Hacker News Reader

Comment by AHappyCamper | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does the timing of this story seem a little fishy considering the EARN IT act that US Senators are trying to push through?

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/oppose-earn-it-a...

View on HN

I'd say the contrary: isn't this a prime example of how law enforcement can work around encryption without weakening encryption in general by law?

It's a shaky argument, because ideally these systems would be so secure that they wouldn't be able to have done what they did. They relied on human error and that seems like a bad excuse to penetrate a system.

Yes, but I'm not sure we should be giving up real rights to imagined threats. In practice, what encryption systems do is make it sufficiently inconvenient to steam open our letters that the authorities only do it with motivation. The only real case for some of these proposed laws is "we don't want to employ specialists in this field" not "these systems are uncrackable".

Or: we want the full firehose of data, and then we want to employ Machine Learning specialists. ML is apparently magic.

The motivation driving these laws is E2E encryption that if implemented correctly are uncrackable. Today, pretty much everything is encrypted but since the provider has the keys they can access the messages. E2E encryption shifts the keys to the user which means that the provider has no access to the content of the message. They are theoretically uncrackable without the user's secret and when it's Apple, Google, Facebook, et.al. implementing the system and not some 2 bit criminal operation it will be uncrackable in practice.

To quote Monty Python "This isn't an argument, this is just contradiction!"

I don't know what this means.

First off, you definitely should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ

But the point is the post just literally contradicted the previous post. There's not a lot of places to go from there.

I'm sure that if a bunch of criminals found a way to make a perfectly secure mobile phone they wouldn't be too bothered with a law that says they're not allowed to do that.

But doesn't that also mean one can plausible defend strong crypto by saying "look how easily police broke into this system's weak crypto, how would you feel if criminals could break into your bank this easily?"

They had the fact they'd broken the system leak to the criminals before they finished their operation.

Seems like they can't be trusted with proper secrets, doesn't it?

I realize Mozilla has an axe to grind, and perhaps rightly so, but they undermine their argument by not linking to the actual text of the Act.

That page is just saying, "Act bad! Signup here to protest!" If the bill is really so bad, then they shouldn't be afraid to let people see for themselves what's in it.

Why would the Dutch and French police time the release of this information with a US law proposal?

Because that's how global politics and alliances work, sometimes.

Sure. Because Trump hasn't completely messed up any form of allegiance the Europe had to the US.

Ultimately Trump is just one (albeit powerful) dude - I imagine intelligence and other agencies have built up relationships over a much longer period

Yes, they probably have, relationships based on trust. Using information for political gain is not the type of stuff that allows that trust to continue existing.

So for US politicians to both know and abuse this, someone in the US intelligence community would have had to be willing to lose a lot of trust on the EU side by both sharing the intelligence and allowing it to be used for political gain and forcing the EU side to become their political puppet.

That doesn't seem reasonable to me, but who knows. If that's what happened though, the US can forget any trust in the near future.

No particular reason I guess, but stranger connections have been made when the US leans on other countries.

Sweden violated its constitution and had dawn raids and confiscation of servers performed to satisfy the RIAA.

That's completely different from asking two different countries to withhold information from multiple criminal investigations for political gain by a specific group of US politicians.

European countries don't even trust US politicians anymore with information about ongoing investigations, due to the blabbermouth president. Why would they even communicate this with them to begin with?

They still hold some clout as long as they are in office.

And don't forget that the administration has installed a lot of affiliated poeople into agencies. (Ratcliffe for instance.)

I'm not saying the dutch and the french did some kind of cooperation with the US here, I'm just saying I would not gasp of surprise if it turned out to be so.

> And don't forget that the administration has installed a lot of affiliated poeople into agencies.

I haven't and neither have our agencies.

Do you mean the staff remember to cater to the whims of their newly appointed chief, or do you mean, they remember and try to stall the worst madness from above?

GCHQ were involved which means the NSa would have known about it since they're not really separate organizations. I believe they would refrain from briefing the president on something which was important to keep secret.

It's probably just a coincidence. The actual French access to the servers was in April - there were more rumors of it back then.

exactly my thoughts too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com