Is this really about terrorism? I have a feeling that terrorism is the excuse being used to try and surveil the public generally.
Why would they want to do this? My feeling is so that they can keep control of public order. It's a mystery to me why there hasn't been more public activism around unemployment levels and wealth equality in Europe so far.
I'm a firm believer that the whole "Terrorism" illusion has been foisted in order to maintain control of increasingly uncontrollable populations (as information is a powerful weapon).
I mean, Germany, 1930's, they deflected from the economic woes inflicted by reparations by banging on about communist and jewish terror - and that's just one, small, well-known recent example. This tactic has been applied over and over since hierarchical societies emerged - i.e. forever.
I'm sure tribal big men thousands of years ago would go "hey, don't look at me, I didn't make the yams not grow this year, it's those fuckers across the valley, worshipping the wrong gods! Let's get 'em!!!".
I'm a firm believer that the whole "Terrorism" illusion has been foisted in order to maintain control of increasingly uncontrollable populations (as information is a powerful weapon).
Note the way voting patterns are trending in the UK, long term, with both major parties from the historical duopoly now in decline and more people voting for a minority party than for the eventual government. Note the way the UK is being marketed as a hub for international finance and London turned into a dormitory town for global billionaires. Every government since Bloody Sunday has been worried about public insurrection somewhere, to some extent: arguably the UK is in a long-term trend towards what used to be called a pre-revolutionary situation, as the interests of the general populace and the elite diverge.
(The real solution is a sustained dose of Piketty's proposed wealth tax, and any other measures necessary to reduce the widening Gini coefficient, but neither the Conservative or Labour parties, which are both in hock to the capital accumulators, are able to address the problem effectively.)
If you walk through Central London you'll see public protests almost any day of the week - but they are not being reported: except minimal press when there are hundreds of thousands of protestors, and except to illustrate police confinement tactics such as kettling and arrest.
Perhaps this is a sign of the irrelevance of most media. I've felt for a while that following the news isn't a very good use of one's time, because the news, by definition, tends to focus on what is new or unusual, suggesting that it is in fact not the norm or what is generally going on.
Given this is happening, people are interested, and people don't know about it, don't you think this would be an ideal subject for the news to report on?
Not when all the news is just "content" to try to get you to look at ads. What company wants their product spots running during reports on something intent on upsetting their economic power? News does not exist to report the truth anymore.
Surely not. News != novelty value. Whatever happens should be reported.
Besides, all the other tedious stuff that also happens every day of the week, does get reported, including stuff about the Royal family's everyday life and what have you.
The Royal family's everyday activities isn't actually reported in the national news. Exceptional stuff like babies or scandals are, but they're exceptional. Regional news will broadcast the royals if they visit the region, but again that's exceptional rather than the norm.
News is, by it's very definition, new and noteworthy information. And given the short attention span of the modern generation, it's all the more relevant that the news stays new and noteworthy rather than old and repetitive. So in many ways, "news" does equal "novelty value".
The chilling effect of surveillance is somewhat well known. How much less likely are we to openly discuss activism on various matters if we're afraid of an ambiguous punishment?
Even the humorous notion that we might say something innocuous online or in email and become a member of the "always randomly screened" club haunts us as we conduct our daily affairs. We reconsider word choice, phrasing, and intent, so a semantic word filter won't pick us out of the crowd.
The solution is for everyone to "increase the noise", so the filters won't be able to distinguish any signal. There is safety in numbers, but the problem is that most people have been gradually conditioned to behave otherwise, and thus it'll require a very large sudden change to work.
You are also forgetting one of the biggest successes; they convinced most all of society to agree to not only ban data, but to see possession of that data as one of the worst wrongs a person can commit. The notion that changing the pattern of bits on your hard drive can be worse than killing someone has now been driven to the core of our society.
And as for the US, drug trafficking has worked great for the most part. For example the concept that intent to distribute can be determined simply by possessing more than some arbitrary amount, with the prosecutor not needing to show any other evidence, is a disastrous development. Civil forfeiture, where one's property is charged with a crime, is also another great development for them, though it is a hand they are beginning to overplay.
LGBT individuals should count themselves very lucky. Had they delayed their rights movement by a few decades, they may have been hunted down (imagine if the social hatred of homosexuals that was present in the early 20th century was combined with the modern day power to pry into people's lives).
To be honest I'm fairly sure the overwhelming fixation on the very rich and very poor is why we don't have a Labour government and thus have to put up with these laws.
Labour tried to (re-)introduce ID cards; they oversaw the expansion of the national DNA database to retain records of anyone arrested for any offense whatsoever; and under Harriet Harman they attempted a strong version of the 'snoopers' charter'. No different; worse in some ways.
I wouldn't trust either the Conservatives or Labour with this element of policy; Labour were pushing the Communications Data Bill back in 2008 which had much of the same language in it.
Fair enough. I moved to the UK in 2008 and only have limited experience of Gordon Brown's government, so I accept that I'm wrong on this one. Thanks for being civil.
For criticising both Labour and the Conservatives? I was wrong about Labour being any better (see my other post) but the conspiracy theories are unnecessary and unhelpful.
please don't make these kind of posts on HN. "common sense" is usually defined as "whatever I believe is the truth" in the context of an argument. Combine this with the personal attack you made, and you have yourself a terrible post.
>Is this really about terrorism? I have a feeling that terrorism is the excuse being used to try and surveil the public generally.
I'd go even further and say that most things related to 'terrorism' or 'protect the children' are Trojan horses to train society to be accepting of the restriction of rights 'with cause', with the 'with cause' slowly expanding over time.
What I'd like to see is all the big internet names - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on - getting together to say "We will provide our services only over fully secure encryption with strong keys. We will not implement backdoors, weaken our algorithms, or let you put a tap behind the SSL servers in our network. We will pull up our roots and leave your country if you demand them. And if you block your public from using strong encryption, they will have to manage without our services."
Problem is the companies exist to generate money for shareholders.
That is against what the shareholders want because it reduces the money.
Ergo, it will never happen.
At best we can expect some half baked ambiguous promises about not being evil (Google), excited yapping about something else as a distraction (Microsoft) or deafening silence (Apple) all backed up with thousands of pages of legalese and even more ambiguous international law.
So forget it; we have to move our feet. Stop being lazy and relying on all the services. Take a minimal set of services from elsewhere (I just have a domain and an IMAP box hosted by two small companies) and give the finger to them all.
I'm not sure if I'm responding to exactly what you said, but I would say that Apple has been anything but silent about user privacy. Tim Cook has said on multiple occasions that he values user privacy very highly, that Apple does not want to collect user data (and thus anonymises/randomises things which do have to flow through them, or uses end-to-end encryption for things that they don't need to process and return) and has-not/will-not install government backdoors.
Regardless of what they say, they have a bad track record and motivation to maximise profit so public assurances are about as valuable as BP's assurance on not letting oil escape from their kit in future.
I'd like to hear more about their bad track record. Also, Apple profits from selling hardware, not user data. They're just not structured to profit from user data. They could change that, of course. It'd be similar to Google becoming a hardware company :)
Could the shareholders be convinced that the combination leaving (inevitably) exploitable backdoors and telling all of their customers that they'll roll over on 'em at government's slightest whim result in losing more customers than pulling up stakes?
95%+ of people are totally ignorant on the matter and would happily walk off a cliff. The shareholders know that.
If you look at most corporate mentality, it's not about doing a good job. It's about maximising return to shareholders and if doing a shitty job and getting away with it pays off then that's what will happen.
It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission here from a business POV.
(and yes this attitude thoroughly disgusts me but it's prevalent and unavoidable)
because governments won't take no for an answer. they have the means to effectively put a company out of business. hence shareholders really have no voice in this area.
this isn't about profit as some claim, its about the absolute ability of governments to do as they wish. you choice as a corporation is simple, cooperate or get shut down.
to fix this requires getting voters to elect politicians who abhor this arrangement.
If these companies simultaneously put their foot down in this way and did not waiver I really doubt the government would go through with doing anything that would risk them leaving. Any one of these examples alone would be a huge loss to the market for, say, the United States. The political backlash would be enormous, and that's not even including the community actually concerned about privacy.
That being said, whether such an ultimatum would ever actually happen? Yeeeeeah...
The governments will simply step up their particular set of sticks and carrots to compel companies to be incentivized to not do those kinds of things.
What, did you, the cattle, think you could revolt against your rancher masters with impunity forever?
What do you think Google will say and do if the Government suggests giving preferences and lavish benefits to Microsoft or vice versa?
The only thing that really can be done is getting politically involved. Politics, elections, transparency, combating corruption, digital activism, etc. are all the only way that this will ever be prevented from metastasizing into something far more devious and nefarious. I hate to say it, but the only solution is suffocating and starving our own governments into submission. We have bred a bred beasts and they are fed with endless and unrestrained taxing power, reality is that we really need to implement what Republicans pay lip service to .... actually cutting taxes. Cut, cut, cut, taxes; limit the tax money to a set amount which then forces the government to have to prioritize, that includes for the military. We have a sleeping demon on our hands with the current surveillance government, which is directly a result of the plundering bonanza of unlimited and unfettered funding for militarism under the guise of security and freedom from boogiemen we create.
That's all well and good, but when both major political parties want lots of taxes, they just want to spend it on "defense" or "social welfare programs", what do you do? It doesn't seem like this will change anytime soon without massive political upheaval.
Bigger than those names, might be companies in the finance industry (the largest economic sector in London, if not the entire UK) which shouldn't wish to a lower levels of encryption available to protect information flows critical to their businesses. The EFF or other activists should be lobbying that industry's leaders to explain what's at risk here. The finance industry has a much stronger sway with the UK gov't than your standard privacy advocates.
I run an ecommerce agency in the UK. We turn over several million quid, employ forty odd people, and process the better part of £1bn of ecommerce purchases in the UK.
Needless to say, if encryption is banned here, we'll either be going out of business or moving to a progressive regime - say Yemen.
The UK is the second biggest ecommerce market in the world. He kills encryption, he will sink the UK retail economy - which is rather at odds with the whole "nation of shopkeepers" bit.
Actually, if it does happen, I'll raise an army and march on Westminster. Cromwell managed.
If they really do plan to ban encryption, the response will be much faster than retail. There is literally no way London financial business can safely exist without encryption. Investments, accounts, insurances, etc. pretty much require encryption under the current DPA and any comparable law of other countries.
The moment London banks say "we're forced to use backdoored/no encryption", any foreign business they interact with will (have to) say "LOL, bye then".
Majority of tech companies are not even comparable to that market.
UK finance here. Several billion goes through our platform.
We've already moved company registration offshore in case the shit goes down. We're about ready to move all our kit out of the country as well.
As for staff, we're staying put because when everything else goes down the shitter, we're going to be in the last position of power financially. House time.
Edit: Also EU safe harbour; fucking joke if there ever was one.
We love tech and finance companies (most major international ones work here), have a sensible attitude to terrorism related issues (we have a bit of a past history), part of the Euro, long-term plans to stay in the EU, don't force backdoors or intimidation of large companies, stable politically, neutral foreign policy, easy enough to get high-skilled visas.
Great place to work, cool people, English speaking, 12.5% Corporation tax, good grants, good beer and music.
It's possible to solve this technically ,such that the encryption will happen on government mandated servers, in a fully secure manner that doesn't hurt most businesses - and hat's probably how they'll handle that.
"Nothing the government can't read" doesn't mean no encryption. It means that there has to be a stored version of the message and the encryption key is handed over if asked, otherwise you go to prison. It'll be no different to what we have now (it's already illegal to withhold an encryption key) but with mandated storage.
It's a serious comment. Sure doing it this way would give the government access to all your knowledge(not really a new state of things). But that won't stop commerce - as long as security from theft is guaranteed, which i think can be assumed under government control.
1. You consider the government as a singular entity. It's a group of people. In that circumstance, it's as secure as the lowest denominator of person, which in a government is low.
2. You're find for them retaining your data, then implementing a law, then using it against you?
3. There are plenty of cases where the government have abused data that has been entrusted to them. There is no commercial motivation via competition for them to do a good job. You are effectively contracting out to a monopoly.
4. There is no absolute security either and it should be in your own hands. The moment you contract it out, you're morally responsible for the competence of who you contracted it out to, yet the government isn't an entity you can easily take to court nor seek compensation from.
5. Keys are complicated to distribute. Do you expect this to be 100% effective?
Consider these a little further then check your opinion against the facts on the table.
With regards to secure technology ,governments, or at least armies and intelligence agencies are most likely leading the race.
With regards embezzeling government money in such system: i believe(and could be wrong), that generally, this isn't a worse problem than the private system. And again, this a problem armies/intel agencies have been dealing it over a long time ,with far higher risks. And of course there's always options of secure auditing(maybe like bitcoin) , further reducing the risk.
With regards to key distribution - if we look at the awful security afforded by credit cards, even though we know how to solve this(chip and pin, for ex.) i'm not sure the government is worse.
As for the issues of power of government and potential for abuse of that power - sure i definitely agree with you(it's a huge problem even today). But again, my comment was about that it's possible to do so in a way that would be compatible with online commerce.
Last week, the UK minister for Internet Safety and Security Baroness Joanna Shields was speaking at a conference in London. She was asked about the potential impact on the fintech sector of mandating backdoors in encryption and she said, in reference to what Cameron said, "That quote was misinterpreted."
Everyone has assumed that when Cameron says that he wants to "ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate", that means that he wants to mandate encryption backdoors.
I think that assumption is incorrect. The guys at Number 10 are well aware that (a) they can't ban math, and (b) the UK tech sector would suffer if they legislated to mandate backdoors in all encryption.
I suspect that what Cameron actual means is that he wants to put in place a legal mechanism to authorise GCHQ (presumably by issuing a warrant) to hack into suspect's laptop or smartphone in order to gain access to the content of whatever messages or communications they may be exchanging with any co-conspirators.
The public statements are very much designed to make people think that they are going to ban encryption. When the media outlets all interpreted it that way there were no government ministers rushing out to correct the misinterpretation, as they normally would after the PM 'accidentally' announced he wanted to destroy a multi billion pound industry.
So even if they aren't actually going to do it, they clearly want people (voters) to think that they are. That's grossly irresponsible in two ways. Firstly the massive risk to UK tech/financial investment. Secondly it creates an expectation among the public and commitariat that encryption bans are feasible and desirable.
The home office has a history of creating wildly impossible expectations among the more reactionary sections of the public, which then results in a huge mess when reality gets in the way. For example talking up deporting 'undesirable' people, and then wasting huge amounts of time and money fighting the courts when they actually try to deport somebody to a country where they would be tried on the basis of evidence gained under torture.
> So even if they aren't actually going to do it, they clearly want people (voters) to think that they are.
This is a good point. They are probably testing the ground. Regardless of what is practically possible, it is very important for Cameron to find out how far he can go in this direction with the public supporting him, or without the public caring (most importantly, before his party risks losing votes). Then he will know his political limitations, not just the technical or economical ones that his advisors know already.
There's actually a law against people who speak out against 'British values' - presumably not those from the Magna Carta, which May et al is very much against.
> I suspect that what Cameron actual means is that he wants to put in place a legal mechanism to authorise GCHQ (presumably by issuing a warrant) to hack into suspect's laptop or smartphone in order to gain access to the content of whatever messages or communications they may be exchanging with any co-conspirators.
Under RIPA if you can prove that you no longer posses the decryption key, you don't have to go to jail. That's not as easy as it sounds, since being a possession of the key "previously" makes the law assumes you still posses the key, but at least you have a chance...
That's a step up from the French key disclosure law, where you go to jail regardless (no backups? your HSM is dead? tough...)
While I hope that's the case, Number 10 must also be aware that the language they're using does make it sound like thei plan is to restrict the availability/legality of ciphers.
Cameron was originally quoted as saying:
> The question is are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: no, we must not
That's a very specific quote that says they want to target the communication itself. Not the machines it's on or the wires it passes through, the 1s and 0s as they go over the wire.
They're either using language to make it sound much more military than it is, in which case they should stop, or they're testing the waters and reigning back when they see the reaction from the tech industry.
I don't like either, and I'd much prefer they asked "What can we do" rather than make their own assertions.
Or knives. I believe the recent beheading in France was caused by a knife. Something must be done about these dangerous weapons that facilitate beheading!
So Cameron wants to reinstate the writ of assistance for the online world? Because that's what his proposed "warrant" is (signed only by the Home Secretary).
What do you want to be done about it, send more young boys from "western" countries to die and/or be crippled like has happened in the wars of the last decade? Spend further billions of dollars/euro and for what, the locals would still hate "us" no matter what when by now its plainly obvious that the greatest danger to the average muslim are other muslims.
I am not sure how wiretapping everyone in the west would help, if someone wants to go to Syria, let them, hell take their passport off an buy them a one way ticket to that shithole to learn all about their religion and how it treats people and hopefully they endup in their heaven surrounded by 72 other jihadi virgins.
Would anybody like to predict and defend a probability above 0.00 that gov.uk will be able to meaningfully impede my ability use cryptography by 2020? Obviously politician's rhetoric, and to a large extent the law, have become unhinged from reality, so the odds of passing one more moronic, ineffectual law are a given: 1.0. But I'm asking someone to seriously state and defend even the slightest possibility that David Cameron might, in even the smallest sense, succeed. I can't.
dude's alleging secret future-tech developed by some modern covert bletchley park, and you're gonna refute it with a fine point about what algorithms can currently do? I don't think you two are playing tennis on the same court.
If Britain mandated encryption for Internet services in the UK, I would feel extremely unsafe making any kind of financial transaction while I'm there unless it's in cash.
Wait, shit, isn't London the global center of the finance industry?
As the domestic European terrorism (ETA, IRA, RAF) faded, our governments/elites imported foreign (mostly Muslim) terrorism and are now using this as an excuse to spy on everyone. I guess if we let them get away with it, we deserve the fallout.
Why would they want to do this? My feeling is so that they can keep control of public order. It's a mystery to me why there hasn't been more public activism around unemployment levels and wealth equality in Europe so far.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/01/europe-...