This isn’t really a dupe ftr; the previous comments were about a leak of the campaign - whereas the campaign is now launched and it needs all the attention it can get to avoid the UK trying to legislate against E2EE… cc dang
Sorry for the choice words, but shit like this makes my blood boil. You're not trying to "keep our children safe" motherfucker, and you know it. You're trying to prevent people from being able to have private conversations, so your secret agencies can harvest all the data from everyone easily. To phrase it as "but think of the children" is instrumentalizing the actual victims of child abuse and you should be ashamed.
This is blatant disrespect of the people. Every time the government, its agencies and their pet organizations draw the "protect the children" card that's appealing to the most technically-illiterate and privacy-unmindful people who have zero understanding of how does the web work, can't think two turns in advance and naïvely believe they "have nothing to hide" and nothing like this[1] can possibly affect them, let alone an inherently malevolent party getting their unencrypted data to misuse it in quite a number of ways possible.
You might not realize it but there really are people who honestly, genuinely, in their heart-of-hearts think this way and if you want to have a chance at inducing real change in the world, you need to acknowledge that they exist and see things from their point of view.
It's easy to forget but not everyone lives in a bubble full of privacy-conscious techfolk. There are people whose children were groomed online and convinced to submit themselves to sexual abuse. There are people who were those children. There are the law enforcement officers and NGOs dedicated to fighting this stuff. These people are all real. They all exist.
Other people are parents. They see the stories, they worry that it'll happen to their own children. Whether you like it or not, this justification garners sympathy from a not-insignificant number of people.
Often, these people don't understand E2E encryption or why they should give a hoot about it. They see the very real, tangible problem of child abuse on one side and some kind of vague objection from technical people on the other.
If you want to move past venting and have a real chance of inducing change, you need to acknowledge that other people with very different worldviews exist and you need to think about how to engage with them, see things from their point of view and convince them that E2E encryption should be protected.
The right to have a private conversation is one of those fundamental rights that society exists to protect. Undermining that in the name of law enforcement is putting the cart before the horse.
I'm sure the police would also have a much easier time solving crimes if they had a CCTV in every living room. They might even pinky swear that that they'd only look at it with a court order. And promise to keep the recording extra, super safe so no bad guys can ever look at it. Just think of how much child abuse takes place inside houses - the very notion of houses that the police can't look into is an abomination that must be banned immediately!
The pushback if they proposed something like that would be enormous. But the only reason they think they can get away with the same thing, just regarding chat systems, is that they want to take advantage of the fact that most people are tech-illiterate enough not to understand how encryption works, while they do roughly understand how CCTV works.
Some things are just too dangerous to exist. A backdoor into every communication channel on the planet is one of those things.
Right? Their complete statement is "remove end-to-end encryption so we can catch child sex abusers...by monitoring all the content that flows through social media" -- they just don't say the second part out loud because everyone would realize how fucking crazy this is.
You live in bubble. Most citizens include all age groups, backgrounds, etc.
Most people literally have no idea what encryption is, what it means, does, how it is used.
Along comes a trustful thing, a news site or tv channel. It explains that encryption is being used to harm little kids, or to allow thieves to do evil.
Governments spout this blather, because it works on the majority.
> so your secret agencies can harvest all the data from everyone easily
The thing is, I don’t think the people who work at those agencies would want this either, except for maybe law enforcement. It’s the bureaucrats who think it’s a good idea, everyone else knows it’s a shite one. It’s an utter farce.
Someone in such an agency believes they act for the greater good. To watch, aides in protecting society from bomber, insurrection, threat.
They see themselves as noble, and likely most are.
The problem here is misuse, and the scope of information. While the majority behave acceptably, agency culture, and political leanings become a trap.
And so the noble use, becomes corrupted. And because the person believes themselves to be good, who they work for is surely good, and so the work done must be good.
Just look at all the devs working at facebook Do they see themselves as evil? Causing civil wars, breakdown of societal cohesion for profit, destruction for stock price?
No.
They see themselves as non-evil. They see what they do as non-evil, because of <reasons>.
Since when have gun grabbers have any success in the US? From the outside, it seems the US has decided it would rather just live with regular school shootings than deny its citizens access to lethal weapons. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
1930s machine guns, short barrel rifles and shotguns, destructive devices and AOWs got a $200 tax, cost prohibative at the time for most people. 1960s more restrictions on FFLs and on types of guns especially imports, both raise prices and reduce availability more. 1980s new transferrable machineguns banned so now existing ones cost more than a car. 1990s handgun age raised to 21. And you steppers keep saying "it's not enough". If the cost of freedom is school shootings then so be it. We could cut down lots of other crime with a police state but don't because it's wrong.
You may as well support banning E2EE because nobody needs it.
We should amend the constitution and then make permitted ownership of single shot bolt action rifles the only widespread form of personal gun ownership. Plenty capable enough for sport hunting.
That would be enough.
There would be people made less safe by such a restrictive regime! Of course a much larger number would be safer. Tradeoffs are exactly what they sound like.
Nitpick: "single shot" and "bolt action" are a contradiction in terms. A "single shot" rifle has no magazine, only a single cartridge can be loaded at once. A "bolt action" rifle has a magazine to hold more than one cartridge, with a bolt that the user manually actuates to eject a spent case and load a new cartridge from the magazine.
If actually proposing legislation such distinctions would be important. For an internet discussion what you meant is clear enough.
Not quite no. There are plenty of bolt action rifles with no magazine, they're still bolt action. Like there are other single shots that aren't bolt action, and there are other bolt action single shot. Stupid policy this person is proposing but their language is technically correct.
Police states tend to reduce crime very well. They're still wrong. And i hope if somebody like you ever gets power and tries to do this Americans resist them by force.
We should uphold the Constution as it is now and remove every single gun law.
> there are enough armed forces personnel to police the third or fourth largest country by land mass in the world (the United States)
If you count the standing paramilitary forces (“police") that work for the government and do this job already, plus all the other armed forces, that's not that much of a stretch.
> that every single armed forces personnel would unquestioningly obey what constitutes illegal orders (military deployment on American soil)
Military deployment on US soil is not illegal. (That would make defensive war, as well as suppression of armed rebellion, impossible.)
Military deployment to enforce domestic order isn't illegal, either, though for federal regular military troops there are procedural requirements for it under the Insurrection Act (mostly, a completely discretionary Presidential determination of one of several specific kinds of need—some of which involve a request from a state governor and some of which do not—and particular notifications to the civilian population and any potential insurgents before employment of the military for certain uses.) State forces not called in to federal service may have their own procedural rules for law enforcement deployments, but most state forces can also be activated federally under federal rules.
To be honest the motivation to keep our children (or people more generally) safe seems way more clear to me that the motivation… to prevent people from having private conversations… to what end?
It's the stepping stone between the two: you cannot believe the motivation is to keep kids safe if the action makes kids less safe. That doesn't prove a specific other motivation. But it does pretty decisively disprove the stated motivation.
Ah, I see. You’re saying the threat of someone successfully breaching a child’s data and appropriate keys from a service is more significant than the threat of just internet weirdos relying on E2E to transact child pornography with impunity.
Pretty much. That is what happened every time other people have been given access.
We're in the middle of a whole bunch of cases of policemen being sacked or charged here for asking our underage girls on dates, keeping and sharing nudes from crime victims phones etc.
And remember: if someone is lying about why they're doing something that's further evidence it's not something you want. If they had a good reason, they'd be up front about it...
To expand the total surveillance even further? It seems to me that every government, no matter how liberal or progressive, loves surveillance. Look at how quick European governments started to vacuum up the data from mobile operators when COVID broke out - all "for your safety", of course.
But again… for what? Are you under the impression that every government is actually authoritarian under the hood but that characteristic just doesn’t really show its head due to encryption? Seems to me authoritarian governments have no problem being authoritarian with or without these sorts of provisions.
Side note: I’m not actually against E2E encryption. Strong proponent really. I just think these arguments tend not to resonate with a very broad audience outside of the security/privacy/technolibertarian communities
“If you outlaw Encryption only outlaws will have Encryption.”
It doesn’t solve a thing, other than make politicians look like they are doing something.
Petty thieves, small time drug dealers and other small time criminals may end up without encryption. But it doesn’t solve organised crime, there are the problem and they are intelligent enough to use an encrypted app, even if it “illegal”.
Amusingly our politicians all seem to run our government and parliament via WhatsApp and that’s obviously E2EE.
And you think our police will have the resources do do anything for those 99%? They are already doing it all out in the open on public platforms, on street corners. Encryption isn’t a barer for enforcement in those cases.
The issue is the worst 1% and they will continue to use encryption anyway.
>And you think our police will have the resources do do anything for those 99%?
I wish they did. As more data aggregators become available to LE I hope it can make more people responsible for their actions. Technology will allow LE to scale to actually handle enforcing the law over large regions using fewer actual humans.
Well if only (non-crypto) criminals use crypto and that is defective illegal then only criminals will be punished. That aspect is not a-priori immoral to me. I don't see how you can win over many people by repeating a mantra like this...
> I don't see how you can win over many people by repeating a mantra like this...
I don’t expect to, this isn’t about wining over or educating the public at large. You would never be able to on a technical issue like this, especially when horrific illegal activity is involved.
The issue is knowledgable and informed politicians and agency spinning this rubbish trying to convince the public they can win this, when they know they can’t. They are lying.
Those in possession of blobs of data passing tests of statistical randomness must be punished. Send any of that statistically-random data over the web? That’s a punishin’.
I've worked in government influence campaigns myself. I really believe
in positive influence as a social good. Amazing campaigns that we've
had in the UK are the famous 70's "Stop Look. Listen." road safety
campaign with Darth Vader actor D.Prowse, and other great Saatchi ones
with the NHS on heart health and anti-smoking. These all undoubtedly
saved millions of lives without fearmongering, or being overbearing
nanny-state performances.
There is however, a rather sinister subculture within British
influence of smug down-talking, classist, oh-so-superior "we know
best" messaging. The BBC's TV licence ads were comical, with overt
menacing of the poor and old. The late 1980's AIDS/HIV campaigns felt
disgracefully out of touch.
Although they look like internal projects coming through outfits like
NHS, 77 Bgd. or the H.O. it's really spun out to contractors and the
messaging quickly gets out of control. In this case I believe its
Saatchi again.
Unfortunately they've really rather fucked this one. I'd call it
malinfluence and stright up propaganda in the bad old sense. Indeed,
it's a disgraceful example of what happens you you mix technology with
people who are intellectually out of their depth.
Knowing a abit about how this stuff works though, I'd say it really
isn't necessarily the position of the government. It's a cheap "think
of the children" shot against Big Tech (so of course I applaud that)
and also a smokescreen for all the other general mischief and twattery
going on these days.
It's terrifying that people of such incompetence and ignorance can get
their hands on powerful channels - precisely what we're trying to curb
when Facebook do it.
I am strongly against child abuse, and have never seen a campaign against child abuse that didn't seem like a callous attempt to use something that in many people's minds is infinitely heinous as a pascal's wager to get people to do whatever they wanted
It feels absolutely horrible to be in a position where I have to be skeptical of any proposed way to stop children being abused, because someone is likely trying to pull the wool over my eyes about an authoritarian power grab they are trying to do, but that's a rational response to the world we live in
convenient list of charities I will no longer be supporting. This whole campaign is disgusting, and reminds me of the propaganda the government put out when the UK had a vote on vote reform.
There are so many charities today. Utterly impossible that more than a handful are sustained by $25 checks from old ladies. Most are money/reputation laundering & tax dodges for corporations, lobbyists, governments, and high net-worth individuals. They are unclean, and should be cleansed with fire.
It's quite short. I can't find a link to a quote online, a transcript is:
"Last month, the notorious paedophile Sidney Cook was blasted into space, to spend the rest of his life aboard a one-man prison vessel, posing no further threat to children on Earth.
But it was revealed that an eight-year old boy was placed on board, by mistake, and is now trapped alone in space with the monster. A spokesman said:
'This is the one thing we didn't want to happen' "
the linked video is the "pedophile blasted into space" segment from Brass Eye (a very dark humored current affairs parody from the late 90s), for anyone else unable to view.
Child abuse is a serious topic. It should be treated seriously.
Evoking a topic like that, creating fear and outrage in an attempt to sway public opinion - by encouraging an emotional response rather than a rational one - is to be considered shameless manipulation, regardless of what agenda it's being used for.
Would any campaign that takes child abuse truly serious rely on tactless and tasteless marketing campaigns like that? Seems a bit unlikely. People who take child abuse seriously and understand that it's a very complex and multi-faceted topic, tend to really dislike seeing it misused for scare-mongering like that.
Did any of the previous marketing-campaigns that did rely on misusing the topic in manipulative ways result in an actual reduction of child abuse cases? Not that I am aware of?
Have any of those previous alleged anti-child-abuse surveillance measures been rolled back, after they have shown to be completely ineffective at actually combating child abuse?
Well, some have actually been abolished again on the grounds of being unconstitutional. But other than that, being not effective has mostly only resulted in loud demand for even more, equally inefficient, surveillance methods.
I really think that people should be called out over misusing the topic of child abuse as a populist scare mongering tactic to sway public opinion. That sort of thing needs to stop - regardless of what anyone thinks of the measures it's being employed for.
Let's say this steering group does really see the benefits of privacy but just wants say more ways to report things or AI magic to spot old people talking about sex to children. That's all well and good, but do you trust the Government to implement it?
When I started secondary school about 10 years ago now it was very clearly impressed upon me how to behave online and how to report bad stuff, but the guy who did that was a very fastidious teacher so I bet not everyone else in the UK does.
That also happened before the phone had completely taken over as the means of consuming the internet, which has made the internet - especially for young people - into a more walled, more anxious, and more manic place in my opinion.
What they want is continuous scanning for "illegal content" and where intelligence services can freely roam, store and analyze everything the population says.
They can use this to control the population, massaging and prodding the herd to move in a certain direction.
If this becomes reality then democracy is dead and I will plead for an authoritarian regime with me at the head.
Whilst the messaging here is chilling, I don’t think E2E will be banned in the UK. Not least because journalists and MPs use it everyday in signal and WhatsApp.
I think the government just rolls this kind of legislation out whenever something else is going on and they need a diversion.
I've said it in previous threads on the topic but something like this has probably come up once or twice a year for the past 20 years. Encryption, porn, age restrictions on the internet...
We shouldn't become dismissive of it that way but I'm sure this will conveniently fall off the radar when it's served its purpose. But it should be noted that our PM Boris Johnson referrs to something like this as a dead cat: throw a dead cat on the table and everyone's looking at the dead cat, not the other thing that's going on.
The regulation won't ban MPs using E2E encryption, the government doesn't care about journalists and their stupid rights. Everyone, but MPs and other people in power will be except from the ban.
MPs and other parliamentary officials are exempt from ISPs keeping logs of their web activities, do you honestly think that this will affect the people in power?
I believe so too. It's not that currently, with no encryption in place on Facebook Messenger, child abusers refrain from grooming children. Yes, it will be slightly more difficult to prosecute them in some cases, but in both cases it will come after the fact. There simply isn't enough capacity to police the messages of billions of users.
Government is pushing for a complete segregation online between children and adults, where you need to have a government issued ID to post online and where you will be prevented from contacting children below the age of 16.
FWIW, it's pedophile (or paedophile). 'Pedofile' is the notoriously efficient entropy coding compression format used for child pornography stashes (/s).
There are so many more low hanging fruits to combat child abuse material, but governments are not taking any action.
By now it's common knowledge that it's really NOT that hard to take down vast amounts of it.
A compromise could be to only disable E2EE when communicating with children over these platforms? How you ascertain a user is a child is probably a different matter though ...
I don't think there's been a government more willing to wheel out the 'Think of the Children' defense (or other similar meaningless done-to-death arguments such as stopping terrorists etc.) than the UK government, and a populous more willing to lap it up at every turn. (Remember Cameron's anti-porn and anti-encryption crusade? Remember Theresa May banging on about the very same things?) Some stances are just perpetually expected to be brought at some point, at least in my eyes, and it can be quite tiring to fight the same battles and arguments again and again, which I suppose is the whole point of beating said stances over the electorate, until they relent.
Given the current precarious position of PM Johnson though, I do not see this actually doing anything just yet other than being a flagrant distraction/appeasement/corruption/all of he above.
Make it in law that if a convicted offender is found to have used a messaging platform to send/receive material, then heavily fine the company that was used in the messaging - but only if they had failed to report the offence. To operate in the UK the company has to pay these fines.
This puts the ball in the company's court - like it should be.
Now the messaging-platform could claim that since it's E2EE they have no visibility on what's being sent/received, but I believe technical solutions exist for this - E.g. pictures and videos go through a post-processing client-side to remove identifiable data (faces in images, text in images, that sort of thing). The original unmodified image is sent E2EE, and the post-processed one is sent to the company and then it's up to them to identify offending images.
Yes, but only in the sense that it's encryption between you and the server you're talking to. That's not what people are referring to when they talk about end-to-end encryption, though.
What people are talking about there is that when I send you a message, it leaves my device encrypted, and can only be decrypted by you, on your device. Whatever servers it goes through, in order to get to you, cannot decrypt it at all. Law enforcement, third-party companies, doesn't matter, they can't see it, only you and I can.
Only in the sense that Zoom got lambasted for calling their original setup E2EE. "Well technically our servers that log everything are a end of the communication".
At least in the states they faced legal penalties for such a claim (albeit a slap on the wrist).
If the other "end" you are talking to is their server, then it's end-to-end encryption. If the other end is another person's computer, and their server is only one jump on the way there, then it's not end-to-end. Clearly, with Slack, "their server" was not the other "end" in anyone's mind; so they were being disingenuous. But for many cases (banking), their server _is_ the other end.
Except that wouldn't even be affected by this legislation because the whole shitck is forcing servers to log everything. I guarantee your bank is already logging everything.
My understanding is, to be E2E encrypted, the keys must only be known by you and the actual other user you're communicating with. With https, this is not the case: you're only communicating with the server, which then relays the messages. However, the server can see everything.
You can use the term in different contexts, depending on what you consider the "ends": If you think of your machine as one end and the server as the other, it is technically E2E encrypted.
But in the more meaningful sense where your device is one end and your communication partner's device is the other end, it is not.
Yes, but the other end is a centralized website under govt supervision. They are against normal end users directly talking to each other in an encrypted way.
I'm working on the wording of this that I intend to use in any such discussion of fake attempts at "think of the children":
Whenever a politician invokes "think of the children", ask them about their funding of Child Protection Services.
Any political action that's said to be under the umbrella of "think of the children" that doesn't provide massive amounts of additional funding into Child Protection Services (boots on the ground, education programs, etc), is hiding something, and actively working against helping children because it's distracting from the actual efforts that Child Protection Services are providing as well as spending money on entirely "something else".
> We like the idea of zero trust and provable perfect end to end encryption. But would prefer it to be based on vendor trust, unverifiable, imperfect by design and have a man in the middle.
one of my opsec friends speculates that this is being done because the National Crime Agency (nca) doesn't have any credible digital forensics capacity.
I find the UK government ministers (and others governments I suppose) completely thick and are generally ex-arts-students who (mostly) graduated in "non-degrees" and have precisely zero understanding of science and technology.
There's a saying 'those who can do, and those who can't teach'. I'd add "and those that can't teach go into politics".
I mean, given the timing, I would assume to distract from Brexit, Number 10 parties, etc.
This (pull out a perennial policy interest and suddenly promote it weirdly eagerly, to distract from the government's scandals) is at this point such a trope of British politics that people make sitcoms about it (half the storylines in the Thick of It were basically this).
I'm going to make a wild guess and say that the website has been contracted out to some senior politicians husband's (our corruption is now done by women and minorities, too, progress!) company or something to that effect.
Edit: Downvoters, it's pretty well documented at this point that the group of tories in power like giving gov. money to friends and family
> Didn't the wikileaks stuff show the GCHQ and other five eyes agency basically have direct access to all this information anyway
...and the 2003 incident involving Katherine Gun showed that those agencies don't really give an $expletive about anyone's privacy, and that many governments don't give an $expletive about telling the truth.
It starts with child abuse, then it's about harassment, then it's about bullying, then it's about hate speech, then it's about medical misinformation, then it's about political dissent, then it's about...
I wonder, would E2E rotc13 count as illegal? What about the old method of both users having the same copy of a book and sending lookups of particular letter and words. Where do you draw the line on banned algorithms?
Where do you draw the geographical line? Would people in the UK no longer be allowed to communicated with someone in the US if that other person would only use E2EE?
Let's assume that it doesn't have any nefarious motives, What's the argument against doing regular police work to catch criminals?
Yes, I understand that it's extremely tempting to be able to peak into every persons communications but that has become feasible only the last decade or so. Just do your job the way it has aways been done.
Haven't we seen how endless are the ambitions of politicians even in the most democratic countries? How one can expect that it's going to be their people who will be sneaking into the people's communications? If you are a tory, consider what happens if Corbyn takes over. If you are a democrat, consider what happens if Trump takes over.
Don't even let me start over the commercial and industrial espionage in concert with the people in the govt.
The moment E2EE is compromised, the computer age dies. This is not like tapping a phone line, the human civilisation is living in a virtual reality where communities come together, organize and express themselves at global scale. We don't need 3D avatars in a metaverse BS, we are already there and compromising E2EE instantly turns our world into a dystopia.
In fairness, perhaps the problem of doing it the way "it's always been done" is that the criminals don't operate the same anymore, more than likely they aren't meeting up in dockside speakeasies, moreover they're probably not talking over phone lines either. Pimps and drug dealers don't need to stand on the street corners and advertise their stuff to make sales. Crime has changed.
If their communication has mostly gone modern, digital, and encrypted, traditional policework gets a lot harder.
That said, I'm not sure if going after encryption is the right way. But could be it is. I don't know. What if we the technology we've developed has us facing a choice between an Orvellian nightmare and Mad Max?
"The old ways" doesn't have to be without using technology, what I mean by "old ways" is actually without having complete access to all the information. I don't say go tap phone lines, what I say is do the investigations without having access on every single thing that every one said or thought. Go seize servers, go install fake GSM towers to target the people under investigation.
I don't see why not having access to complete communications should warrant Mad Max. You don't need to have access to everyones data to notice that kids are disappearing or firearms are being traded or something like that.
The old ways also hinged on people actually meeting up, on criminal enterprises producing a legible paper trail. Seizing encrypted hardware or intercepting encrypted traffic just doesn't work.
We also mustn't forget that an integral part of old fashioned policework is just grabbing some random homeless person found in the area and beating them with a nightstick until they admit to the crime.
There is a large array of organisations listed in the page's footer which support this initiative.
I don't know who they are, but I'd think researching who those organisations are and what their political angle is could shed a little more light on whether this is genuinely motivated by online safety or just a scare tactic for more surveillance.
How the page is worded, it sounds as if they'd also be OK with "only" mandatory client-side scanning a la Apple. (Not that this would be much less dystopic, but it would permit E2EE)
Hats off! It's an efficient move--collecting a salary and pension while forcing nerds in a different country to do your job for you--for free! If only they were this concerned about the children in Rochdale...
