David Cameron: Twitter and Facebook privacy is unsustainable | Hacker News Reader

David Cameron: Twitter and Facebook privacy is unsustainable

politics.co.uk

64 pointstjr62 comments

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811288

"The question we must ask ourselves is whether, as technology develops, we are content to leave a safe space—a new means of communication—for terrorists to communicate..."

This kind of argument is only a few steps removed from physically placing microphones in private residences. Only to be turned on with a proper warrant, of course.

No need to discuss it as if it were a hypothetical. We have already done this. Interestingly, the government didn't have to push for it at all; people willingly brought the microphones into their homes on their own. All the government had to do was either convince the companies that make the microphones (and the phones that contain them) to add a backdoor, or find a way to compromise them.

Yes, that is a clever civil-libertarian perspective on the implications of mobile phones, but it doesn't hold up for anyone outside the world of software engineering and security. You can't say people willingly accepted it when normal people don’t think in opsec terms.

No one outside tech circles thinks, upon signing a mobile service contract, "this device could conceivably be turned into a remote bug if the baseband is compromised by a state actor, but I'm willing to accept that trade-off." They think it's secure because it's sold as secure.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing that people willingly accepted mass surveillance within their own homes, or that they somehow deserve it by accepting technology. I'm just saying that the scenario in which there's a microphone in everyone's house that the government can turn on at will is not a hypothetical, it is reality, and furthermore that it's remarkable that the government didn't have to raise a stink or pass oppressive laws or anything of the sort in order to make it happen.

But in that case, you could leave your private residence and whisper to your friend in a microphone-free park. If our goal is to ensure that terrorists have absolutely no means of private communication and we don't know who might be a terrorist, the only viable solution is to ensure that everyone carries their surveillance equipment with them wherever they go. Back-dooring Facebook and Twitter will only drive the terrorists to use services which don't log everything they write and give American corporations unlimited access to their secret plans, so it's either snoop on everyone's body or accept that people are going to find ways to communicate in secret if they really want to.

This makes the big assumption that they actually give a shit about catching terroist's rather than using it as a massive powers land grab.

We already have RIPA which allowed local councils to use anti-terror legislation to investigate parents for school catchment zones (oh and iirc investigations into bins).

Either they want to catch terrorists and haven't thought through the consequences of what they're saying, that people should be denied the right to communicate privately, or they're just using fighting terrorism as a convenient excuse to deny people the right to privacy.

RIPA regulated those councils, and stopped that abuse of law from happening.

> Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8868757/Council...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...

There might be an argument that this assumes that the terrorists are in the same location, which often might not be the case.

Let's say they're not in the same location. They can send encrypted email. It doesn't even have to be email. They can paint an encrypted message on the side of a fleet of commercial airliners and read it out loud during a football broadcast. As long as there's a way to encrypt a message, there's a way to send it to someone who has the decryption key. Demanding that no private communication is available to terrorists requires absolute surveillance.

Of course, some people are going to get sloppy and reveal secrets over the phone or other unencrypted or under-encrypted channels, but that's not the subject at hand. The stated goal was to ensure that terrorists have no means of private communication, which has some pretty awful consequences.

Imagine if he would have said, "The question we must ask ourselves is whether, as technology develops, we are content to leave a safe space—for people to communicate..."

That's some first class political fearmongering

And I'll keep asking, before the one time cipher was invented, and really - before RSA was invented, what safe space to communicate without the state being able to (if necessary) listen in existed?

I remember the recent controversy about inclusion of google now features in chromium in relation to this. We have mobile phones and other devices like Amazon's Echo that can and do listen to whatever we speak. Although, right now they only transmit the data to cloud after you say the tag phrase like "OK, Google" etc, it doesn't seem hard to make them always on, if the government agencies are given the legal authority to do so.

physically placing microphones in private residences

Do you keep your cell phone at your bedside table? Do you have access to your baseband source code? The future is already here.

When are governments going to stop maintaining roads and bridges for terrorists to safely drive on?

Two words and I'm not making an intelligent argument here but: Get fucked.

I was about to respond with something similar. Sometimes profanity is the most effective way to express yourself in the face of complete absurdity.

You forgot to add - "With all due respect...."

I don't think there is much respect due for him.

"Britain is not a state that is trying to search through everybody’s emails and invade their privacy," he insisted.

That made me laugh...

Mr. Cameron glanced up from everybody's emails to say...

He followed up "I mean, don't get me wrong- we do that. All the time. Constantly. But we aren't trying to. And in the end, I think it's the thought that counts."

Some consider the entire British Empire to have come about essentially by accident. Compared to that, accidentally reading everyone's e-mail is minor.

He says "We have always been able, on the authority of the home secretary, to sign a warrant and intercept a phone call, a mobile phone call or other media communications," but is clearly not content with same constraint with electronic communication. He can already get a warrant and gain access to private emails; what he wants is the ability to collect all emails regardless of the existence of a warrant.

It's an amazingly huge power grab and degradation of privacy.

Let us not forget that this is the leader that takes policy direction from what happens in the television dramas he watches. [0]

>"I love watching, as I should probably stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There is hardly crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device.

>"As you move from a world of people having fixed telephones and mobile phones to Skype and phones on the internet, if we don't modernise the practise and modernise the law over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of devices. That is a real problem for keeping people safe."

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10608439/David-...

It's a bit of a leap from those statements to "takes policy direction from [...] television dramas he watches" though.

I think the Telegraph is being intellectually dishonest. Cameron was using the TV shows as an easily understandable and relatable-to example of what the policies he is promoting involve, not the other way around.

Can someone to me explain why it seems that all major British politicians from both parties seem so unbelievably stupid when it comes to the internet? Cameron wants an end to encryption, a backdoor in to all communication; and before him, Milliband pushed through that awful 'think of the children' countrywide porn block. Those are the heads of the two major parties, both pushing through awful legislation.

They are not stupid. They want to protect their power and are willing to say anything for this, invent any excuse.

No, I think they really don't fully understand the technical implications of the policies, so they implement what the majority of the public says they want (protection from terrorists, paedopholes and so on) without worrying about implications that only a minority say they care about. Perhaps with better science and technology advice they would choose differently?

I really don't think that this is an instance of Milliband trying to "protect his power" by allowing GCHQ to surveil the Internet...

On the other hand, secret trade deals like TTIP are, according to O'Brien, er, Cameron, perfectly fine.

I suppose it's one way of dealing with terrorists who "hate our freedoms", you just need to take these freedoms away one by one until they have nothing left to hate...

Is there any evidence that terrorists prefer Facebook over GPG?

Is there any evidence terrorists can get gpg to work?

( ._.)

Irrelevant - law enforcement wants a backdoor into everything.

Drop the charade and call them with their real name - repression apparatus.

Can someone explain what the UK public finds in Cameron - his economic policy has been mixed bag at best, foreign policy is same and internal policy - you have the whole Scotland situation - i have a feeling that Downing street unlike the Scots prefer to forget about the whole "devolution max" stuff.

8 years into depression and London situation getting somewhat tense - there should be at least figurative heads rolling, and yet he get reelected and entrusted with more power ...

Then the terrorists will move to different services. If you want to prevent that, you have to shut down the internet, which is quite impossible due to the decentralized structure of TCP/IP. Someone should explain the technical working of the internet to this poor guy.

The other possibility is that he is just forwarding the internal GCHQ lobby, and he knows that this plan is evil and only about controlling citizens.

This is a big reversal considering the UK had been the one pushing Facebook and others into implementing stricter privacy controls.

> implementing stricter privacy controls.

except for them of course.

Terrorists will use other forms of communication if you open up Twitter and Facebook. In fact, I'm pretty sure the smart ones aren't using these services right now. The unfortunate reality is that terrorists will always have a safe space to communicate if they want it, from message encryption to passing notes in a park.

That man is un-freaking-believable!

What's even harder to believe, though, is that the British actually re-elected him!

> "We just want to ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate."

What a load of bollocks. I suspect the "terrorists" have access to their own communications infrastructure that doesn't depend on Facebook and Twitter. Just another push for a snoopers' charter.

He forgot to mention pedophiles. Remember people, we do this for your safety and your children's.

That may be a sensitive subject around parliament.

Nah, they shredded everything shreddable, stuffed the 'investigation' with cronies, faked health issues and generally buried everything in a massive hole.

It's a solved issue.

This hole is called the "Memory Hole". If this sounds Orwellian to you, it's because it is indeed Orwellian.

So you're saying most of the UK's government and media should be wiretapped?

Considering the last Gov's relationship with the Guardian (they sent people around to smash up a laptop) I'd be amazed if they weren't already.

David Cameron is unsustainable. He can no longer be tolerated in the face of governmental terror.

Cameron is essentially shrugging his shoulders and saying that a free society is unsustainable.

This is quite unfortunate for our friends in the UK. Even more unfortunate for us here in the United States is that there are plenty of halfwit authoritarians just like him to be found in both of our major political parties.

Unfortunately, people will keep voting for them, because they can't be having with those dirty hippie leftists. Don't they know the holy words of Saint Thatcher? "There Is No Alternative."

But hey, at least they're not those dirty fascists in the UKIP and BNP! I mean, sure, they work to bring the xenophobic policies of those two parties into the mainstream, without even the BNP's egalitarian approach to domestic economics, but that's totally a serious distinction between neoliberalized conservatives and fascists!

New Labour in the UK don't have a better record on technological civil liberties.

This is part of the problem - we cannot signal our rejection of these measures electorally.

> New Labour in the UK don't have a better record on technological civil liberties.

That was, in fact, exactly my point. Neoliberal "social democratic" and neoliberal "conservative" parties basically just pass the governance ball back-and-forth in accordance with whose base will be more or less alienated by what the elite's Very Serious People decree will be passed this time.

It's almost like we need a party that advocates for personal liberty above all else.

I would love to see Twitter just say "nope".

In order to combat ongoing human rights violations, human rights have to be abolished bit by bit. There is nothing benign or misguided about this to me, this is calculated and predatory.

Omniscience and omnipotence by states and corporations lead by very human, sometimes sick people, may make the world "safer" from small fish (and even that is not clear), but might also make powerful sadists untouchable. It might make fixing the problems we have with corruption and abuse impossible, the final kicking away of the ladder.

You think it can't get worse, wait until the trap actually snaps shut. That happened in Germany in the 1930s and people watched on like it was a dream, a game, or over soon.

What if that happens again, but there is no outside world to invade and rescue anyone from themselves? What if it's not done by crazy narcissists bent on destruction and self-destruction, but "just" people who like and got used to power, and will not ever let it go?

I know I'm fearmongering here, but I just can't help but extrapolate and be extremely concerned. And I know I'm not alone, I just suck at expressing it without coming across wide-eyed. But there's better people for that, example Eben Moglen, from "Freedom of thought requires free media" ( http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t... )

> We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again.*

and

> We have a responsibility, we know. That’s how Berlin became the freest city that I go to because we know, because we have a responsibility, because we remember, because we have been on both sides of the wall. That must not be lost now. If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. Everything will be remembered. Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, everything you watched, everything you searched for.

> Surely we can pass along to the next generation a world freer than that. Surely we must. What if we don’t?

> What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away.

> Is that what we're gonna tell them?

> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.

"We just want to ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate. That is the challenge, and it is a challenge that will come in front of the House."

What do Amnesty International and EIPR from Egypt have to do with terrorism that prompted GCHQ to spy on them?

I am not saying that these two orgs are above the law but I am just wondering what's the probable cause for these rogue spy orgs to target them and try to collect as much info as their hands could grab.

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