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It's crazy that we allow this at all. The government can't observe clandestine conversations that occur in person, does that mean they can mandate us to carry a government recording device? That people don't equally balk at requests to encumber encryption is baffling.

I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.

Yeah... the crux is should electronic conversations be afforded the same rights, and by extension are they assumed rights for all communication? Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.

By analogy, what if I have multiple pairs of tin cans, where each pair of tin cans is connected by a string, and sell those pairs of cans to people so that they can have private conversations at a distance from one another.

If I provide privately owned physical infrastructure for protecting those strings and facilitating the routing of the strings am I obligated to make that available to the government for eavesdropping?

Wellll…by default, they're available. High-speed cameras (and possibly lasers/lidar?) can read the string. Maybe shroud it?

> Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.

It shouldn't be murky at all. For all of the history of humanity, privacy has been the default state. I could talk to people face to face (what used to be the only way) and it was by default private. I could keep written notes and records and they were by default private.

There were special-case mechanisms to violate that privacy (e.g. search warrants, targeted spying) but by their nature they target specific people and, at least most of the time, go through a process with some checks and balances. I don't have any objection to this type of spying. If someone is suspected of a serious crime, it's reasonable for society to have a way to approve planting some surveillance bugs on them and them only.

It's only now that nearly all communication is over third party systems that government suddenly feel it's ok to spy on everyone and all the time. It's clearly not ok, nothing murky about that.

> special-case mechanisms to violate that privacy (e.g. search warrants, targeted spying)… go through a process with some checks and balances. I don't have any objection to this type of spying

I think this is why it’s such a hot issue though. E2E Encryption is a “get out of all surveillance free card.” Even a mildly trained criminal or terrorist can easily guarantee that his communications will never be intercepted. This has never existed before.

I share with people in the pro-Encryption camp the acknowledgments that you can’t un-invent encryption, so you’ll only be catching the most dim-witted criminals by nerfing the mainstream messengers. Anybody can use the ‘OpenSSL” cli to make unbreakable encryption no matter what laws say.

But I also acknowledge how frustrating it is that a truly bad person can simply bypass all the “just” exceptions to privacy, like a search warrant, if they’re even a little savvy.

TL;DR nerfing iMessage (etc) ain’t it, but I can see how non-evil people in law enforcement wish something could be done about the root problem, which is somewhat new.

These checks and balances are an illusion. They do not work. Courts are overwhelmed with work and suddenly will sign anything. Minimal impact and minimal risk aside for the victim.

An experienced and higher public official will get permission for everything. There is neither a check, nor any balance at all. This is true for every country that pretends surveillance would happen with care.

> get out of all surveillance free card.

Because it is the only encryption that works.

> E2E Encryption is a “get out of all surveillance free card.”

That's the misdirection the pro-surveillance agencies use but it's not true at all.

People still ultimately exist in meatspace (as it used to be called). If you get a warrant based on legitimate suspicion to follow someone, you can assign detectives to follow them, plant bugs in their home, wire up collaborators and all the endless techniques that were used before the internet was around. People are still people and they walk around in the real world, they can be spied upon.

Sure, it's not as easy as sitting back in the DA office and spying on everyone all day long with zero effort, but it should not be. When the power is given to remove fundamental rights to privacy from someone, it needs to be based on a legitimate process and it must take effort. If it is zero-effort it will be relentlessly abused.

> all the endless techniques that were used before the internet was around

Ok that’s another fallacy though. Before, authorities could get a warrant to wiretap phones and to check the outsides of your envelopes (a “mail cover.”) Only an idiot criminal would ever make a phone call or mail a letter today for anything even remotely related to crime because e2e encrypted calls and chat apps are a thing now, removing lots of risk (nobody can do anything short of getting in the room with one party and peeking over his shoulder, which is not just hard for “lazy” cops, it would be hard for elite international spies). That’s a whole new thing, and a big deal if your job is say, stopping and apprehending human trafficking rings or organized crime.

Again though I’m not saying “and that’s why we should have a back door for cops.” I’m not and we shouldn’t. Just that people who say things have changed in a very impactful way are not being hyperbolic or dishonest.

> Before, authorities could get a warrant to wiretap phones

So basically, before the invention of phones, no criminal was ever caught?

Clearly that's not true. It is entirely possible to follow and spy on people in person and that's how it was always done before the 20th century.

Just because new technologies exist does not justify using them to inifinitely augment surveillance powers of the state.

> a big deal if your job is say, stopping and apprehending human trafficking rings or organized crime

You don't succeed at human trafficking or organized crime if you never leave the house and spend all your day just chatting on signal. You have to actually go out into the real world and do the crimes. As soon as you step out of the house you can be followed and monitored and caught in the act.

it isn't murky, it's obvious that it should require a warrant for the government to tap into any conversation that people have a reasonable desire to keep private. The police should be there to serve us and not the other way around.

> Where to draw the line?

That line is called the Third Party Doctrine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant"

... but if you really want true privacy:

"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself" -- George Orwell, 1984

I don't believe encryption should have intentional backdoors, but more because of the technical impossibility of doing this without introducing security risk. Your analogy doesn't really work, because what governments are arguing they should be able to do is break encryption and snoop only when given a warrant. They can snoop on in-person conversations when they get a warrant and the general public doesn't oppose that, even though they would not want to carry 24/7 recording devices that snooped on every conversation even in the absence of probable cause to be suspected of a criminal conspiracy.

Couldn't they still use their original strategies for spying if they had a warrant? Just get the phone and install a secret microphone inside, or inside a house or a car. This can be done with cameras, too, though the text on a phone might be hard to read.

> Assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well?

Playing devil's advocate: in most US states, the FBI can in fact plant someone with a wire to record a private conversation. They don't have the resources to record all in-person conversations, but maybe they would if they could.

AI makes it a lot more feasible.

Isn’t a warrant required in advance to place the recording device? Many unencrypted messages will be recorded automatically and be retrievable indefinitely.

let's only let those people that absolutely must leave their homes, everyone else should stay inside under government microphone and camera. Imagine how much safe society would be! The government could save so many people like that and keep crime down!

They feel they have nothing to hide. I find the “nothing to hide” argument baffling, as when they say this, I immediately ask them to tell me about their last sexual encounter, in graphic detail. After all, they’ve nothing to hide.

For some reason, they never do, and they usually get rather upset with me.

Or simply ask for their bank account info and passwords. Surely there's nothing to hide with that!

Should it be legal to have a private conversation along a windy beach?

Government: “Allowing it might be as dangerous as a gun!”

It was predicted that encryption would be attacked with a veneer of being against child pornography or terrorism.

Problem is most people aren't politically involved and just don't think about any implications of a state being able to fish your messages. And for tech affine users this will likely not be true, but certainly for the masses.

I don't think it's that crazy if you trust the government to use these capabilities in the intended ways, that is to catch serious crimes. The US is a very specific country, because here people have very low trust in government and public institutions, which is why public good endeavors are less developed here, while corporations do whatever they want, as long as it seems legal. Many people would argue that's a bad thing for public good...

> while corporations do whatever they want, as long as it seems legal

They don't even care how it seems. They'll do anything illegal if they will make more money by doing it and being caught than they'd make not doing it at all. Lucky for them they routinely get tiny slaps on the wrist for things that would get any other "person" executed or put away for life. Once you have enough money, crime usually pays pretty well.

> a government recording device

Many people believe this is happening with your phone. It's a recording device after all, and usually carried by most people. If not you then someone nearby likely has one. All these conversations can be transcripted automatically and the vast amounts of text can be analyzed by AI for whatever purpose they want. The infrastructure is already available.

>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new.

The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.

Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with fundamental rights!

Had those rights been respected all along instead of exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of how easy it was, it wouldn’t be such a shock to lose the ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services despite government threats. It would seem like the Human Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don’t know if it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.

That's not true, people have stepped aside for 10s of thousands of years to have private conversations they didn't want other people to hear. why does the medium matter, whether is pressure waves from mouth to ears or electron/light communications. Why does anyone have a right to listen in?

> Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private

In principle they were not private but in practice they were because in most places the police had to realize that there was a conversation of interest, get a warrant, and use scarce resources.

Now the authorities are able to use machines to monitor traffic patterns for almost all communication the cost of interception is much lower.

The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way.

Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...

Oppenheimer was an obvious target, you and I are much less likely to be listened to when resources are scarce. So in Oppenheimer's time my communications would most likely have been very secure.

But now resources are less scarce and the task is easier so blanket surveillance and recording is more nearly practical.

To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years. This basic argument for encryption is often raised in combination with countries which we already consider non-free. But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this message during COVID times. I would never have expected society deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect anything frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to encrypt communication even stronger for me.

Yes, this is something a lot of people don't think about:

What is acceptable (even legal) today may not be tomorrow, or in X years (10, 15, or more)..

If we allow all our private conversations and messages to be permanently archived (and you know they will be, disk space is effectively infinite), who is to say that wouldn't be used against us in the future when laws, or even social standards, have drastically changed?

And we literally have examples, right now, of Facebook handing over private messages between people talking about abortion and then those were used to convict someone.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion

It's the first like 4 links right now

Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data, which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do, who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist just because they've never heard of a park run.

You can demonstrate this to folks with a very recent change in government: Abortion and LGBT rights.

How much do you want to bet states like Texas or Florida will use government surveillance to prosecute folks seeking medical care?

I give it a month before we hear about someone being charged with some form of conspiracy to leave the state before their poor kids are taken. "Exhibit A will show the defendants intent to move their children across state lines..."

If you think that's bad, just wait until Abbott/DeSantis-like politicians take over the White House and Congress.

Yep, this just gives them the tools when they go full fascist. For example the USA had a recent coup attempt, and that same person attempting the coup will be running again for president and there is a non-zero chance that he will win. He has openly stated that he wanted to "reform" the government and install only loyalists, that is the type of regime you don't want to have instant access to all communications.

You assume your current government to be benevolent. We see a lot of political prosecution from these benevolent governments even today.

> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.

The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling your location - and there is no restriction on law enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly rosy in the US either.

This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)?

I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?

Is TFA not a good enough example?

It's more complicated than that.

First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov. also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities instead of getting a clean entry point)

Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default. There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99% of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK ones.

Have a Constitution that limits government power.

That said, it has become apparent to me that we need to impose further limitations because apparently the whitelist/blacklist approach we have thus far is insufficient and the Anti-Federalists were much more correct in the long run.

That only works if you have a government willing to limit government power. Otherwise the letter of the constitution will be preserved while everyone in power do basically whatever they want.

That’s true of every conceivable government. Political office is ultimately a position of power and so those who have it seek to maintain and expand it, but I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles, but the powers given to Congress could use a textual update, and a right to privacy more clearly spelled out to account for technological and international diplomacy changes that have occurred since 1789.

> I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles

This is also an opinion commonly shared among people living in a country. Otherwise you either have a dictatorial state preventing people from leaving/reacting (keeping them dirt poor being an option for that), or the people rioting in the streets for months until something breaks.

Companies can't arrest me and throw me in jail.

Has Snowden been forgotten so quickly?

An insidious part of this discussion is this idea that these laws do not interfere with encryption. IMHO, it's a dishonest stance to take but when debated, the first thing defenders of this legislation say is that this "does nothing to break encryption" or "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive — we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers."

In this plan messages are sent to a third party for analysis. Sure the messages sent to the third party are encrypted but your privacy is entirely violated.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/

> [...] any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim

Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major social media players?

Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and getting outlawed in many places?

They could and they did, the problem is they’re now attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.

It's not just about encryption and privacy. That's missing the forest for the trees.

For a democracy to function, people need to be able to have free and candid discussions about any topic without the fear of being ostracised, persecuted or whatever. Only that way can ideas be exchanged and people get a hunch of what others think about stuff of relevance. Only that way can people partake in sensible democratic decision-making. Framed opinions pushed onto you by one-way media are no substitute. That's dictatorship in disguise.

"Classic" ways of public communication, like town halls, pubs, marketplaces or whatnot, cannot fill that role any longer. But online, places like Twitter, Reddit and some chat services that closed the gap now get killed off, too. This dystopia cannot be let come to pass.

I used PGP Phone with my dad, which means it was pre-Dec 1999. The crypto battle is kind of orthogonal to general privacy concerns. Stuff like being allowed to sell location data from your phone is not related to building back-doors into encryption. The argument against crypto backdoors is pretty simple: bad guys can get good crypto, and backdoors invariably end up providing access to bad actors, via hacking or secret leaking or corruption.

In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable communication even more. I’d like to believe we’re reverting back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation but now over long distant.

BlackBerry's BBM was E2E encrypted with no backdoors much like Signal is today.

Tho as I understand it, Signal's security is more robust.

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority

I'd like you to back up that claim because from what I had seen about surveillance and terrorism most people supported it(even the patriot act had popular support in the polls). Only people smart enough to know about encryption oppose this. Most people who don't understand tech pretty much assume the government is already looking at messages. Long before snowden, illegal phone tapping was a public secret people were fine with so long as the government doesn't abuse that access. Even before computers, they had secret rooms where they opened to read people's letters without a warrant. Not one major political candidate that I can recall since 9/11 has mentioned expiring the patriot act or investingating the NSA and recommending criminal charges in their campaign, nor does it get brought up in their town halls.

Anti encryption? Not sure most people support that specifically.

But generally speaking, I dont think you’ve emphasized it strongly enough. People arent just supportive of trading privacy and freedom for the promise of safety. They are literally begging for it.

I think you parsed the comment you're replying to backwards. Like you, the previous commenter suggested that opposition to surveillance is uncommon.