Five Eyes and Japan call for Facebook backdoor to monitor crime
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-sta...
Same goes for kitchen knives. I don't hear them call for banning those, or have every sale of one tracked and monitored (which would only illustrate the lunacy of their "argument" even more).
* a large number of people
* from a distance
* with basically no effort
With knives on the other hand it's hard (especially for untrained attackers) killing/injuring
* even a low number of people (IF even more than one)
* from arm's reach
* with large physical effort.
Following that firearm restriction to those who may actually need them (law enforcement etc.) is then quite obvious.
There are costs to freedom, including the potential for abuse. Just like predictive policing is wrong because it goes after those who haven't committed crimes, banning guns is wrong. The death of a ten, a hundred, a thousand, or more people doesn't justify restricting liberty. All guns ought to be legal.
If so, can I please be allowed to have my own private nuclear warhead? I promise to only use it as a deterrent against a similarly armed government getting too "oppressive".
I promise not to set it off in a bout of drunken depression.
Also good luck filling out all the paperwork. There's a difference between outright banning something and placing an astonishing number of administrative hurdles in the way. Private nuclear weapons come with so much paperwork as to be esssentially impracticable, but never the less possible.
At least that was the verdict last time I looked into the question.
Sure, how about a howitzer then?
What you're failing to see or refusing to admit is that you too want to restrict access to weapons based on a certain threshold of collateral damage/body count each of them can inflict.
It's just that for some (perhaps most) of us, an AR-15 is way past our threshold.
As for the truck you mentioned that was used in France: if it's ever found that a certain truck model makes it particularly easy to run over people with, I bet my bottom dollar that soon after there will be legislation enacted restricting access to it.
Saving lives is not a rational explanation for the political strategy of anti-gun activists. If it were, I would be more willing to consider what they had to say. Based on what they do rather than what they say, I can only conclude that their motivations have nothing to do with rationally increasing safety, and are more related to mindless irrational fear, disarming people for political reasons, and simply pandering to people who have also done no real research.
Finally it ends with 'do you trust current authority?' and depending upon the social circle you will get various answers.
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
The US was setup to protect individuals from both government and the majority. Sadly through out history we have lost respect for this separation of powers resulting is elimination of many checks and balances that where builtin to the system
Short answer... No I do not trust any government, or authority. Nobody should
Cough cars, police officers, food that doesn't taste like grass and cardboard, cough, cough.
(from 2005 but it was brought up again last year...)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm#:~:text=%22Off...
The proposal was from a hospital research group who argued that many stabbings are impulsive and that long knives cause extremely serious penetration injuries. So they suggested banning those knives for home use, or at least blunting the tips.
The response to this is usually "well people could sharpen them?" and sure, but the purpose is risk mitigation. You'd still be able to buy a smaller pointed knife if you wanted.
> The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.
They allegedly consulted with chefs who agreed that if you really need to use the tip, a paring knife would be OK. Anecdotally I'd agree - the only thing I use the tip of my chef's knife for is for opening packaging.
[1]: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1990/act/12/section/9/ena...
"Normal use of pocket knife" is how the police formulates one of the exceptions or carve-outs for legitimate use of a knife in public spaces. There is a lot of leeway there.
If so, then do people have to take the fish home before cleaning them or can they prepare and eat them while camping, etc?
When you place the burden on the people and not the state - often through "common sense laws/regulation" - you inherently enable subjective and arbitrary enforcement of the law.
This unfortunate trend not only creates and enables petty tyrants, but disproportionally afflicts the most vulnerable in society and politically disfavored minorities.
it also gives police discretion to avoid getting people into trouble because of too rigid rules. Many countries have a lot of lenience about the enforcement of relatively harmless drugs, for example.
Lenience and judgement on part of a police force is a good thing, and a necessary thing because reality is complicated and rules don't always make sense. The way you frame the issue just shows that you have low trust in your respective police force, in which case the issue is quality of policing, not rigidity of the law.
Of course, shockingly few of these ban-heavy countries, with the exception of the East Asian ones, have considered the much more effective strategy of adopting laws to reduce the number of bad actors. Switzerland is almost unique in only adopting laws to reduce the number of bad actors (very strict immigration system) but having fairly lax object laws (knives are mostly fine, guns are relatively loosely regulated) and it works well for them.
Strict? 25% of Switzerland’s population is foreign-born[1], and they are in the Schengen area, so no passport needed to cross the borders. I’ve cycled through at least three, none of which were even marked.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Switzerland#/...
I still don't get the idea that having a weakened security system could somehow benefit security. Based on many real-life hack stories I've heard, it's usually the "bad actors" who's taking advantage of unsecured apps to attack normal people, this is the very reason why developers are making apps more secure to begin with.
Another point is, insecured systems are usually easy to take control of (By injecting malwares payload into the brokenly-encrypted traffic for example), then "bad actors" can turn those systems to a trojan proxy. How does that help if you want to make things safe?
Last point: I know this is about big companies encryptions. But really, "Roll Your Own Encryption" is not that bad anymore if all other "secured-encryption" was bugged. And, really, roll your own encryption is not that hard today if your only goal is to annoy the FBI.
Real last point: Even if companies such as Google and Facebook did banned encryption, does that also prevents "bad actors" from using real encryption on top of their service? You can even send your nudes to me safely by encrypting it with my public key and publish the encrypted data here (Don't actually do that). The point is, even if you've successfully banned encryption in big companies, users will then just add a layer of encryption of their own, and that layer can be very very secure.
That's what projects like Maskbook do[1]. The problem with those is that the use of such technology can be detected, and thus the small number of users singled out. You'd need steganography for this principle to work, and AFAIK that's already what paranoid criminals are doing. So in reality making E2E encryption inconvenient only penalizes regular honest people.
[1]: https://mask.io/
However, a system can be designed to do that with ease. You can encode data in video streams with Fourier transform, you can encode data using English words, you can put encrypted data as JEPG payload etc.
"Bad actors" will do whatever it takes to protect themselves from law enforcement, they'll kill the police in a blink if their account balanced out (On the same note, they can also join and control the police from within), let alone to learn to use encryption. It is the normal people who will feel most of the hurt, because after that they don't even have the protection against bad actors.
Secondly, I think people are really naive to consider any justification for catching bad guys. All funding should be going into making the desire "to be a bad guy" zero. That's not going to be done by fear but instead by making a life as "not a bad guy" more attractive. Currently people are living unattractive lives while following the law and society should be making that unattractiveness go away.
La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. (1894)
[1] among my stock of anecdotes from the States, that I pull out for people here who have never lived there: "uninsured motorist coverage" ... kepashang? (wtf?)
That said, a scary amount of digital crime cases get dropped by the FBI when they are faced with some scrutiny. Their reasoning really doesn't hold up when they justify it either, got a bit of smell about it.
The whole “Apple wouldn’t decrypt the phone for the FBI” is one such false narrative in the media to further this. Apple had already provided the FBI with the phone’s iCloud data, which usually contains backups that have complete plaintext message history. Apple also dropped their plan to encrypt iCloud device backups that would prevent this sort of surveillance, specifically to aid the FBI.
Facebook already provides whatever surveillance law enforcement requests. This is a press hit along the same lines to spread the lie that routine communications on Facebook are not subject to surveillance.
They absolutely are. You can tell this by trying to send banned links via Messenger. A platform that doesn’t surveil the content will necessarily permit them as they will be opaque to the provider. Facebook has many systems in place to monitor and censor message content.
The narrative that "bad people use X" becomes "bad people used X to do thing Y and the government was helpless to stop it, omg!" in various echo chambers. Soon, news reports start appearing with "Thing X was used by bad person. If only the government could have acted in time, tragedy would have been averted".
The various governments and TLA's arguing about the need for back-doors is akin to them complaining that they can't solve crime because of the invention and use of curtains on windows. I mean, can you picture them arguing that if only people left their curtains wide open all the time then there would be no more crime happening inside houses.
Yes, it's called "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...)
I think the trade-off of denying the establishment some control that would empower it to more effectively combat malevolent behavior by fringe elements, in order to better protect the majority from potential abuses and structural exploitation by the establishment, is worth it.
That's all this is about: cost. It's more expensive and the system would have to dedicate more resources to fewer targets, being forced to prioritize their efforts.
Sure, that means that investigating truly bad people will be more difficult. But, that extra cost means that the average well-meaning person won't be nearly as vulnerable to bad actors who use Total Information Awareness for nefarious purposes.
This shouldn't really be controversial now, in-fact it's a well established principle in criminal law called Blackstone's Ratio.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
So for instance, in the United States federal framework for criminal crypto enforcement report recently published by the US Department of Justice's Cyber Digital Task Force, it states:
https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download
>>Because of the global and cross-border nature of transactions involving virtual assets, the lack of consistent AML/ CFT regulation and supervision over VASPs across jurisdictions—and the complete absence of such regulation and supervision in certain parts of the world—is detrimental to the safety and stability of the international financial system.161
This takes it as a priori that state institutions having Total Information Awareness with regard to private financial transactions DOESN'T pose a threat to the "safety and stability of the international financial system."
This is an absurdly totalitarian political philosophy and the infrequency in which it's criticized is extremely dangerous.
As an anecdote, I went to DEFCON last year. I was at a blackjack table and surrounded by midwestern salt-of-the-earth types. I had my badge on which flashed lights, and someone asked if I was "one of those computer hackers" and I said Yes (of course). Then they asked me if it was true that the government could read everything they did on their computer! The very first question! I hesitated, and said yes! The government can indeed read everything they do online! It made the whole table silent.
The mainstream media keeps publishing these hand-wringing articles about how America's faith in institutions has diminished, as if Trump did it all. I argue that the total lack of privacy and argument from the Department of Justice that any privacy is akin to terrorism / criminal behavior kills society more than what they think they protect.
Is not privacy a fundamental American principle? What the hell happened?
Much of the rhetoric during the Cold War actually made these types of government activities unacceptable to the average person because not doing these things was used to differentiate the US from the Soviets. “Microphones in every house? What is this, Soviet Russia?”
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and we have not been vigilant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy#United_States says activist judges provided privacy, mostly over the latter half of the twentieth century, but strict constructionists would answer: it isn't.
Just think about that for a while.
If stored on an American third-party server.
2. What’s the endgame here? Open-source encrypted messaging software is widely available. The cat is out of the bag. Every country on Earth could outlaw the technology and it would still be trivially easy for criminals to use it. Do the people behind these proposals not see that?
End-to-end encryption doesn’t protect the social graph. They already know who is talking to who; they just don’t know what is being said.
I don't think we're far away from court ordered wire taps to compel Google to enable the cameras and microphones.
With this kind of architecture, law enforcement doesn't need 0-days, they only need a warrant/NSL, or to just ask the manufacturer nicely. Some manufacturers (e.g. Amazon/Ring) are a little too eager to essentially hand all of their data over to the police in real-time with almost no strings attached.
Devices that don't already upload everything to the cloud (e.g. Apple and Google's pinky-promise that smart assistant audio is processed locally) automatically receive and apply software and firmware updates from the manufacturer / carrier that can arbitrarily change device behavior. The government can and probably does compel these companies to write and push custom firmware to targeted devices.
"We encrypt your data so hard that we couldn't access it even if we wanted to" is almost always a lie, is never verifiable, and is ultimately subject to the same automatic firmware/software update problem.
It will never be possible to secure systems like these from government snooping, and people largely don't seem to care.
Google also asks you if you'd like to update Android, and they currently let you turn off auto-updates in the Play store, but they push updates to their nebulous, infinitely privileged "Play Services" packages frequently and without asking or informing the user. Even if Apple doesn't currently do something similar, it would be foolish to believe that they're not capable of doing so, as an ace-up-their-sleeve in an emergency scenario.
Also baseband firmware is pushed by the carriers silently and is essentially unauthenticated.
You really, really, really should not trust your phone, like, at all.
"this app wants access to your microphone: YES/NO"
This isn’t a defense of backdoors, btw — just saying that we can still expect some criminals to use compromised messaging software even if secure alternatives are easily available.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/ammo-guns...
If you want your messages encrypted, do it yourself. Then you are in control, not some big corp.
Nobody has to use these platforms, unless everyone else is using these platforms.
Have you ever been that one person who is being regularly invited to an event but you aren't in a Messenger or Whatsapp group to receive it? Pretty soon you stop receiving invitations. This is actually worse in the case of Whatsapp outside America, since it's used more often than it should for business, and if you don't make yourself accessible for business, you don't eat.
>If you want your messages encrypted, do it yourself.
I've been "that guy" trying to tell others about PGP. I still get jokes about acting like I'm hiding from the FBI occasionally, even in this age where privacy is mainstream enough where I can point them to a Joe Rogan podcast featuring Edward Snowden. People care, but it has to be frictionless.
No, even if everybody else is using those platforms, it does not force you in anyway to use them. It's still always up to you.
Well, you're wrong. I've had interviewers ask why I host my own blog instead of using Facebook, and said it was very unusual that they couldn't check out my social background.
And Craiglist rental ads often screen applicants using social media, usually Facebook.
Well, why would an employer need to check your social background? They should care about your skills more than anything else.
Thus said, a call to previous employers should do the trick.
Personally I'm on no social network, on purpose. I've never had any issues. If it was an issue for an employer that I didn't have a Facebook account that their issue not mine.
I don’t know what it’s like where you are (or what it’s like where I am now), but in the U.K. references from a previous employer are limited to confirming that a person worked at a place between specific dates.
This is because everyone gets legal advice warning they may be sued for libel if they either say anything negative or have a policy of saying nothing only for bad employees.
I don’t know how likely the scenario is, but everywhere I’ve worked before I left the U.K. shared that policy and that reasons.
I don’t want to work in an office with an unrepentant violent criminal or vigorous racist. Irrespective of their skill.
Example: Donald Knuth doesn't use email. This works fine for him because of his reputation, but if I were to quit email and social networks, I'm not influential enough that people would send me snail mail.
It's different because you're voluntarily giving information to a third party (Facebook), which the government is asking to share with police.
You may not agree with it, but that's the difference. It's a pretty substantial one.
Here's the link: https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/VbJAr/i-nord-korea-maa-fo...
The difference is that the infrastructure is in place and can be turned on at will so it feels within the reach of the people who think they deserved to do that.
They think that deserve it because they believe that the job they do is the most important thing in the world and they can suddenly gain access to an amazing tool that will make their job much more easier and potentially more effective. They believe that the risks are overblown, can be contained with proper measures and well worth it.
If you are a pro-nuclear energy, you can draw an analogy with you desperately wanting nuclear power all over the place.
“So what if a really bad accident can cause an irreparable damage? The new designs would not allow this to happen and the positive aspects are huge. Coal kills much more people. Yes we had chernobyl and fukushima but this time is different”
is very similar to “So what if the surveillance can be used to create a dystopian state? The measures we put in place will prevent it from ever happening and the positives are huge. Terrorist and other criminals cause huge damages and not that many are killed by repressive government. Yes we had the stasi and kgb but this is different”
After all, it is true that it would have been great to a have a power that watch us an protect us, right? The concept is the bedrock of many religions anyway. It’s something that a lot of people want.
A politician here a journalist there, people looking at death toll statistics must be wondering what was the big deal about Stasi, Chernobyl, KGB, Fukushima and so on.
You cant be serious.
To be clear, I am not anti-nuclear however I don't buy the "Chernobyl and Fukushima are note big deal" message that the low death toll numbers convey.
Huge swathes of KGB operatives worked through all of its organizational incarnations. They did (and Russian FSB still does) refer themselves as 'chekists' informally. Their professional holiday is the CheKa foundation day.
If you want to pretend the KGB, or the regime it operated under[1], was just the same as the NKVD under Stalin, then please provide examples of the same crimes (mass killings) occurring from 1954-1991.
The policy has been changed under Khrustchev, but thousands of the same butchers that committed massacres of 1930s were serving (often in the same offices) until late 1970s.
Of course not, it's as ridiculous as claiming the KGB, the intelligence agency of anti-Stalinist USSR, killed millions of people, just because an utterly different (Stalin) regime did so while employing some of the same personnel.
If the KGB is just a name change, as you keep trying to pretend, then as I already asked, where are the mass killings perpetrated in the KGB era (1954-1991)?
[0] "Reinhard Gehlen, head of the Org and later president of the BND, [stated] that around 40 of his employees came from the SS and SD ... If there was ignorance on the matter, it was only because no one wanted to know"
Apparently even today, on Hacker News, some people still don't want to know and prefer their own fantasy version of history instead.
"Many Nazi functionaries including Silberbauer, the captor of Anne Frank, transferred over from the Gehlen Organisation to the BND ... Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization
"The then-opposition leader and SPD head Kurt Schumacher [...] described the Gehlen Organization as 'riddled' with former members of the murderous Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS's intelligence agency"
While relevant to your initial question:
"The British press at the time openly mocked the 'Gestapo boys' working at the BND's headquarters in Pullach, near Munich."
We both know the issue is members of the SS, SD, war criminals continued to work in (West) German institutions, including its intelligence service, after post-WWII regime change.
I've already asked you twice, if "KGB" is nothing but a name change from "NKVD", simply state when, in its ~37 year existence, did it engage in the same actions (mass killings) as the NKVD.
We both know this too, though, that the KGB did not kill millions of people, as was the claim, because it was for all intents and purposes a different organization, with different objectives and under different orders from a government diametrically opposed to the Stalinist regime of the NKVD era.
> Huge [swath] of post-war German police, judiciary, political personnel
And the Braunbuch is very dubiously sourced.
"It's one of the country's worst-kept secrets. Yet questions still surround the presence of former Nazis and war criminals in West Germany's police, secret service (BND) and politics."
https://www.dw.com/en/stasi-files-shed-light-on-west-german-...
Why not? What evidence is there to the contrary? These death tolls vary by a lot, but even the high end is quite low compared to fossil fuels.
The fear people have of radiation seems to be much greater than reality would justify. This causes very serious problems, like evacuating hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily after an accident, destroying their lives due to mostly paranoia[1], as well as slowing down considerably our efforts to lower CO2 emissions (like Germany shutting down all its nuclear facilities even if that causes thousands of deaths due to increased pollution[2]).
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japan-nuclear-sh... [2] https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nucle...
Would you dissmiss hydro power because of the barrage incident then? Because last time i checked, the death toll, the displacment toll and the lost land caused by hydro power were a lot more than nuclear for sensibly the same power production.
Is it waste that grind your gear? Yeah, speak to the people who live near cadmium mines where nothing can grow anymore. Also a Co2 surplus in high atmosphere last around 100 000 years (order of magnitude here). Compare that to the dangerous radioactive waste. Also, coal mining and burning cause the area around to be more radioactive than the area around fukushima, or French uranium mines. Weird, no?
You know why you really don't like nuclear power? Its because with solar panel, oil and coal, the externalities are paid by poor populations in China, India, Africa or south America. So its better for you (or me). Its because hydro power failure only happened in poor countries. Or rather, country you don't really know or care about. Italia, Brazil, China barrage failure each have death toll superior to fukushima + chernobyl counting displacement caused deaths (avoidable deaths).
Anyway, the big issue is that it could have been(and still can be) much worse. it’s a scalable disaster with consequences outlasting human generations. If you need heroic efforts and enormous resources to contain something and there’s a possibility of that not succeed then you don’t want it happen and it’s a big deal.
Yes, but im sorry, the discussion is not "nuclear or not nuclear", its nuclear energy or another form of energy
> Anyway, the big issue is that it could have been(and still can be) much worse. it’s a scalable disaster with consequences outlasting human generations. If you need heroic efforts and enormous resources to contain something and there’s a possibility of that not succeed then you don’t want it happen and it’s a big deal.
No, no civil nuclear incident can't be worst than Chernobyl. Right now or in the future. There is no reactor that is using graphite anymore. Even if we lost suddenly all knowledge. Fukushima however, why not. But if its not happening in the next 50 years, it won't happen after with Gen3 and Gen3+ designs. You can argue than gen3+ designs have a greater surface of attack and are no better than gen3 and i could reluctantly agree, however i think a core catcher is a must have on new designs. We never know what can happen, what if we suddenly lost all knowledge on how to operate a fission plant?
You probably don't know that, but the radioactive cloud from chernobyl contaminated large areas of central europe.
To the point, that I still cannot pick and eat mushrooms out of the forest as much as I like and that every wild boar meat has to be checked for radioactivity and lots of it has to be thrown away. And that a generation had to avoid open playground for some time.
That is a huge impact from just one accident 34 years ago. Which happened far away from us. And also one of the reasons, why nuclear power is not liked very much in germany. Nobody wants a radioactive cloud on a bigger scale.
So I am not for turning all nuclear power plants off now, but as soon as they can be replaced by regenerative energy.
And every individual at each level within the system rationalizes that they are doing the right thing (because in many ways, they are doing things that can be justified as genuinely useful, within a limited perspective - which coincidentally, is the one that most people see), or doesn't think about such things because they have enough shit to worry about in their lives right now.
This is exactly the reason communist systems have to destroy religion and replace it with the state. Because if people realise they're not being watched over by some all powerful benevolent entity, and that it is just a bunch of other (self-interested) people, they lose "the faith" pretty quickly.
This compares very poorly with a surveillance state, where there is no particular theory that a surveillance state ever does anything good. The nuclear industry base-case positive is 2.5 Petawatts of power a year enabling hundreds of thousands to millions of people to live first world lives. The nuclear industry downside is evacuating Fukushima once every 20 years, no fatalities.
The best-case positive for a surveillance state is people lose any expectation of privacy but a few hundred criminals a year get caught who wouldn't otherwise. The downside is enabling groups like the Chinese to genocide Uighers and effectively suppress resistance, or supressing political resistance in Soviet Russia, or hunting down Jews in Nazi Germany, or all the examples that weren't history-defining catastrophes in various dictatorships. Who knows what sort of damage it will cause in the Five Eyes countries next time a moral hysteria sweeps through the public, but I'd rather not find out.
The issue here isn't the form of the argument, it is the magnitude of the positives and negatives.
"Who knows what sort of damage it will cause in the Five Eyes countries next time a moral hysteria sweeps through the public..."
That moral hysteria is NOW and every day since mid-march.
Alignment. This is a thing which benefits those in power, not the general population; those in power always either think they are acting in the best interest of the people, or don’t care what the interests of the general population are. Either way, surveillance states support whatever goals the people at the top have.
> The best-case positive for a surveillance state is people lose any expectation of privacy but a few hundred criminals a year get caught who wouldn't otherwise.
If you think drugs are a serious problem (I don’t, but governments act like it is, and my brother’s in-laws (who are are Pilipino) support Duterte‘s drugs policy), consider: in the UK 2017-18 crime survey, 9% of 16 to 59-year-olds reported using a drug in the previous year[1].
If the No Drugs Party wants to end drugs forever, how tempting would perfect surveillance be for them? That’s not a mere few criminals, it’s a radical change to society that the No Drugs Party would want to actively pursue.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
That's really not the argument, but also please don't pretend that this is a fact. This might of been true in the long ago past, but solar has and is innovating and advancing way faster than nuclear. Solar is also on the order of 10x cheaper to build per kWh, 10x faster to build, safer, and doesn't leave you with radioactive materials that you need to store safely for some 50-10,000's years.
You have your orders of magnitude wrong. Solar panels (as in photovoltaic energy) is the worst "green" energy when accounting for waste and probably the one that caused the most cancer with children near zinc/cadmium mines, but fear not, in the following years they will start killing people near landfills[0][1]. More wastefull in term of minerals too, but veolia might have something to say bout this (Best company working with renewable imo). Maybe in 50 years.
You can't smelt rare earth without a lot of energy, whereas you can reduce iron and CaCO3 with hydrogen and make steel and cement almost carbon-free. And as Fe and CaCO3 are present almost everywhere, you also don't have to globablize the production.
Ow, and if you evalutate the CO2 ton to be around 100$ (i think its at least 4 time this price), solar energy is twice as expensive to build and install as nuclear per kWh(and if we start reducing iron and cement with hydrogen, the difference will only grow). Thats only installed power, not produced power, also not counting energy storage.
I really like wind though and geotermic energy though, i think thermo solar is a good idea (not as good as passive) and maybe next gen solar won't use as much rare earth. Also if you're really interested, you should check how a power grid works.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489... [1] https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
But I think the argument here is a little convoluted. In my opinion, nuclear power is still the best "bang for your buck", and that's probably not going to change considering the same rules apply in the rest of the universe. Absorbing the energy of photons that were created by a nuclear reaction is going to net far less energy than simply using the full energy from the original nuclear reaction to power a turbine, no matter which way you slice it. On a large scale, nuclear makes sense. And even though there have been a number of high-profile incidents in the past 50 years, nuclear doesn't even come close to the amount of deaths and sickness people have suffered over the past couple hundred years by working in coal mines. I'd much rather take my chances with a bit of radiation than go into one of those mines, knowing that my lungs are going to be pitch black by the time I'm 45...and if it catches fire, I'm done.
Maybe it's not about the criminals? Governments have a tendency to seek to increase control of citizens, surveillance being part of it. Saying it's about "tools for terrorists and child traffickers" is the traditional rethorical ploy no-one can argue against. You wouldn't want to protect child traffickers would you?
The breakdown of the rule of law. It’s what happened in Athens and is why pure direct democracy doesn’t work: the tyranny of the majority [1].
To be fair, when's the last time you encountered any policies enacted by a majority? All Five Eyes countries are republics, not democracies.
To your specific question, though: often! In the US, state constitutional amendments and local ordinances are often decided by popular vote. For example, voters in New Jersey are currently choosing whether to legalize marijuana.
By the way, "what happened to Athens" doesn’t mean much: it’s still a living city, although the age of city-state has long gone.
So, as Churchill would quote it: "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." see: https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government
The modern secret services are based on British Empire's model, itself an outgrowth of Elizabethan intelligence services.
The reason the "5+J eyes" -- btw, Israeli eyes don't count? -- insist on knowing everything about everyone in "the realm" is because Catholics and Protestants were having a very nasty, and very bloody, power struggle in England. The queen of england had reasons to fear her own subjects, and the "intelligence services" that supported her certainly viewed say 1/2 of the English population as potential enemies.
This is their mindset. Nothing will change this state of affairs until the current ruling set is booted, once and for all. They've had a multi-century run. Time to take a bow.
"He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
Detim to tili du kombat wit inyalowda, to gonya du sheru du owta wit kowmang. (He who continually struggles against Inners will become divisive himself.)
- Friedrich Nietzsche
At least on phones with gatekeepers like Apple, they can get them to comply on apps.
Thankfully, web is still free for now.
Trivially easy but probably in practice too much of a bother. I imagine most traffic isn't between well trained members of international terrorist or crime organisations planning major heists, but people who are friends, family members and acquaintances.
They're already using WhatsApp to talk with other friends about every day things so start planning and revealing criminal behaviour accidentally without taking the trouble to move to another platform.
I also wonder if this has much to do with this article. If you are conversing about future criminal activity on Facebook or SMS, can you argue it was not premeditated in some fashion?
And even if this makes sense... how much loss of our personal freedoms is it worth to eliminate xx% of crime? (And, is it possible that there are better ways, like perhaps looking at the causes rather than trying to curb the effects...)
We can really get the visible crime off the streets, or at least get thrown a bone every once in a while to look like we are policing despite the bulk of crime being done by our network of police state associates.. Who is going to explain how this works to Tony?
Could you explain this question to someone who doesn't have a Facebook account?
As far as I understand, US phone companies are required to provide law enforcement with the ability to tap phone calls going through their exchanges, yet it doesn't seem that is on the same level as a government mandated microphone. Does Facebook have constant access to a facebook user's ("provider's" maybe, given their business model) mic and camera?
Edit: With ~State-Company i mean stuff like Lockhead Huawei Tencent
Not that I’m arguing for these backdoors; just pointing out that “but criminals can still encrypt their messages” is mostly irrelevant.
If Al-Qaeda had genuinely wanted to harm the US financial system as their main goal, flying into the twin towers wouldn't have been terrorism as it wouldn't be about terror.
Though I'm unsure of a good term that encompasses violent action against the state...
Paradoxes of technology-industrial complex.
Nothing out there is better than face-2-face social meetings. Nothing private should have access to the internet let alone "going over secure links".
There is no endgame, strictly. Like a "war on drugs" or terrorism, crime will never raises a white flag and surrender. So, no endgame. For insight on the point, I think it's useful to compare CCP strategy 1 to CCP strategy 2: soft power.
I mean soft power broadly, rather than the strictly geopolitical play. Early on, China sought absolute goals, like the USSR and others. The literally tried to control knowledge itself. Strict bans on books or encyclopedias with a bad narrative. Overseas travel was considered dangerous, and vetting was required.
These days, instruments like the great firewall don't work that way. People can work around the great firewall, travel and access information (eg foreign papers) if they want to. A short wave radio, a foreign magazine or a vpn are no longer serious contraband. But, most of the stuff that most people access is approved. They can't keep news of something big a secret, but they never really could. What they can do is monitor, manage and influence the conversation. High influence is the goal, not strict control.
Same here. Sure, sophisticated criminals can avoid fb. But, most people do use fb. This "most people, most of the time" includes criminals, friends of criminals, etc. This is enough. Enough to be chilling. Enough to make secure systems feel sketchy. Enough to help with the the job, whether the job is investigating a string of robberies or monitoring separatist rebels.
See also: https://www.socialcooling.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363).
It's called e-Discovery, and it's a bitch.
This is the cellphone you're already carrying.
So if a plan doesn't inconvenience anyone and doesn't trigger identity politics it will probably be ignored by most people.
I would also wager that there is a non-zero chance that the baseband processor of all phones has a backdoor, which is why the US can't allow phones to predominantly use Chinese made baseband processors. The baseband has access to your microphone and camera and is mostly out of control of the application processor.
Governments think computers are too powerful and mere citizens should not be allowed to have free and unrestricted computers. Cryptography used to be a military tool but it has been democratized. Everyone has access to high quality, widely available cryptographic software. This means citizens are able to subvert the government by denying it access to information. Governments think they are always justified in everything they do and it's an affront to their power when they experience resistance.
In order to safeguard our freedom, we need to be able to manufacture hardware just as easily as we can write software. Currently, computer hardware manufacturing costs billions and there are very few companies doing it. They are natural targets for regulation and legislation.
We need to be able to make computer hardware at home.
We need a certain tolerance of petty crime if we are going to truest be free.
I think human nature or whatever you want to call it is always going to mean that some number of people don’t follow The Rules to some degree, and that achieving 100% perfect rule adherence should not necessarily be the one and only goal of society.
People generally go with the foggy model of what seem the most in accordance with values they lously acquired by observing there own neighborhood.
Surveillance societies have a lot more crime, it’s just carried out by a single set of uniformed groups.
Do it right, and no liberty or privacy is lost for honest individuals. While petty thieves will lose liberty, of course.
Then we can address each one. Otherwise I'm just shooting in the dark and playing argument bingo.
I live in a crime-ridden country. Here, we as honest citizens are building fences, walls, gated-communities, electric fencing, metal bars around our doors and windows, hiring private security, etc to combat the crime that the wider society is tacitly tolerating. People want security, and we're willing to forego things such as "privacy" in return for that. Not all of us put "privacy" on a gigantic pedestal as some others do.
If a society is willing to give up their privacy then governments can be lazier because they'll be more aware of their direct threats, therefore they need less awareness of actual societal problems, which are indirect threats.
Like why isn't the debate here revolving around the suggestion that we need to have processes, and super-secure, open and cryptographically secure audit of all government actions so that government "privacy" violations are immediately caught and addressed? Instead, we're asking government to solve some arbitrary problem called "privacy" because we think it'll prevent potential government abuse in the future?
Alternatively they can look at existing analytics packages and look at the dependency graph and take over one of those to capture the screen and read info.
If anything, this sort of announcement might just as well be a false flag tactic: look how secure Facebook is, 5-eyes is pleading for them to be less secure.
[/tinfoil hat]
First they came for Facebook; everybody liked that.
It's to catch the terrorists. You wouldn't say no to that, right?
I have nothing to hide, said the commoner.
It already has laws to protect state secrets and prosecute alleged attempted conspiracies, and laws to compel any news outlet to never report any government-aimed criticism without always meticulously counterbalancing it with the same amount of positive praise (!).
Also the recent rejection, by the prime minister, of scientific committee appointees, without willing to give any reason, is baffling.
riiiiight.
backdoors can be used by bad actors too.
Is there a technical provision that applies to people hosting mastodon instances that doesn’t apply to large social media cos and cannot be beaten with a $5 wrench?
Also, I don't think it is just the state. There is no way to know if they are in majority but I am sure many people also buy into this argument. If you argue for encryption and antonymity, I am sure someone will bring up one of the four horses of infocalypse.
Consider the Iraq war. The largest worldwide protests the world has ever seen, but the US and UK didn't give a shit. Saddam didn't have WMDs, so the US and UK governments made up "evidence". The UN vote failed, so the US strong armed the UK into joining them in a ploy to blackmail UN members for votes. The US and UK went to war anyway, even though the UK's own legal advisor had previously thought it illegal - funnily enough, he had a complete u-turn after a visit to the US. How many killed as a result? How many children maimed? And for what, to score political points and further line the pockets of the rich and powerful.
And what consequences for all of this corruption, for all of the lies to the people of the US and UK? Nothing.
Western governments, and their security apparatus, particularly in the US and UK, are utterly and completely corrupt, broken. They are so good at controlling the narrative that most of the populace doesn't even have a clue what is going on, and would give half a shit even if they did.
We are well and truely fucked.
The rapture will be here any day.
More seriously, here's some seventeenth century righteous truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859546
What, obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy? Burn the Quakers!
As this subject has been iterated over many times, will keep this comment short.
* FB deploying frictionless, unbreakable encryption at scale makes the job of law enforcement harder, and makes it easier for less sophisticated criminals to get away with conspiracies (a word which, by the way, simply refers to two or more people secretly collaborating on criminal activity).
* As math cannot be stopped, more sophisticated criminals, as well as those with general concerns about privacy from big brother can still use their own open source tools.
Long before the internet, comms via telephony were anything but secure. We’ve tested the waters post-Snowden with E2EE which likely resulted in numerous secret case studies on the effect E2EE has on an orderly society.
* Don’t bring gizmos into your home if you want a modicum of privacy at home
* FB offering a frictionless, global private network out of reach of law enforcement isn’t a constitutional right. We can still gather in a home, use strong encryption when it matters (in more extreme cases, on an offline device, with write-only outgoing media transported via sneaker net to the transmission device).
* I’d rather have hardened devices and lawful access to the deployed encryption by major service providers, rather than flawed by design consumer device architecture. Then I can employ strong encryption software on those devices and have more confidence in preventing big brother from snooping at all.
Apps should protect users and police should seek to end crime. Only when these two needs cross we get something fair. If one side gives in we all lose.
An extreme view might entail banning certain forms of math on the internet entirely, rather than simply regulating the widely deployed frictionless math.
This isn’t extreme at all.
Oh, and make sure to use steganography when appropriate.
Based on your description, the situation you described is a shame and a failure of law enforcement to keep us safe. Not an encryption issue.
Especially given we know that those with access regularly use it to spy on ex-girlfriends and other innocent civilians.
My understanding is that FB (for example) would hold the keys and turn over only when compelled via warrant. Not mass surveillance.
Also, Snowden’s propaganda has worked like a charm in sowing discord in American society. Without a doubt, even if you support his actions and cause 100%, concurrently the Russian government consider the NSA to be the crown jewel of the IC. And Snowden’s actions and ongoing politics support Russia’s long term “Active Measures” campaign against the United States.
I sympathize with law enforcement, most of them just want better tools with the genuine desire to catch as many of the bad guys as they can. The problem isn't that, it's that those tools once established and ubiquitous represent a lever of control so powerful that the temptation for the bad guys to obtain them will be so great as to be unavoidable.
If someone could guarantee to me that such tools would be used for good with practically impenetrable safe-guards against abuse, okay I could probably live with that. But no one can make that guarantee in good faith.
I’d also bet that many criminals (those beyond petty drug pushers) aren’t even sophisticated enough to understand what’s at play here, and will use FB messenger regardless of the encryption implementation. In this case, offering a means to recover encrypted comms in exceptional, warrant-backed circumstances would only be of help towards criminal investigations.
Do I want to make it harder for the law enforcement of the CCP occupation in Xinjiang to do their jobs? Hell yes. Law enforcement of the DPRK (North Korea)? Law enforcement of the Iranian regime? The law enforcement that lynched George Floyd and many other Black, Indigenous, and PoC Americans? What about the law enforcement that seizes people's cash in the airport without charging them with any crime? The Chicago law enforcement who terrorized public housing residents and profited off the drug trade, and operated a secretive detention site at Holman Yards that allegedly operated as a black site, not registering the names of inmates? The law enforcement of Bull Connor who brutalized civil rights protestors? Absolutely, I want to make their jobs harder.
Point is not to say that all law enforcement everywhere is bad--but rather, that it is quite often right and just to resist or frustrate the efforts of those who enforce a given law. Just like we have the right to bear arms and speak freely to check the power of unjust government, so too we need the right to secure communications in the digital age. It's good for the government to have to work hard to do their job--it will keep the resourced focused on real crimes that threaten our safety, not political, economic, and other crimes that have no victims.
> makes it easier for less sophisticated criminals to get away
Up until 2003 (!) it was a crime in some parts of the US to have intimacy in a same-sex relationship--and it still is today in 70+ countries, with the death penalty in 12.
In Thailand it is a crime to insult the king, and criticism of the state is criminalized de facto or de jure in countless other countries. In Iran, defense lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to 38 years and tortured for fairly and effectively defending clients when the regime violated its own constitution to punish them for political and religious crimes. Here in the US, another woman legal trailblazer, Lynne Stewart, was the subject of a surveillance campaign against her attorney-client communications for passing messages from her client, who was banned from all communication with the outside world under a SAM order, resulting in a 10-year prison sentence.
In North Korea, it is against the law for anyone to leave the country without an exit permit, which is not granted to civilians. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot leave the country without their wali's permission via a mobile app. Crossing the border without permission is a crime.
In fact, of all types of criminals, political and "morality" criminals tend to be the least sophisticated in terms of financial, technical, and social capital. The rich and powerful, whether or not they are on the right side of the law, won't be affected by this.
Someone like Epstein is more than capable of getting E2EE/secure communications, even if he doesn't understand a thing and has to pay a million dollars for someone to set it up for him. The Mexican drug cartels have their own network of cell towers (mostly atop existing towers they have illegally attached to) for their communications. Take that, lawful intercept. But everyday people whose only crime is having a prohibited opinion or identity will never be able to do that.