Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

aucisson_masque

The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to intercept their communications.

makes sense to the average non tech people.

The sad truth however is that it wouldn't even solve the issue, criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications: there are open source software that can't be tampered with, software that doesn't use a single server where backdoor can be put, or they could even simply encrypt their text message.

i could do that from my mac terminal, encryption is basically mathematics. Bruno Retailleau isn't somehow going to put a backdoor in every device that could be used to encrypt. People even used to encrypt communications before computer.

The only looser of that law is the normie, you and me, who use whatsapp or signal to chat and couldn't ever push their relative to use things like pgp encrypted email.

>The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to intercept their communications.

Terrorist attacks in Paris were coordinated using SMS and play station network.

Wouldn't law enforcement just use Pegasus style zero-days to spy on the their targets? So why all the hubbub about making backdoors that become vulnerabilities for nefarious users too?

Like why bother convicting Signal to create a backdoor for you, when you can put your nations geniuses to find some RCE bugs in Qualcomm or Apple modems or SoCs, and spy on them that way? This way nobody's the wiser.

Governments around the world do not want to stop at the identifiable target. They'd like to imitate the US and China, obtaining special deals with service providers that allow them to collect summary statistics and identify individuals computationally from the total of all communication.

Here are a few uses for total surveillance:

1. Public opinion can be monitored on a much more objective level than polling provides.

2. Discontent can be identified long before potential protestors are aware of others who share their views.

3. People whose views are significantly outside the usual range can be picked out and targeted in advance of any crime, even when no crime would occur.

4. Serious attempts at labor or protest organization can be resolved into definite schedules with more basis for comparison to other events than the participants themselves have access to.

5. There would be no more electoral surprises.

From this list, you may notice that states that are presently democratic have even more of a use for this capability than the others.

I feel like they would reserve this type of hack to international criminal organizations (plus terrorists and bad countries) but not for smaller fish.

The smaller fish, as you say, could just talk in person like they used to.

There are still methods that are unbroken.

Onetime pad: messages are encrypted using an key that has the same length as the message

An enigmalike machine: the enigma has some problems, but that can easily be fixed. If someone uses more complicated keys than AAA they should be safe from reading the messages.

I think the interior minister pushes for the easier solution. What you talk about is most likely illegal currently (and law enforcement usually cannot do illegal stuff unless explicitly permitted by law and a supervised by a judge) and requires highly qualified staff. Hooking an AI to a backdoor is just easier and cheaper.

I suspect Five Eyes already has backdoors into Apple and Google and can remotely push compromised updates to specific targeted devices. How do you know the version of Signal you get from the App Store is the same as everyone else? Australia can compel engineers to implement backdoors, they can't refuse or even talk about it due to gag orders. They can then share that info with Five Eyes to bypass their own laws like they did with ANOM. Australia ran the operation specifically to bypass stronger privacy laws in the other countries. The Snowden leaks with PRISM, showing governments getting data straight from Apple and Google servers. Australia's latest encryption bill lets them force companies to give access to encrypted comms. Seems pretty plausible to me.

the conversations seem to stay focus on e2ee good or bad; it’s important to question - is this the correct focus? Drugs should not be illegal in the first place; decriminalising them is known to have good results, (look at Portugal) it weakens organised crime and black markets, less costs for the justice system, less health issues and less need for public health money to be spent on dealing with resulting issues, the list goes on. E2ee is essential for a society to protect itself against internal threats like tyrants.

> Drugs should not be illegal in the first place; decriminalising them is known to have good results, (look at Portugal)

I have no knowledge on the impact of that policy. On the other hand bruno Retailleau said at National Assembly that this kind of policy doesn’t work. What happens is that there are expensive legal drug and cheaper illegal drug that organized criminals provide.

Hence there are more drug user but barely less income for drug cartel.

He gave for instance the tobacco example. It’s legal in France yet it’s so expensive that black market has never flourished so much.

Without knowing much about that subject, I must admit it makes sense.

Tobacco is expensive because the French government is using the taxes on it to make up the overall shortfall of tax revenue. See the budget deficit from last year.

Obviously the French government is saying that this is for health reasons but that reason has gone out of the window when a pack of smokes is 13 euros.

So the black market flourishes.

You can't keep increasing the price of a good without making sure that it can't be imported from elsewhere and since France is part of Europe and it no longer has any border checks, it very easy to smuggle cigarettes from Portugal or Spain.

This tactic of increasing the price of cigarettes or alcohol works in a place like Australia where it's orders of magnitude harder to smuggle things since stuff has to come either through airports or boats which are both watched carefully by the state.

Good point. Lots of reasons to love France. Also some good amount of things they get very wrong. Inheritance tax hitting the low class a lot these days, especially as house pricing is up through the roof.

While I generally agree with your position, this is the same unconvincing argument I've read for a long time.

Even if there is a specific criminal gang that is sophisticated enough to use a properly encoded open source application, the majority aren't, and there is enough of a overhead and annoyance factor that will allow the majority not to use them.

If any open source application gets enough people using it, there will be plenty of opportunity for the maintainers to be bullied into submission to the state. Then the fragmentation will begin ("You need to use this branch, that branch is compromised").

If 10-20% of your full time job as a criminal is keeping your communication encrypted, that's probably a win for the government.

Then the criminals will just talk in person about all the information they downloaded about us. ;-)

Your assertion that criminals are idiots or lazy might hold true in the case of the high school weed dealer but i'd argue strongly against that case for the international drug trade or traffickers. The more sophisticated the crime, usually the more money, the more incentive to keep it hidden. These laws aren't written about weed dealers, they're written about traffickers. The justifications are always the high level traffickers and related peoples, the people most likely to be locked down anyways.

And besides all that, let's invoke the slope, would you install a camera in your home? Even if you would, are you willing to force that upon every other person, regardless of their feelings or wishes?

Sure, let's think of the children. Can we also think of the potential future regime jailing/torturing all their political opponents? Why must we always be asked to think of only one side of the harms?

Even it would occupy them 20% of their time, the issue with such a backdoor is what it can do to non-criminals (ex: loose the backdoor to an enemy nation state that would allow spying on all citizens, or allowing some party to eliminate opposition).

I always find this "war on drugs" strange, considering they are so many buyers to make it worth. Annoy/treat/educate/understand the buyers, if enough people want something you will not make it go away by reducing supply. Or make it legal and make money from it as a state...

I would argue that organized crime benefits from economies of scale - and that's what they're saying this might somehow alleviate. It's really not that hard to find one OSS e2ee app that is only updated for severe security issues when you have millions flowing through.

You don't know how organized crime families are nowadays in France. French gangs are led by 3 "families". Or rather, 3 groups of families who now are friendly with each other and divided their territory nicely and stopped fighting each other ~7 years ago. You might catch some minor gang member trice removed from the Hornec (And i've heard the Hornec are not the leading family, too exposed, so i would guess getting to the true boss is even harder), but you won't catch any leader like this.

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