Civics is boring, so, let's encrypt something (2024)
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If I send you a letter and you promptly burn it, that does not entitle the police to imprison either of us, no matter what sorts of subpoenas they obtain after the fact. But if I send you an encrypted message, we both throw away the key, and the police later subpoena our communications, this proposed law would permit one or both of us to be jailed for the ENTIRE term of whatever crime we are ACCUSED of:
> Then, fourth and finally (drum roll, please!), they'll need to allow courts to jail the accused until: (a) the communication has been decrypted by someone; (b) the maximum penalty for the charged crime has been exceeded
Unless this is a joke that's gone over my head, this is an open embrace of totalitarian surveillance. Either way, it's farcical. Fortunately it would not survive basic constitutional challenges in any liberal democracy.
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Here's another silly detail. (Ugh, this article is bad on so many levels.)
> Then the legislators can get to work. First, they'll need to make it a crime to force or trick anyone into using stronger encryption than they consent to, no matter how that might be done. (Note that IT liberalists who claim encryption is a human right never realize this should also include the right not to be forced to use encryption against one's will.)
This means, if you start a conversation with me in plaintext, I'm obliged to continue exactly as I would if we were talking through encryption. This compels speech, which is both unconstitutional in most places and completely untenable in practice. (And why would there be a human right not to be "forced" to use encryption? There's no human right precluding "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policies. People who don't use encryption do not constitute a protected class!)
Aside: The fact that someone (legally) deleted data or (legally) switched to an encrypted channel may still be used against them, when establishing mens rea regarding some other actual crime.
That said, I don't want to dissuade anyone from taking steps to be safe.
I think the author would say that if you don't want to continue in plaintext, you can just not respond.
Refusing to respond to unencrypted requests is honestly the only thing I can think of that would really constitute "forcing someone to use encryption." (Unless they mean forcing via threats, but why would they mean that? Who's going around forcing people at gunpoint to encrypt messages?)
One of these things is not like the others…
It raises eyebrows because it’s almost as if it wasn’t a random example.
There is already a tenuous balance in terms of power and consent between the governing and the governed. On balance, more harm is done to me by those in political / financial power than by the average criminal.
I'm not convinced handing governments omniscient surveillance is worth the price it exacts.
"(Note that IT liberalists who claim encryption is a human right never realize this should also include the right not to be forced to use encryption against one's will.)"
It would be true in context only if the users were given two options, like two buttons: "Click here for strong encryption" and "Click here for breakable stuff".
Who would click the breakable stuff? Yeah, me neither.
I'm not even sure who he's railing against with that. Is it violation of my human rights that I'm "forced" to use IPv4 or TCP/IP by my ISP, or HTTPS by my bank?
As far as being "forced" to use encryption; unless I'm missing something, I can't think of a law that would preclude my transmission of communications with another individual in plaintext. I'm free to use HTTP instead of HTTPS on my website, should I so choose.
And even if there were such a law, I'd be hard-pressed to figure what harm is being done to me (much less deprivation of human right).
No I would not like to weaken encryption for my bank (obviously), my personal information (if only due to spear fishing), cryptographic authentication like passkeys in general and ssh keys in particular, and absolutely no one gets access to any teenager's phone anywhere. (unless it's their parents maybe,... that one is debatable).
ps the term "NOBUS fallacy" is apparently not a thing yet. (I thought it was!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Once you're multiparty that goes away, any other party can definitely betray you and then it's game over, your own integrity doesn't matter.
Historically NOBUS was about having a particular technological lead, that's very fragile and didn't work out long term. If anybody has that lead today it's the Chinese, but realistically nobody has such a lead.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_global_telecommunications... "The hackers were also able to access wiretapping systems used to conduct court-authorized wiretapping."
I'm not advocating for it, I'm just saying the computer science of this matters, and a lot of people have objections to the concept of NOBUS that are more ideological than empirical.
The first is that "us" would be something like "governments in the US"; but then that's too big of an organization to sustain as free from compromise. There are tens of thousands of judges in the US, well over a million police and military. All it takes is one of them to be corrupt or incompetent or lazy and the bad guys get to use the skeleton keys to everything in the world, which can unlock secrets worth billions or get people killed. And that's assuming they only compromise the authorization system; if they actually gets the keys it's practically armageddon.
And the second is that it's not just one government. If the UK makes Apple and Google build a system to unlock anybody's secrets, is Australia not going to want access? Is China? Let's suppose we're not going to give access to Russia; can the fallible humans operating this system fend off every attack once the FSB has been ordered to secure access by any mean necessary?
It's a system that combines many points of compromise with an overwhelming incentive for everyone from state-level attackers to organized crime to break in and severe consequences when they do.
“ideological” and “moral”, as bases for objection, mean exactly the same thing, though people will often use “ideological” to mean “based in principles of right and wrong that I don’t agree with” and “moral” or “ethical” to mean “based in principles of right and wrong that I agree with”.
(I will grant number 101 is the hard one to defend.)
Have any such system been built?
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/12/22/on-junip...
But also, Dual EC was suspected of being backdoored from day one, was slower than existing CSPRNGs, and was therefore avoided like the plague. Whereas the premise is that if you put all the world's secrets behind one set of keys, there doesn't exist a level of defense that can withstand the level of attacks that will attract. Which doesn't apply when it isn't widely used.
On top of that, the attackers would be the likes of foreign intelligence agencies, and then them not getting it and the public not hearing about them getting it are two different things.
The backdoor is a vulnerability even if you don't have the keys because it requires the trappings of third party access. If you try to get something in the shape of a backdoor through code review, you should get knocked back. But if something in the shape of a backdoor is required then a change in who has the keys to the lock is much smaller, more subtle and easier to sneak in.
Also, "never getting caught" isn't what NOBUS means.
But the Juniper hackers are the NOBUS failure because changing the locks on a backdoor that somebody else had installed is easier than getting one installed yourself.
Except that it was intended to be "nobody but the us (i.e. the NSA)" and now you've got China using it.
NOBUS or not, if your adversary controls your source tree, you're boned. Here, the adversary replaced "our" NOBUS backdoor with theirs. Two different backdoors, different keys, same structure.
[1]: "The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told," https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-r...
In reality the choice is between such a totalitarian surveillance state without the possibility of digital security guarantees, or one where police can’t read your digital mind but can do good old fashioned police work.
However: Not all countries have this effective separation/independence between branches, and some countries which have so far enjoyed such separation are perhaps not so certain anymore.
Even so: I think the point still stands - there is a choice to make, and the current trajectory (EU’s ChatControl, and UK’s encryption ban), is what we’ll risk getting instead.
Backdoored encryption makes everyone unsafe while not stopping bad guys from using actual encryption. And when the bad guys use real encryption, the police can still catch them- see the case of Ross Ulbricht.
The point doesn’t stand because the magic system that only lets the good guys decrypt if only the engineers would think harder simply does not exist, and framing it this way obscures that fact and paves the way for ChatControl or encryption bans, not user freedom. We had this debate before with the Clipper chip, and reason mostly prevailed. Now we’re having it again with even higher stakes and people are arguing to give in to a framing that assumes defeat.
Presumably a Freudian slip for "governments"?
Truly there is no process as quick and urgency-aware as creating and signing international treaties.
(1) It's important to remember that part of why Telegram is in this pickle is that they deliberately designed a system that increased the surface area of what governments could demand from them, because they're not fully (or even mostly) end-to-end encrypted (in fact, they were openly dismissive of end-to-end encryption). We get these kinds of interventions in part because governments know they can work; we know how to design systems where they can't work.
(2) The idea that governments worldwide will uniformly solve this through international agreements seems fallacious, because some of the largest countries in the world have sharply different legal and political standards. For an agreement on lawful intercept to work, you need to foreclose on products that refuse lawful intercept. There are countries you can do that in, and others where you can't.
I think there is a well-taken point that cutting off law enforcement access to data isn't a long-term stable equilibrium; something will give eventually. But I think PHK is way overshooting how strong that argument is today.
This proposal isn't just evil, it's evil in a remarkably novel way. I'm disgusted in ways normally reserved for stumbling upon a group of neonazis chatting amongst themselves.
> Then, fourth and finally (drum roll, please!), they'll need to allow courts to jail the accused until: (a) the communication has been decrypted by someone; (b) the maximum penalty for the charged crime has been exceeded; or (c) the court decides to release the accused.
Can someone explain to me why wiretapping can't just.. evolve? Upon a court order, send a guy to bug someone's house with cameras and watch him put in his password. Use a microphone to listen to him type in his password, perhaps even from a distance, then use some open source tool to convert the audio data into keypresses & similar. Order the ISP to copy the packets for you so you can do traffic analysis. Order companies the guy has accounts on to cough up whatever data they actually have access to. Intercept his mail. Follow him around.
Encryption doesn't prevent any of these things, so what's with all the focus on it? Wiretapping was never zero cost, and we the people only consented to the norm of court ordered wiretapping in a world in which it took some effort to do. It ought to stay difficult.
The civics lesson is almost useful, except for the part where it treats the current demands as immutable rather than an adversary to be fought and defeated.