UK launches “No Place To Hide” propaganda campaign to ban E2EE
noplacetohide.org.uk
noplacetohide.org.uk
Side note: I’m not actually against E2E encryption. Strong proponent really. I just think these arguments tend not to resonate with a very broad audience outside of the security/privacy/technolibertarian communities
We're in the middle of a whole bunch of cases of policemen being sacked or charged here for asking our underage girls on dates, keeping and sharing nudes from crime victims phones etc.
And remember: if someone is lying about why they're doing something that's further evidence it's not something you want. If they had a good reason, they'd be up front about it...
Fwiw seems rather clear to me that we live in an age where information is groomed for us, for the same reasons.
The thing is, I don’t think the people who work at those agencies would want this either, except for maybe law enforcement. It’s the bureaucrats who think it’s a good idea, everyone else knows it’s a shite one. It’s an utter farce.
Someone in such an agency believes they act for the greater good. To watch, aides in protecting society from bomber, insurrection, threat.
They see themselves as noble, and likely most are.
The problem here is misuse, and the scope of information. While the majority behave acceptably, agency culture, and political leanings become a trap.
And so the noble use, becomes corrupted. And because the person believes themselves to be good, who they work for is surely good, and so the work done must be good.
Just look at all the devs working at facebook Do they see themselves as evil? Causing civil wars, breakdown of societal cohesion for profit, destruction for stock price?
No.
They see themselves as non-evil. They see what they do as non-evil, because of <reasons>.
You live in bubble. Most citizens include all age groups, backgrounds, etc.
Most people literally have no idea what encryption is, what it means, does, how it is used.
Along comes a trustful thing, a news site or tv channel. It explains that encryption is being used to harm little kids, or to allow thieves to do evil.
Governments spout this blather, because it works on the majority.
I'm sure the police would also have a much easier time solving crimes if they had a CCTV in every living room. They might even pinky swear that that they'd only look at it with a court order. And promise to keep the recording extra, super safe so no bad guys can ever look at it. Just think of how much child abuse takes place inside houses - the very notion of houses that the police can't look into is an abomination that must be banned immediately!
The pushback if they proposed something like that would be enormous. But the only reason they think they can get away with the same thing, just regarding chat systems, is that they want to take advantage of the fact that most people are tech-illiterate enough not to understand how encryption works, while they do roughly understand how CCTV works.
Some things are just too dangerous to exist. A backdoor into every communication channel on the planet is one of those things.
You may as well support banning E2EE because nobody needs it.
That would be enough.
There would be people made less safe by such a restrictive regime! Of course a much larger number would be safer. Tradeoffs are exactly what they sound like.
If actually proposing legislation such distinctions would be important. For an internet discussion what you meant is clear enough.
We should uphold the Constution as it is now and remove every single gun law.
Regardless this is why citizens need modern military equipment.
1. there are enough armed forces personnel to police the third or fourth largest country by land mass in the world (the United States)
2. that every single armed forces personnel would unquestioningly obey what constitutes illegal orders (military deployment on American soil)
3. that the entire population would simply sit down and let themselves be overrun by the military.
I think you should check your assumptions.
If you count the standing paramilitary forces (“police") that work for the government and do this job already, plus all the other armed forces, that's not that much of a stretch.
> that every single armed forces personnel would unquestioningly obey what constitutes illegal orders (military deployment on American soil)
Military deployment on US soil is not illegal. (That would make defensive war, as well as suppression of armed rebellion, impossible.)
Military deployment to enforce domestic order isn't illegal, either, though for federal regular military troops there are procedural requirements for it under the Insurrection Act (mostly, a completely discretionary Presidential determination of one of several specific kinds of need—some of which involve a request from a state governor and some of which do not—and particular notifications to the civilian population and any potential insurgents before employment of the military for certain uses.) State forces not called in to federal service may have their own procedural rules for law enforcement deployments, but most state forces can also be activated federally under federal rules.
And if elements of the military are involved on both sides, it's not exactly citizen resistance anymore.
It's easy to forget but not everyone lives in a bubble full of privacy-conscious techfolk. There are people whose children were groomed online and convinced to submit themselves to sexual abuse. There are people who were those children. There are the law enforcement officers and NGOs dedicated to fighting this stuff. These people are all real. They all exist.
Other people are parents. They see the stories, they worry that it'll happen to their own children. Whether you like it or not, this justification garners sympathy from a not-insignificant number of people.
Often, these people don't understand E2E encryption or why they should give a hoot about it. They see the very real, tangible problem of child abuse on one side and some kind of vague objection from technical people on the other.
If you want to move past venting and have a real chance of inducing change, you need to acknowledge that other people with very different worldviews exist and you need to think about how to engage with them, see things from their point of view and convince them that E2E encryption should be protected.
I would add that some may see E2EE as important, but protection of vulnerable as *more* important. Life just isn't so black & white.
As the paraphrased saying goes:
“If you outlaw Encryption only outlaws will have Encryption.”
It doesn’t solve a thing, other than make politicians look like they are doing something.
Petty thieves, small time drug dealers and other small time criminals may end up without encryption. But it doesn’t solve organised crime, there are the problem and they are intelligent enough to use an encrypted app, even if it “illegal”.
Amusingly our politicians all seem to run our government and parliament via WhatsApp and that’s obviously E2EE.
I don’t expect to, this isn’t about wining over or educating the public at large. You would never be able to on a technical issue like this, especially when horrific illegal activity is involved.
The issue is knowledgable and informed politicians and agency spinning this rubbish trying to convince the public they can win this, when they know they can’t. They are lying.
You overestimate outlaws. 99% of them will just use major platforms and not bother with encryption. There is a lot of low hanging fruit.
The issue is the worst 1% and they will continue to use encryption anyway.
I wish they did. As more data aggregators become available to LE I hope it can make more people responsible for their actions. Technology will allow LE to scale to actually handle enforcing the law over large regions using fewer actual humans.
There is however, a rather sinister subculture within British influence of smug down-talking, classist, oh-so-superior "we know best" messaging. The BBC's TV licence ads were comical, with overt menacing of the poor and old. The late 1980's AIDS/HIV campaigns felt disgracefully out of touch.
Although they look like internal projects coming through outfits like NHS, 77 Bgd. or the H.O. it's really spun out to contractors and the messaging quickly gets out of control. In this case I believe its Saatchi again.
Unfortunately they've really rather fucked this one. I'd call it malinfluence and stright up propaganda in the bad old sense. Indeed, it's a disgraceful example of what happens you you mix technology with people who are intellectually out of their depth.
Knowing a abit about how this stuff works though, I'd say it really isn't necessarily the position of the government. It's a cheap "think of the children" shot against Big Tech (so of course I applaud that) and also a smokescreen for all the other general mischief and twattery going on these days.
It's terrifying that people of such incompetence and ignorance can get their hands on powerful channels - precisely what we're trying to curb when Facebook do it.
It feels absolutely horrible to be in a position where I have to be skeptical of any proposed way to stop children being abused, because someone is likely trying to pull the wool over my eyes about an authoritarian power grab they are trying to do, but that's a rational response to the world we live in
A good take on government competence on this sort of stuff was done by Brass Eye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRw1ERj2Gc
> Video unavailable
> This video contains content from LDS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
LDS "suggests" I watch "Michael McIntyre On Christmas | Michael McIntyre" instead.
"Last month, the notorious paedophile Sidney Cook was blasted into space, to spend the rest of his life aboard a one-man prison vessel, posing no further threat to children on Earth.
But it was revealed that an eight-year old boy was placed on board, by mistake, and is now trapped alone in space with the monster. A spokesman said:
'This is the one thing we didn't want to happen' "
Evoking a topic like that, creating fear and outrage in an attempt to sway public opinion - by encouraging an emotional response rather than a rational one - is to be considered shameless manipulation, regardless of what agenda it's being used for.
Would any campaign that takes child abuse truly serious rely on tactless and tasteless marketing campaigns like that? Seems a bit unlikely. People who take child abuse seriously and understand that it's a very complex and multi-faceted topic, tend to really dislike seeing it misused for scare-mongering like that.
Did any of the previous marketing-campaigns that did rely on misusing the topic in manipulative ways result in an actual reduction of child abuse cases? Not that I am aware of?
Have any of those previous alleged anti-child-abuse surveillance measures been rolled back, after they have shown to be completely ineffective at actually combating child abuse? Well, some have actually been abolished again on the grounds of being unconstitutional. But other than that, being not effective has mostly only resulted in loud demand for even more, equally inefficient, surveillance methods.
I really think that people should be called out over misusing the topic of child abuse as a populist scare mongering tactic to sway public opinion. That sort of thing needs to stop - regardless of what anyone thinks of the measures it's being employed for.
When I started secondary school about 10 years ago now it was very clearly impressed upon me how to behave online and how to report bad stuff, but the guy who did that was a very fastidious teacher so I bet not everyone else in the UK does.
That also happened before the phone had completely taken over as the means of consuming the internet, which has made the internet - especially for young people - into a more walled, more anxious, and more manic place in my opinion.
They can use this to control the population, massaging and prodding the herd to move in a certain direction.
If this becomes reality then democracy is dead and I will plead for an authoritarian regime with me at the head.
I've said it in previous threads on the topic but something like this has probably come up once or twice a year for the past 20 years. Encryption, porn, age restrictions on the internet...
We shouldn't become dismissive of it that way but I'm sure this will conveniently fall off the radar when it's served its purpose. But it should be noted that our PM Boris Johnson referrs to something like this as a dead cat: throw a dead cat on the table and everyone's looking at the dead cat, not the other thing that's going on.
See BoJo's Christmas Parties and weekly "work meetings" for details.
Pedofiles and abusers will just install E2EE apps manually or use one of the zillion systems to send E2EE messages.
As an example, banning movie piracy had zero effect in stopping emule, torrents and illegal streaming.
Government is pushing for a complete segregation online between children and adults, where you need to have a government issued ID to post online and where you will be prevented from contacting children below the age of 16.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/sexual-violence-a...
So I find it hard to believe that this is about protecting children.
Given the current precarious position of PM Johnson though, I do not see this actually doing anything just yet other than being a flagrant distraction/appeasement/corruption/all of he above.
Make it in law that if a convicted offender is found to have used a messaging platform to send/receive material, then heavily fine the company that was used in the messaging - but only if they had failed to report the offence. To operate in the UK the company has to pay these fines.
This puts the ball in the company's court - like it should be.
Now the messaging-platform could claim that since it's E2EE they have no visibility on what's being sent/received, but I believe technical solutions exist for this - E.g. pictures and videos go through a post-processing client-side to remove identifiable data (faces in images, text in images, that sort of thing). The original unmodified image is sent E2EE, and the post-processed one is sent to the company and then it's up to them to identify offending images.
But the owner of the domain can decide at which point they terminate.
Could be that your connection is just encrypted until a proxy that's inbetween.
What people are talking about there is that when I send you a message, it leaves my device encrypted, and can only be decrypted by you, on your device. Whatever servers it goes through, in order to get to you, cannot decrypt it at all. Law enforcement, third-party companies, doesn't matter, they can't see it, only you and I can.
At least in the states they faced legal penalties for such a claim (albeit a slap on the wrist).
My understanding is, to be E2E encrypted, the keys must only be known by you and the actual other user you're communicating with. With https, this is not the case: you're only communicating with the server, which then relays the messages. However, the server can see everything.
You can use the term in different contexts, depending on what you consider the "ends": If you think of your machine as one end and the server as the other, it is technically E2E encrypted.
But in the more meaningful sense where your device is one end and your communication partner's device is the other end, it is not.
Whenever a politician invokes "think of the children", ask them about their funding of Child Protection Services.
Any political action that's said to be under the umbrella of "think of the children" that doesn't provide massive amounts of additional funding into Child Protection Services (boots on the ground, education programs, etc), is hiding something, and actively working against helping children because it's distracting from the actual efforts that Child Protection Services are providing as well as spending money on entirely "something else".
There's a saying 'those who can do, and those who can't teach'. I'd add "and those that can't teach go into politics".
I'm going to make a wild guess and say that the website has been contracted out to some senior politicians husband's (our corruption is now done by women and minorities, too, progress!) company or something to that effect.
Edit: Downvoters, it's pretty well documented at this point that the group of tories in power like giving gov. money to friends and family
https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/slides/my-little-crony/
Just recently they wrote of billions of pounds in COVID procurements that in large part went to very strange new companies and delivered nothing.
This (pull out a perennial policy interest and suddenly promote it weirdly eagerly, to distract from the government's scandals) is at this point such a trope of British politics that people make sitcoms about it (half the storylines in the Thick of It were basically this).
I don't know enough about E2EE to know whether a backdoor or some other circumvention is possible.
...and the 2003 incident involving Katherine Gun showed that those agencies don't really give an $expletive about anyone's privacy, and that many governments don't give an $expletive about telling the truth.
Where do you draw the geographical line? Would people in the UK no longer be allowed to communicated with someone in the US if that other person would only use E2EE?
Yes, I understand that it's extremely tempting to be able to peak into every persons communications but that has become feasible only the last decade or so. Just do your job the way it has aways been done.
Haven't we seen how endless are the ambitions of politicians even in the most democratic countries? How one can expect that it's going to be their people who will be sneaking into the people's communications? If you are a tory, consider what happens if Corbyn takes over. If you are a democrat, consider what happens if Trump takes over.
Don't even let me start over the commercial and industrial espionage in concert with the people in the govt.
The moment E2EE is compromised, the computer age dies. This is not like tapping a phone line, the human civilisation is living in a virtual reality where communities come together, organize and express themselves at global scale. We don't need 3D avatars in a metaverse BS, we are already there and compromising E2EE instantly turns our world into a dystopia.
If their communication has mostly gone modern, digital, and encrypted, traditional policework gets a lot harder.
That said, I'm not sure if going after encryption is the right way. But could be it is. I don't know. What if we the technology we've developed has us facing a choice between an Orvellian nightmare and Mad Max?
I don't see why not having access to complete communications should warrant Mad Max. You don't need to have access to everyones data to notice that kids are disappearing or firearms are being traded or something like that.
We also mustn't forget that an integral part of old fashioned policework is just grabbing some random homeless person found in the area and beating them with a nightstick until they admit to the crime.
I don't know who they are, but I'd think researching who those organisations are and what their political angle is could shed a little more light on whether this is genuinely motivated by online safety or just a scare tactic for more surveillance.
How the page is worded, it sounds as if they'd also be OK with "only" mandatory client-side scanning a la Apple. (Not that this would be much less dystopic, but it would permit E2EE)