Microsoft and Law Enforcement Transparency | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft and Law Enforcement Transparency

blogs.microsoft.com

91 pointsmwadams20 comments

Open articleView on HN

How about plugging the hole you made on Skype? That would be a great start :)

ie.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/snowden_leak_shows_m...

http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-docs-boast-now-we-can-wiretap-s...

http://www.slashgear.com/microsoft-unlocked-skype-chat-backd...

They're just asking for the laws to be changed, actual civil disobedience is a bit beyond that.

It would not be civil disobedience. There's no law requiring you to turn over cleartext if you don't have it, and Skype used to be structured such that, not only was cleartext not recoverable, there was no practical way to find the Skype packets.

Sure, I'm reading between the lines a little here. But they deliberately restructured skype to be less secure and more expensive. Unless your opinion of MS's competence is really THAT low, it seems reasonable to conclude that they were compelled to make the change.

Induced, convinced... but without a law "compelled?"

Sure. Otherwise they would fix it.

It's good to finally see Microsoft step up on surveillance reform. Obama and Cameron's plan to mandate backdoors and outlaw end-to-end encryption will only hurt the tech industry in the long run. Here's hoping Microsoft puts their lobbyists where their blog post is.

I agree, especially when we already have laws (HIPPA, PCI DSS, etc) that basically already require end to end encryption that cannot have backdoors.

And, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure the financial and healthcare sectors (and any vendors that work for them, ie, every major vendor including Microsoft and Google and Amazon) would just ignore Obama and Cameron: being fined by the government for using real encryption is a lot less money than being sued by your customers who rely on certain standards.

Due to the political climate lately on HN, I expect to be downvoted, but I don't care. The sooner we dump this political baggage the better, its simply not profitable to keep kowtowing to the Republican Party and the foreign equivalents.

To be clear Obama is not a member of the Republican party. You mention Obama specifically and then dumping "this political baggage" and follow it up with the "Republican Party".

On Surveillance, war on terror, war on drugs and war for fun, Obama is republican. All his policies are continuation of Bush era ones. They diverge on social issues.

All besides the second predate Bush significantly. Monroe Doctrine's been out for a while now, War on Drugs officially started with Nixon but had precedents since Anslinger's crusades from the 1930s (staunch drug control laws themselves since the 1900s), mass surveillance started with... Truman, actually. Not necessarily under his supervision, but from that time period.

To label policies as "Republican" and "Democratic" sounds very disingenuous to me, given how flexible the two parties have been throughout history. Indeed, until the Southern Strategy in the mid-60s, the Democratic Party was the one with the pronounced right-wing populism. Nowadays they both are, but the Democrats are more reserved it seems.

Or, perhaps the common stereotypes of American party politics are flawed, and the two parties are not nearly so far apart as they lead us to believe. I've longed concluded that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, and there's a whole lot of political ideas that are completely left out of our discourse as a result.

Regarding the war on terror and foreign policy in general:

Bush-era policy was actually a 180 from what he campaigned on in 2000. Bush campaigned on a non-interventionist foreign policy while Al Gore pushed for "Nation Building". Nation building was consistent with operations and campaigns carried out during the Clinton administration. Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act making it the official policy of the United States to support regime change in Iraq. A few months after signing we carried out the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign in Iraq. There were other operations and similar polices as well.

Granted you can probably continue this line back through George H.W. Bush and prior, but my point is I'm not sure Obama's policies on surveillance, war on terror, & war on drugs are all republican stances. Rather they are a continuation and expansion of policy that has been in effect at the national level for decades. Party is irrelevant.

I stand corrected. Anyway the inclusion of Obama in the debate was appropriate.

Obama is a hawk in a donkeydress.

Perhaps this is the "No true Democrat" argument.

Obama is not a member of the Republican party.

I can't tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. I can only rarely tell the difference between Democrat and Republican.

Well the legal exposure you mention would be resolved by CISA, which provides blanket immunity for companies that give the government any user info it asks for (in the name of preventing "cyber threats"). But that's a whole other can of worms and another net negative for the U.S. tech industry.

That only gives them immunity if the government "hacks" them with the backdoor. It does NOT give them immunity if someone ELSE actually hacks them with the backdoor.

No company will ever want to take that kind of risk, and it'd cost the US economy billions no matter what the fallout is.

Microsoft's political intentions seem nice and all, but I'd like to see them focus more on encryption, too. I've seen some hints of that with the new stuff for Windows 10, but they still need to do more. Skype adopting Axolotl/ZRTP would go a long way to secure their users' data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com