both ways, though. There has also never been a full, verbatim record of all of one's communications, personal notes, searches of the equivalent of the world's largest encyclopedia, precise location over time, and myriad other details, carried in one's pocket and/or magically copied to a central location at which someone can perform instantaneous bulk keyword searches. The raw data and processing power over that data that governments have, now, is completely unprecedented in the history of the world.

We used to be protected by the ephemeral nature of 99% of life and by the inability for anyone to centrally view or mechanically process the other 1% (letters, diaries, etc). This is just as much argument for strong protection as your argument goes against strong protection.

I think the two key things to remember are that "failure will happen" and Blackstone's principle. We have to, as a society, decide which direction we want to fail (modes of failure). We also have to decide what amount is acceptable (having 0 crime is a good goal, but we will never get there and need to be realistic). I think it is clear which way the founders of the country wanted failure to happen, which is Blackstone's principle. "A hundred guilty men should go free before a single innocent man is is deprived of his freedom."

I think everyone here is familiar with Pareto. Capturing 80% of criminals is easy. Catching the next 10% is harder than catching that first 80%. Catching that last 1% takes significant amounts of resources, way more than the previous 90%. So it just isn't economically viable to stop it all (exponential curve and we don't have infinite resources).

So I'm not sure that saying

> A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption.

But I don't think it is necessarily wrong either. I think encryption enables it, but this sentence implies causation (which is the rhetoric of those that want to remove encryption: causation).

How I read the horsemen comment is that these topics are used as boogie men. Because what sane person wants that stuff to exist? OF COURSE we want 0%. How can you be against stopping child trafficking? (practically) No one is against that! These are also topics we care VERY much about. Because frankly we should do everything we can to stop child exploitation. But we know the goal is unobtainable and to get only a handful more than we currently get (which is almost all of them!) requires huge violations of privacy and significantly more resources to be allocated. The horsemen are being used to get us on board and make us not ask if these methods are meaningfully effective or ask what the costs are. It also says that anytime you hear officials talk about the horsemen that you should perk your ears up and start asking serious questions. How effective is this? Does it actually help? What are the costs? The Patriot Act is a good example. It is not clear that it meaningfully reduced terrorism in any way and yet we gave up a significant amount of privacy (I can quote founding fathers on this too).

So it boils down to "if giving up the privacy does not do an effective job at making any meaningful reduction in actual child trafficking <insert horseman>, why should we give that privacy up? There's clearly benefits to privacy. So is this issue really about child trafficking or is something else at play here and are they just feeding off my emotions?"

> How I read the horsemen comment is that these topics are used as boogie men.

Yes they are. And it works because we can't multiply, emotionally. I tend to avoid LessWrong links around here, but this one is appropriate: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply.

My first comment alluded to the torture vs dust speck dilemma. Horsemen vs privacy is nowhere near as extreme (especially at the dust speck end), but it has the same structure. If lay people realised this, the horsemen would not convince anyone.

I agree with much of your argument, but what makes you say so confidently that we capture or punish almost all of the people who engage in child exploitation?

I'm going off of what is said in the article and determining if what is said matches what I expect (which is based off of Pareto). Also consider that the statement that the AG said is not countering FB's claim. So that's what gives me confidence. One side says "we capture 99%" and the opposition says doesn't disagree and uses a desperate statement. I think if FB was wrong then the AG would counter on that point.

> (having 0 crime is a good goal, but we will never get there and need to be realistic).

Actually, please stop there and think about this for a second.

Having zero crime depends extremely strongly on the precise definition of "crime". Much more so than other, non-zero levels of crime.

This is only a good thing if you are absolutely sure that the definition of what constitutes a crime right now is perfect and immutable.

Extreme positions are almost always a bad idea and I think this is one of those cases.

Why does my point have to depend on immutables? I'm really pointing out Pareto, which is still going to exist if you add or remove crimes. The only way I can see your counterpoint being an actual rebuttal, and not just pedantic, is if you redefine crime to be something meaningless. But if we're allowed to change definitions then we can't really have any conversation about anything. But language is imprecise and we can quibble over things that are in that imprecision or we can argue over what was the clear intent of statements.

It was not meant as a rebuttal of your overall point, which I agree with.

I'm adding to your point by saying that I don't consider "0% crime" as a desirable goal since crime is something defined by people and people are fallible, hence the definition is also fallible.

The problem is not in removing meaning from the word "crime". We all have an imprecise, handwavey meaning of the word in our minds when we use it. We usually mean something like "undesirable behaviour which benefits a single individual while harming others". The problem arises when you try to operationalize this loose notion into laws since this process frequently results in errors. Another way this can go sour is due to overreach by groups currently in power in an effort to stay in power, leading to loss of freedom (which is more applicable in this case).

In other words, some crime is actually people breaking the law because for good reason, like rebelling against an unjust, inefficient or overreaching law.

Therefore, it's better to strive for a low crime rate than a zero crime rate. This is also the conclusion you arrive at through the application of the Pareto principle.

> We rarely condone murder in the name of the betterment of humanity: some tried, didn't go so well.

sounds like "War" to me.

This whole privacy thing is pretty mute if the lack of privacy doesn't come with its own danger. The wider princple is likely based around a simpler question.

Who is more of more danger to you. A cabal of rich drug dealing terroist pedophiles or your own Government? The argument then becomes one of statistics and then of the lesser harm.

I imagine the answer is obvious with the Government being sigificantly more harmful. You're likely comparing a few hundred deaths of tens of thousands.

You'll always find a subset of the population who thinks the death of citizens or harm is justified in some way, because they took some action that broke the law.

But find enough examples where the offernder did no direct harm to anyone else and I suspect you'll give most reasonble people pause for concern.

And if the facts don't match your gut, then maybe you're wrong and privacy isn't all that important.

> Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

The thing to point out is that we all make the implicit choice to let people die for convenience every single day: Almost all of us could choose to pay a bit more to charity to save a life, almost no matter how much we're currently giving or what we're currently doing, or could choose to take jobs that would do more to make the world a better place.

We just rarely have to face what choosing differently would have meant, so we get to pretend it doesn't have much to do with us. And granted, most of the time the consequences are many steps removed from our choices.

> The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few.

I think this kind of dark-sounding reasoning only holds up when you phrase it not as “a mere inconvenience” but as tyranny, which is what encryption and privacy in general protect against.

I support personal rights to privacy, and believe that we should find ways to enforce laws without violating privacy. Representative governments need the ability to alter their own power structure in order to function, and yet human power structures naturally resist change, including by spying on those who conspire against them: therefore, privacy is essential for representative government. Representative government’s alternative is tyranny, which we know creates incalculably-large-scale suffering.

Human nature is at the root of why privacy is costly and also why it is necessary; however, much evidence suggests that the set of aspects of human nature we express is mutable and dependent on environment.

While I would never argue that we can remove those aspects of our nature, I believe we can alter our environment to reduce how frequently we express the more sinister ones.

In short, I’d rather work on reshaping our environment, including and especially our culture, to make privacy less necessary and costly, than to debate whether it is either. It is both, and it will always be both, but we can make it less of both, or more of both, with our culture. Same for guns.

Anyone decently intelligent and motivated can utilize end-to-end encryption in myriad ways with relative ease. If anyone is going to organize a sufficiently dangerous security threat, they're not going to do it through unencrypted Facebook messages.

Sure, idiots do stuff like this all the time. Sure they get caught. But idiots usually get caught by other means, too. And you never catch all the idiots, there's just too many of them.

Honestly, on HN I feel there is much more disdain for my position. Given the world we're in, Facebook being able to assist law enforcement around child abuse, sexual slavery and human trafficking provides a lot of value. I feel people on HN are underestimating the extent of these issues, underweighting their severity, and overstating the dangers of letting Facebook store private data.

Estimates say there are something like 20-40 million slaves in the world, and that 50,000 people are trafficked per annum in the USA. Something like 20% of slaves are sold for sex. Facebook is believed to be a common platform to facilitate this, though I haven't been able to find numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

In contrast, despite the occasional news post of a particularly incompetent company leaking a database of plaintext passwords, Facebook's data storage is pretty safe, and encryption does still afford a lot of protection. The idea that hundreds of thousands of people are going to have their private data extracted from Facebook through individual attacks against the servers is not well corroborated.

Totalitarianism is an important long-tail risk, but I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that these programmes are a path to it. Overall privacy rights quite plausibly are, but that issue exists primarily as a matter of policy and law, not as a matter of technology. If the laws are bad, Facebook illegally preventing protection of trafficking victims will not help those laws change to a more moderate position, and if the laws are reasonable, cooperating to prevent trafficking victims would not be harmful to positive political outcomes.

The scale of abuses would have to be multiple orders of magnitude smaller, or detection mechanisms incredibly ineffective, before this tradeoff made sense to me.

> A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few.

Wow. I can't agree with that one even a little bit. The real concern is totalitarian abuse. But being inconvenienced allows us to kill? That rings as downright pathological.

That's because it only works on pathological cases. Like the dust speck vs torture dilemma. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...

In practice, the tradeoffs are never that extreme.

> I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

Yep. I'm pretty sure you just torpedoed any hope you may have had at a political career.

So, how do you feel about gun control?

I used to have an opinion, but recently realised that I simply don't know the subject well enough. But I can see the tradeof: on the one hand, guns facilitate accidents and murders. On the other hand, arming the population could ensure they can effectively rise up against their government if that's really needed. Not that they will actually, do it, but the mere possibility likely changes the way things are done.

There's also personal defence, but that one has disadvantages too (there might be false positives, were a presumed mugger would get shot). Plus, from what I hear, guns have different effects in different countries.

It's a complicated subject. My opinion right now is not informed enough to be trusted.

I didn't really want to derail the discussion, it was just really striking how similar the arguments here in favor of privacy really are to the arguments in favor of gun control- but many people I have known are in favor of one and not the other.

What number of things will happen?

This argument is so unbelievably stupid, that I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, encryption in WhatsApp is targeted towards consumers. You won't catch terrorists by limiting encryption. If terrorists and other criminals are not using encryption anyway, then they are so stupid that they deserve to be caught.

The only thing a lack of privacy does is throwing us further into dictatorship. Just imagine a madmen, like uhm... say Trump, with the full power of the secret service behind him and limited to privacy for end-users. Well this is just great. All the dirt he can dig up about his opponents. He asks foreign governments to dig up dirt, okay, that means right now the NSA isn't too much inclined to help this guy out, but what if they were?

If you water down privacy you are robbing the people of their only chance to organize protests and rise up to authoritarian governments.

Last but not least, the crimes prevented by not using encryption are absolutely negligible. The numbers are so freaking low that each day more people will die in car accidents in the US alone than would die globally because of pervasive usage of unbreakable encryption.

This analogy of `Uh a person could be prevented from getting raped is more important than preventing a fall into dictatorship` is so contrived that I don't even understand how anyone can eat this shit. Bad things happen all over the place and you are buying this sham argument that is preying on human psychology.

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