Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

This guy is all about how much of a threat the expansion of Chinese hardware is but doesn't say a word about the same being true for American hardware. Chinese networking hardware may contain backdoors, American hardware has been confirmed to contain backdoors over and over again.

Re: the iPhone: when any country has the golden keys, every country has the golden keys. How hard is it to. Get that through your head. The moment the US demands golden keys, China is going to demand their own set of golden keys, followed by Saudi Arabia and any other foreign adversary. These keys are going to be used the same way the US is going to use them (spy on allies and enemies) as well as for seeking out minorities and problematic citizens.

As a foreigner, if something doesn't cross the US Senate of all bodies because of ethics or surveillance problems, that's really saying something. These are the people that brought us laws like the PATRIOT ACT and the CLOUD act, systematically expanding the reach of US law enforcement across borders. The EU, supposedly an ally, had to negotiate a quick, likely invalid or quickly overturned bandage treaty to make it legal to even just store personal data on US company servers. Is this what the US wants to become? A risk to their own allies?

Forcing weak encryption is not defence, it's offence. It's hard to believe that people like these aren't jealous of the spying network China has set up.

Backdoors have been revealed a few times in US products, but US companies have learned their lesson and appear to be pushing back. 9/11 is almost a decade in the past and the Snowden revelations embarrassed several companies. Things like warrant canaries are pretty common and companies like Apple have been publicly fighting government attempts to access Apple devices in court.

One thing the US has going for it is that unlike some countries, is that companies are more scared of their customers than the government.

Every three or four months Cisco or Juniper get caught having introduced a new backdoor. Hardcoded admin passwords, full system access backdoors following a specific port knocking sequence, you name it. Sure, some companies have started pushing back but the companies that produce critical network infrastructure can't be trusted.

Backdoors or just shitty developers and security practices?

What port knocking backdoor?

> 9/11 is almost a decade in the past

I assume you mean two decades?

(unless I'm missing the point and you are referring to some specific fall-out from that event that had particular significance at a point ten years after?)

A warrant canary is utterly useless as a defense. Any secret legal order to alter IT systems (the specific threat model it is most often suggested for) can logically also include an order to maintain a fake warrant canary.

Part of the theory of a warrant canary is that compelled speech (and in particular a compelled lie) may be easier to challenge than suppressed speech. While that isn't definitive, there's some jurisprudence to back that theory. If you have a warrant canary, you should be prepared to challenge any such order in court and use that as the defense.

How so? Censorship is explicitly forbidden by the US constitution, and even so it happens (in this case, "in the name of national security" or whatever).

The current interpretation says there are certain reasonable restrictions on the 1st for the public safety. Compelled speech isn't accepted as constitutional.

Remember the constitution only really, effectively, says whatever the current Supreme Court says it means. And really I don't think anyone want's the 100% literal 'shall make no law' interpretation of free speech; that would throw out any kind of labeling laws for starters, companies would have no government compulsion to accurately label drugs or food products for example.

is ordering silence and secretly seizing control of the publication technology (ie website) then maintaining a false warrant canary a way around compelled speech ? if so then regular live press-conference/video appearances would be the only practical implementation method. if they say nothing and exit then the canary is dead.

It could be, I'm not a lawyer. That seizure would be something you could fight in court too on two fronts: seizure of property and if the government takes over your means of communication and pretends to be you what separates that from directly compelling speech.

An important detail in the US juristiction certainly.

On a practical basis i cannot evaluate the jurisprudence involved and I would assume the number of people who credibly can is very small, especially in the context of "secret courts for national security reasons".

A useful test would be if any of those few had demonstrated a personal risk using this as a defense and succeeded. The rest of us can only guess the risk based on the reputation of the entites involved.

You threaten that and they say “go pound sand in the courts”. And even if you “win” in the courts you still lose because “the process is the punishment”.

"US companies have learned their lesson"

SURE. And they are all GDPR compliant as well.

>Backdoors have been revealed a few times in US products, but US companies have learned their lesson and appear to be pushing back.

Yeah, that's not exactly the case...

In comparison to Chinese companies which comply 100% of the time with Chinese military intelligence, it matters.

I'm on your side here, but throwing around baseless acquisitions isn't helpful.

>baseless acquisitions

huh? what's baseless about pointed out the 100% compliance of Chinese companies with the CCP?

It would be baseless if anyone had a single story of any Chinese company trying to go against the wishes of the Chinese government and not being either immediately arrested and "disappeared" or having the company nationalized by the government.

I'm not sure token non-compliance (and non-compliance theater) makes much of a difference...

You are not sure cooperating or not cooperating matters? Or you think Apple secretly gave the FBI an iPhone unlock when they say they didn't?

What are you actually saying?

9/11 is almost two decades in the past. Shall we return to the Crimean war?

Note: 9/11 is almost two decades in the past

His whole point is to not weaken encryption but to strengthen it, despite the likely social costs that will incur. Have you read the conclusion of the article?

China already got golden keys for Chinese iPhones. Apple handed them iCloud.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't been able to find a source for this - only mentions of a new datacenter in China. A citation would be nice.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

Well, China issues aside, that should be the case in every country -- such services should be local, governed by local laws, and not giving a free-pass to foreign countries/governments (foreign as to the users of the service) to enforce their laws/surveillance.

E.g. I would like the EU iCloud to be hosted in EU.

> that should be the case in every country -- such services should be local, governed by local laws

So a cloud service that's available worldwide should store and process data locally in every country (or perhaps even every sub-jurisdiction of every country) just so that that jurisdiction can serve warrants to it and others cannot? Or worse, people in multiple countries should have to use different services and hope those services interoperate with each other, just so that they can "shop local"?

The Internet does not and should not work that way. If we're going to go to the trouble of building interoperable, federated services, it should be to put them in the control of individual users, not in the control of governments.

>So a cloud service that's available worldwide should store and process data locally in every country (or perhaps even every sub-jurisdiction of every country) just so that that jurisdiction can serve warrants to it and others cannot?

Simply put, yes.

You are maybe concerned with the technical issues / problems to the service provider.

I'm more concerned with the decentralization, surveillance, and data sovereignty.

>Or worse, people in multiple countries should have to use different services and hope those services interoperate with each other, just so that they can "shop local"?

Yes. In fact, this decentralized nature, and resilience, was an early vision about the internet itself, and not just some hippie dream, even in its army-research origins... And of course all the way to ideas such as XMPP, Diaspora, and so on.

Nobody dreamed a Facebook silo somewhere gathering all the world's data...

>The Internet does not and should not work that way.

That it does not, it's obvious. That it should not, less so.

(And of course, if one's county is the one doing the data-gathering/policing of data for the rest of the world, it's "naturally" all A-OK to them that it is so).

>If we're going to go to the trouble of building interoperable, federated services, it should be to put them in the control of individual users, not in the control of governments.

Notice how I didn't propose putting them "in control of governments".

They already are in control of at least one government (the one of the country of Facebook, Google, MS, Apple, Twitter, etc).

So what I proposed is already de-centralized: putting each users data under democratic control in the places where they themselves are (and vote, have rights, etc), as opposed to a central place, where they don't vote, don't have any right or resource as foreigners and are "fair game" to the whims of both the service-origin government and the service company.

If they're going to go to control of individual users, even better. But stopping the control of a single foreign government is already a good first step.

(Exceptions could be made for non-democratic countries -- no reason to give control of a service's local data to a dictatorship).

> Simply put, yes.

Feel free to build such services, if you wish.

> You are maybe concerned with the technical issues / problems to the service provider.

Not just that (though I certainly don't consider it reasonable to expect a service to have thousands of servers in thousands of jurisdictions and deal with thousands of legal systems; frankly, I want services to expose themselves to as few jurisdictions as possible).

I'm concerned about the usefulness of the service to its users. As a user of a service, I will not accept partitioned and walled-off services where I cannot interact with people elsewhere in the world. That's my choice, and the choice of people and projects I collaborate with, and I choose to use services that allow me to collaborate with those people and projects.

> And of course all the way to ideas such as XMPP, Diaspora, and so on.

I did specifically say that:

If we're going to go to the trouble of building interoperable, federated services, it should be to put them in the control of individual users, not in the control of governments.

If you have the capability of interoperability and federation, then where you host your data should have nothing to do with jurisdiction, and everything to do with who wants to store and control the data.

>Feel free to build such services, if you wish.

Well, I don't propose or expect companies to volunteer doing this.

My point is that EU (for one) should mandate them, and if service providers like FB, etc, don't like them, they could skip the 500m market -- and just be careful not to let the door hit them on their way out...

>Not just that (though I certainly don't consider it reasonable to expect a service to have thousands of servers in thousands of jurisdictions and deal with thousands of legal systems; frankly, I want services to expose themselves to as few jurisdictions as possible).

As long as it's your jurisdiction? (assuming you're in the US, since it says on your HN profile that you work for Intel).

Or that's a happy accident (for you) that is not really relevant to your point, but others should be fine with?

I'd prefer the services I use to be under the control of my country's laws and my democratic vote -- not under what some third country dictates and controls.

Besides, hyperbole much?

There aren't "thousands of jurisdictions and legal systems". At worst, they are like 150 or so, as many countries. And some could get together and accept a single country as the host and set their common rules (like the EU could do for EU member states).

Major services already have tons of global CDNs servers, even on small countries.

And if there was a mandate, there could easily be an infrastructure and common services to deploy to span the globe (e.g. turn-key Amazon provision for sharding your data into multiple data centers per jurisdiction).

It doesn't even need to be all players, could be mandated on some size and above -- and surely Google, Facebook, Apple, etc scale.

> As long as it's your jurisdiction?

No, not at all. I expect it to be the jurisdiction of whoever runs the service. That jurisdiction will necessarily have control over the authors of the service; there's no getting around that. (The authors can try to build the service with themselves as a threat model, which few services do, and even then that may not work.) Unless you want to mandate that people can't use services from outside their country (and enforce that with a country-wide firewall blocking access to the real Internet), then you're never going to get around that.

Also, you seem to be treating "store and use data locally" as a thing that protects the citizens of a country, rather than a thing that threatens the citizens of a country. Many countries want data stored locally so that they can seize it, and want services hosted locally so that they can block those services or make them consistent with the country's propaganda.

Also, you're assuming that data is nicely partitioned by user. For many useful services, it isn't. Just for the simplest case, consider collaboratively-edited works by multiple users.

> There aren't "thousands of jurisdictions and legal systems".

Tell that to states and equivalent sub-jurisdictions within countries. Tell that to many large cities and their local regulations. Thousands is if anything an underestimate.

> there could easily be an infrastructure and common services to deploy to span the globe

That sounds like a great way to introduce security holes and a vastly expanded threat model.

Also, to comment on something you edited into a previous comment:

> (Exceptions could be made for non-democratic countries -- no reason to give control of a service's local data to a dictatorship).

Who gets to decide that? Obviously not the countries themselves. That just leaves the people building the service and the people deciding which services to use; those are the same parties who already get to decide that today.

That is technically incorrect. As I understand it, the iPhones are generic (global), but the iCloud service is what the Chinese authorities have full snooping rights to.

Apple doesn't cut a custom firmware with special/additional golden keys or anything of that nature, as I understand it, for anyone.

The iPhone in this case is safe, assuming you don't use iCloud, in China.

> assuming you don't use iCloud

But most people use iCloud, right? Apple forbids you from using competing full phone cloud backup services. The built in backup software continuously sends iCloud copies of most user data on the phone.

As far as I understand, they send an encrypted binary blob of the data on your phone, and the keys stay local. That’s much different.

This is not correct. Apple's page explaining their iCloud encryption states that they use end-to-end encryption only for a few specific types of data, and only if you enable two factor authentication. iMessage in particular explicitly sends its encryption keys to iCloud (so that iCloud can unlock your messages if you lose your device, but of course this means iCloud can unlock your messages for any other reason without your knowledge). https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

I would be excited to read about how we can rethink encryption to enable a stateless society.

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