I think it has become abundantly clear that a fully peer to peer, encryption required (non-optional), no single central server infrastructure solution is the answer.
No points to tap.
No point in tapping the data.
If they want to capture conversations it's time to go back to the proper old ways of actually spying on high-value targets.
This discussion should never be framed as a choice between legal solutions and technical solutions. They are complementary.
The legal approach is correct and easy for the public to understand. Explained correctly it is also popular. The government used to have to do things like get a warrant and investigate specific crimes. They couldn't listen to everyone's phone conversations all the time and they shouldn't be able to do this on the Internet either. Digital dragnets are illegal and unconstitutional.
The technical approach is also correct. If you're building something that makes it harder for criminals inside the government to commit more crimes, you're doing work that is profound and in the best interests of society. Anyone with passion and technical skill can participate in this work. It's the right thing to do.
Both efforts help each other. Keep the government in line and accountable to the people. Make it harder for people inside the government to do the wrong thing. All approaches deserve support and should leverage each other's work. They should cooperate with law-abiding, constitutionally empowered government authorities as well. There are good guys in the government too.
Technical and legal solutions are not complementary, they're relatively unrelated. Legal rules addressing behavior are about what we "should" do. Technical rules are about what we "can" do. Technology is about implementation and enforcement, law is about what we consider to be the correct result.
But the main place where law and tech come together is enforcement. For law to work at all, it has to be enforced relatively evenly. Technology may make a law's enforcement impossible or easy, but it does not make it more or less "right" in the abstract.
And legal is about what recourse we can seek afterwards, when we understand we've messed up the implementation and security had failed.
Relying on legal protections alone is absurd. Relying on technology without any legal recourse for failures maybe somewhat less so, but still not suitable for this "real" world we live in. Not without reconsidering our approaches and attitudes to way too many things.
> And legal is about what recourse we can seek afterwards, when we understand we've messed up the implementation and security had failed.
Not at all. Legal rules are about what we "should" do, what's right and what's wrong. However, legal rules need to be enforced to be effective. If you create a legal rule that's impossible to enforce and everyone flouts it, not only does your rule not get enforced, but it also creates doubt in the entire legal system.
So legal rules ought to consult with what's possible and impossible, but they should not be dictated by them.
This is a case of the government trying to force Facebook to essentially strip out their technology; saying technology is the solution here is kinda ignorant of the actual issue
I think that’s close, but until a technical solution to this comes around, we’ve got to look elsewhere.
An easy target is saying the government is too powerful. That would be a mistake. If Facebook were more powerful than the government, we would no be in any better hands.
The problems with the US government are that it does not work for the people.
It would be painfully short-sighted to say this debacle goes to show the gov and private companies are not too involved with one another. This will be handled with some deal that will deepen the coupling and citizens will not have a say. That’s how most things in our lives get handles. Without regard for us, that is.
Private interests have eroded our state of civility. Citizens voices mean nothing and that is all that’s going on here.
We need our government back. Nothing else is going to solve this, unless of course we can actually address the technical issue that you raised. That would be nice.
A government that was our government would simply not step over this line. It’s possible; not easy, but possible.
I am not sure what you are onto. People are still voting for about every election so the realization that the government is not what they wanted is not anywhere in the public psyche.
Id say it would be better to decentralize governments so that you dont have any great accumulation of power anywhere, and by bringing government closer to communities you automatically bring back power to the people.
Decentralizing government would not have the effect of stopping power consolidation. It just means power gets accumulated by the megacorporations, which is an even worse outcome.
A country that's going to mandate backdoors/access to such communications, are going to outlaw communication methods they can't backdoor.
Say Apple makes a federated end-to-end encrypted messenger app, the government will still go to Apple and say "let us read all the messages, otherwise you can't sell your devices". THAT is the problem, and it can't be solved by more technology and shouting "BLOCKCHAIN!"
If a largish group of users could create end-to-end encryption not with a single company but with "readily available materials", then stopping it could be harder.
So it's a combination of state dictate and the practical ability of users to defy that. This isn't saying I'm optimistic, I'm rather pessimistic on any ability of a wide home-grown encrypted-messaging milieu to appear - if few are aiming for this, those few can easily be picked-off. But I don't think we should just give up on any part of this.
Possession of encryption software could be treated the same as possession of drugs. On the next stop and search you would only had to handover your phone. If police password will not work it will be confiscated. If encryption software is found you go in the dock. It is the future. Society accepted ridiculous laws to jail people for having a plant, they'll accept jailing for programs. Only terrorists, thieves and adulterers encrypt their messages ;-)
The War on Drugs is considered a failure and in parts of the world like NSW, Australia made prostituion legal in 1979 in both cases because criminalising things most people use generally doesn't work and all you do is randomly jail people for doing the exact same thing as a large proportion of the population.
I fail to see the point, without encryption, there's no modern web, no e-commerce, no smartphones, absolutely everything relies on it like water. Unless you want to go back to pre-2000's technology of course.
Of course e-commerce will be fine, because browser vendors will obtain licenses to ship TLS modules and as a condition of such will include the .gov root cert.
It's trivial when you can pass arbitrary legislation.
Back in the 90s we had to deal with US gov restrictions on encryption export. Software companies and organisations fell into line. It was a big deal when 128-bit keyed Netscape became available globally in 1997, per State Dept approval, but even then the full-strength server-side SSL was still restricted to 'approved' entities.
And even 56-bit server SSL was only exportable with us.gov key escrow.
I used to use Apache with the 40-bit SSL option. Pathetic strength but no-one was going to risk jail-time by breaking laws.
The difference being that there's way too much necessary legitimate use of cryptography to stop now, and as the traffic is encrypted, you can't tell what traffic isn't legitimate. Plus steganography and plenty of places accessible on the net that aren't the United States.
This isn't meatspace, the dynamics are quite different.
There is nothing you cannot legislate for. For example use of encryption could be licensed, just as drugs are. If you don't have prescription, you go down.
Possession of encryption software could be treated the same as possession of drugs.
Well, then clearly it would quickly become ubiquitous. I mean, if a war on encryption that was just like the war on drugs were to be launched, why my local stream bed might "place burned passwords here" on the tin-can that currently reads "used needles here." (put there by the other homeless people).
There's a difference between running a Tor exit node and encrypting a personal conversation.
At least in the US, if a US citizen is part of a potentially incriminating conversation, the government's going to have a hard time forcing a court to force the citizen to decrypt the conversation.
Lawyers, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a conversation wouldn't be subject to the vagaries of "combination to a safe"-production loopholes.
Its not laws since the US government and probably others have already shown with the NSA and the like that they have no respect whatsoever for the existing laws and nobody actually seemed to care one bit about that.
The issue is the government wanting to strip the encryption going forward. In other words, even the most decentralized & encrypted app can still have NSA_RemoteConn.Log(dat) written into it's source code
Stripping encryption is one thing, sure. But for the backdoor, you'd have to have the clients phone nsaserv.spy/writeremoteconnlog then or sure, write some record on the client's device. You can't "tap" encrypted communications unless you can figure out how to factor integers then you'd get a Field's medal.
Or, ofc, get people to adopt insecure protocols. That we know (or have good suspicion) they've tried.
This actually feels more like what I would expect police work to be like given the situation.
They most certainly do not have cause to demand access to swaths of comms no matter whose comms they're after and most assuredly when that access actually entails enabling access to all of the comms.
I posit there is no authority that should be able to demand this as a matter of the right to human existence. Law, order, society and government should not have ultimate authority on private communications no matter what the tech is capable of. We, as humans in a modern world, can speak and if desired do so in private. This is our right as individuals and if encryption helps us accomplish and enforce that right then so be it.
If they have probable cause then they need to beat feet or beat heads but either way they need to get to work. And by work I do not mean trying to impose a different reality than the one that we currently have - where math is fact, compute is cheap and source is open.
What's it going to be? 100 go free or six lines from everyone?
set up the device to wipe itself after $x number of incorrect attempts. keep giving the wrong password after every whack from the wrench. then you have plausible deniability. "how can i possibly think straight when you keep hitting me with that wrench?" just need to make $x a value small enough that you can survive the wrench.
No good, it is already standard for forensic teams to clone and checksum a hardrive before attempting to look through files. The clone is sent to evidence and any password attempts will be made on a copy. The "original" copy will be kept safe and any number of passwords can be used against nth iteration of copying the clone.
Isn't this the purpose of the secure enclave on iPhones? Taking the drive away from the secure enclave makes the drive useless and the enclave only allows a few password attempts.
This is exactly this. It also allows a weak password (4 digits PIN) to de ok. The enclave which holds the actual encryption keyd will refuse to hand them over if the right trigger is hit (too many attempts, too high a rate,...)
In practice, chances are those 5 are all rigged. They are rigged because you have so far trusted:
- That there are no tricks in the algorithm or its practical implementation
- That there are no tricks in the key generation algorithm or its practical implementation
- Hundreds of contributors to the software implementation of those algorithms
- The guy that compiled the software into binary form and distributed it
- The compiler used to compile the software and all the libraries and dependencies the software has
- Hardware manufacturers
So, common sense tells me that because you have trusted so many people, in practice, it is very unlikely you can have end-to-end encryption or any real ambition to have privacy.
This does not even consider more aspects, like your operating system, your sources of entropy, etc.
P2P routing is hard (nat bypass only really works on 80-90% of networks which is not good enough and Tor is unviable for mass adoption), and decentralized identifiers are generally not liked by users
Other than that, it's doable.
Spam protection and censorship (necessary for mobile app stores) can be distributed as opt-out blacklists. If it gets to be a huge problem then a "enter this password to add me" type thing could work too.
I've been compiling a bunch of ideas as such for fully P2P decentralized/encrypted chat, but I'm stuck at the two issues I mentioned earlier.
Intermediary is not the best word here. What if you could use a storage infrastructure to implemented a protocol for storing and retrieving packets across NAT and disconnected devices. If the role of storage is similar to the raw networks transport via ISP, then it is not more centralized than using an ISP.
Keep in mind they do have the infrastructure in place(carriers and oems) to directly tap on cellphones. While a federated encrypted chat services are a step in the right direction, we won't get truly 'free' communication device until an open source hardware to software solution exists.
Plus a client which is under complete control of the user - a phone could never be and a laptop running Linux with Intel me stripped-out might be if you're lucky.
I believe it's substantially more difficult, legally. CALEA for data-in-transit and judicial interpetations for data-at-rest mean it isn't as strictly protected as personally-controlled data.
So it's definitely covered by a different legal regime, to set aside the technical bits.
Slack literally stands for Searchable Log of All Content and Knowledge. It’s incredibly useful and transformative for what it is. It’s about the furthest thing possible from private.
No points to tap.
No point in tapping the data.
If they want to capture conversations it's time to go back to the proper old ways of actually spying on high-value targets.