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>The controversial so-called “ghost protocol” has been fiercely opposed by companies, civil society organizations and some security experts – but intelligence a

>The controversial so-called “ghost protocol” has been fiercely opposed by companies, civil society organizations and some security experts – but intelligence and law enforcement agencies continue to lobby for it. Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused. Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them?

Nasrudith 7y ago
The answer is no of course - they have the thought terminating cliche of "national security" to protect against accountability. Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around. If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker? That is inexcusable incompetence.
- isostatic 7y ago
  > Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around. However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication". "We" also have nothing to hide. This yougov poll shows more Americans support backdoors in encryption than oppose it https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/2015/10/19/americans-all-stripes-worried-about-data-privacy https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/... https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2015-10-19/data4.png https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inline...
  - pizza234 7y ago
    > However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication". This is appropriate, under the assuption of accountability; right now, three letter agencies aren't subject to it. > "We" also have nothing to hide. This is disingenous or naive (and it's a worringly widespread idea). Literally (as in literal-literal) anybody can be accused and charged, it's just a matter of legal power¹. Giving up privacy makes it dangerously easier. ¹=There's even a book on this subject (although the angle is not precisely this): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    At first I thought that you linked to the wrong poll by mistake. The last question does show more "favor" than "oppose" for installing back doors in encrypted systems, but the first question shows much more "oppose" than "favor" for reducing encryption to help government agencies. The second question shows that more people want tech companies to protect customer privacy than to cooperate with government agencies to fight terrorism and crime. So people want encryption back doors that don't reduce encryption and don't require tech companies to cooperate with government agencies. Of course "we can have all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff" is a common delusion among government agencies proposing encryption back doors too.
    - inopinatus 7y ago
      Yes, since the operational outcomes of the first and last questions are the same, the main notion this poll really confirms is that people in general don’t understand cryptography. c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation can override mathematics.
      - isostatic 7y ago
        > c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation can override mathematics. I believe the phrase is PI IS EXACTLY 3
        DomreiRoam 7y ago
        According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill the value of pi would have been defined as 3.2 in Indiana.
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    I mean, when you the word question like that and say the backdoor is to “monitor suspected terrorists” of course the average idiot will agree. They think it won’t apply to them & their communications. They aren’t terrorists, so why should they mind? Most people have no idea how far the government is able to stretch the law under the auspice of “safety.” Perhaps naively, I believe people would be outraged if they actually understood how the Patriot Act is used and what a backdoor would allow the government to do.
    - isostatic 7y ago
      > when you the word question like that and say the backdoor is to “monitor suspected terrorists” of course the average idiot will agree And that's where democracy falls down
  - taneq 7y ago
    The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the people supporting backdoors here also think China's government monitoring is a gross violation of human rights.
    - humantiy 7y ago
      Other funny thing on that is if you are a citizen of one of the five eyes and china was putting a backdoor into phones it would probably wouldn't matter too much since they have little influence on you unlike say your own gov having that same capability and using it.
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  I think it’s normally wrong to pose these issues as intelligence services trying to come up with new ways to oppress the population. It requires some kind of conspiracy either of the whole organisation or a conspiracy of the highest levels to trick the rest of the organisation into oppressing the population. In reality these are massive organisations of people who want to do good and protect people from actual dangers and repeats of actual harmful incidents. So I think framing the motives as malevolent isn’t helpful because the motives aren’t malevolent. I think it’s much more reasonable to ask why these things arise. Eg maybe the government says “how will you stop something like x happening again” and they say “well it would have been really hard to detect but we were slightly suspicious of them. If only we could get a warrant to find out what they were talking about...”. And this probably seems reasonable to the minister who still thinks these intelligence agencies are steaming open letters or tapping into phone lines. It doesn’t even need to be the case that people know these laws would work/be useful, all they need is to feel that they would. And this can quite easily happen without any malicious intentions. Other things one could imagine happening are finding warrants annoying because they feel like a formality and feeling that the pause in the process potentially causes harm. Or seeing the whole “I ask my ally to spy on my citizens” process as a silly way to get round an annoying loophole. I can imagine something like this happening in a multinational company and if you see intelligence allies as actually working together in a team it doesn’t seem so crazy to see it as a silly legal formality to allow the actual teamwork. So (to say the same thing again) I don’t think these things arise from bad intentions. A final thing is that many people in these intelligence organisations seem to care about how this surveillance is done in an ethical way (although some people don’t). Eg note here that they want to get this ability with a warrant (perhaps they really want it warrantless and plan to get it or perhaps they feel like they were burned by the various revelations and don’t think they could get it anyway). Compare this to the way much of the modern mass surveillance we are exposed to every day is planned where there is virtually no ethical oversight at all.
  - torified 7y ago
    Those are all great points butit's still unbelievably scary to think of a government that is storing all digital communications of all its citizens forever. You'd have to be super naive or ignorant of history to think any different. Even if you trust our current regime, you never know what could happen in the future. It's just too much potential harm in exchange for the convenience of simply not having to do targeted spying instead of mass surveillance. Nobody likes terrorists but mass surveillance is just way too open to abuse.
ummonk 7y ago
Well there is a middle ground - one where any conversation could be examined after the fact but only with an auditable warrant-based investigation.
- consp 7y ago
  Which still requires a backdoor or control agency which is insecure and can be exploited by anyone by grace of existing and given some time/effort.
  - ummonk 7y ago
    The same can be said for the organization distributing E2EE messaging app binaries (or source + compiler) even without any official backdoor.
- humantiy 7y ago
  There isn't though unfortunately. If you allow it audit trail or not it can and will be abused. FISA court being an example of that exact type of warrant abuse. Even without a warrant someone would have to hold the master key or keys that any nation state would go to great lengths if they weren't in possession of them and if that did hold it; they will abuse it. They seem to unlock most of this info though by attacking the endpoint itself anyway.
gnode 7y ago
> Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them? Intelligence agents willingly sacrifice much of their personal privacy as a condition of their security clearance, so by selection bias would be more willing to subject others to loss of privacy.
- JoeSmithson 7y ago
  Also, there is no exception in the law for LEOs or intelligence officers, the same rules literally do apply to them.
  - hestipod 7y ago
    On paper yes. In practice no.
- humantiy 7y ago
  I wasn't referring to personal so much. More so the conversations they have that they are trying to keep a secret.
vineyardmike 7y ago
So I broadly agree with your point (that 'backdoors are bad'), but I'm both curious, and want to play devil's advocate. > its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused. Is there actually any good, cite-able instance of government backdoors being abused? I believe it is possible, but i don't know of any instance of it happening.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
  Food for thought: Some of the zero days we have heard about could intentionally have been left in there at the behest of the government for their use.
Barrin92 7y ago
>Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused. I'm going to defend what is probably the minority opinion on this site and say yes, I'd rather live in a society where communication is open to surveillance. The reason being that the situation appears to me very binary (and I think most people would agree on this), either there's strong encryption in which case almost all communication is not subject to surveillance, or the state has the capacity to eaves-drop. The first scenario scares me because it essentially eliminates the ability to engage in surveillance when it is needed. Be it financial fraud on a wide scale, terrorism, crime, radicalisation or whatever else, and society has a vested interested in having the capacity to prevent this. I don't think the two most cmmon criticisms hold up. The first one is that surveillance affects many people adversely. I don't think that's true. Nobody has an interest in eaves-dropping on average citizens, it's simply a waste of resources. The second one is the slippery slope line of argument you brought up. I don't think there is a lot of evidence that, in states of law, surveillance has been abused or employed illegaly.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
  Here is some evidence that in states of law like the US, surveillance has been abused. [1] [1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-routinely-misuse-state-federal-databases-stalk-romantic-interests-business-partners-family-even/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-ro...
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    I don't think that falls into the category of surveillance in the context of encryption, because individual police officers abusing privileged databases will still be a thing in a perfectly encrypted world, unless we take all information away from official agencies. I was thinking more along the lines of targetting of political dissidents, building unlawful programs, arresting people on the basis of information not lawfully collected, and so on. The Snowden revelations brought this topic up when it comes to US intelligence abroad, but I don't think such violations ever occured inside the US. (or respective western countries, say).

Nasrudith 7y ago

The answer is no of course - they have the thought terminating cliche of "national security" to protect against accountability. Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around. If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker? That is inexcusable incompetence.

isostatic 7y ago
> Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around. However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication". "We" also have nothing to hide. This yougov poll shows more Americans support backdoors in encryption than oppose it https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/2015/10/19/americans-all-stripes-worried-about-data-privacy https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/... https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2015-10-19/data4.png https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inline...
- pizza234 7y ago
  > However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication". This is appropriate, under the assuption of accountability; right now, three letter agencies aren't subject to it. > "We" also have nothing to hide. This is disingenous or naive (and it's a worringly widespread idea). Literally (as in literal-literal) anybody can be accused and charged, it's just a matter of legal power¹. Giving up privacy makes it dangerously easier. ¹=There's even a book on this subject (although the angle is not precisely this): https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
- philipkglass 7y ago
  At first I thought that you linked to the wrong poll by mistake. The last question does show more "favor" than "oppose" for installing back doors in encrypted systems, but the first question shows much more "oppose" than "favor" for reducing encryption to help government agencies. The second question shows that more people want tech companies to protect customer privacy than to cooperate with government agencies to fight terrorism and crime. So people want encryption back doors that don't reduce encryption and don't require tech companies to cooperate with government agencies. Of course "we can have all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff" is a common delusion among government agencies proposing encryption back doors too.
  - inopinatus 7y ago
    Yes, since the operational outcomes of the first and last questions are the same, the main notion this poll really confirms is that people in general don’t understand cryptography. c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation can override mathematics.
    - isostatic 7y ago
      > c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation can override mathematics. I believe the phrase is PI IS EXACTLY 3
      - DomreiRoam 7y ago
        According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill the value of pi would have been defined as 3.2 in Indiana.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  I mean, when you the word question like that and say the backdoor is to “monitor suspected terrorists” of course the average idiot will agree. They think it won’t apply to them & their communications. They aren’t terrorists, so why should they mind? Most people have no idea how far the government is able to stretch the law under the auspice of “safety.” Perhaps naively, I believe people would be outraged if they actually understood how the Patriot Act is used and what a backdoor would allow the government to do.
  - isostatic 7y ago
    > when you the word question like that and say the backdoor is to “monitor suspected terrorists” of course the average idiot will agree And that's where democracy falls down
- taneq 7y ago
  The funny thing is, I bet 90% of the people supporting backdoors here also think China's government monitoring is a gross violation of human rights.
  - humantiy 7y ago
    Other funny thing on that is if you are a citizen of one of the five eyes and china was putting a backdoor into phones it would probably wouldn't matter too much since they have little influence on you unlike say your own gov having that same capability and using it.
dan-robertson 7y ago
I think it’s normally wrong to pose these issues as intelligence services trying to come up with new ways to oppress the population. It requires some kind of conspiracy either of the whole organisation or a conspiracy of the highest levels to trick the rest of the organisation into oppressing the population. In reality these are massive organisations of people who want to do good and protect people from actual dangers and repeats of actual harmful incidents. So I think framing the motives as malevolent isn’t helpful because the motives aren’t malevolent. I think it’s much more reasonable to ask why these things arise. Eg maybe the government says “how will you stop something like x happening again” and they say “well it would have been really hard to detect but we were slightly suspicious of them. If only we could get a warrant to find out what they were talking about...”. And this probably seems reasonable to the minister who still thinks these intelligence agencies are steaming open letters or tapping into phone lines. It doesn’t even need to be the case that people know these laws would work/be useful, all they need is to feel that they would. And this can quite easily happen without any malicious intentions. Other things one could imagine happening are finding warrants annoying because they feel like a formality and feeling that the pause in the process potentially causes harm. Or seeing the whole “I ask my ally to spy on my citizens” process as a silly way to get round an annoying loophole. I can imagine something like this happening in a multinational company and if you see intelligence allies as actually working together in a team it doesn’t seem so crazy to see it as a silly legal formality to allow the actual teamwork. So (to say the same thing again) I don’t think these things arise from bad intentions. A final thing is that many people in these intelligence organisations seem to care about how this surveillance is done in an ethical way (although some people don’t). Eg note here that they want to get this ability with a warrant (perhaps they really want it warrantless and plan to get it or perhaps they feel like they were burned by the various revelations and don’t think they could get it anyway). Compare this to the way much of the modern mass surveillance we are exposed to every day is planned where there is virtually no ethical oversight at all.
- torified 7y ago
  Those are all great points butit's still unbelievably scary to think of a government that is storing all digital communications of all its citizens forever. You'd have to be super naive or ignorant of history to think any different. Even if you trust our current regime, you never know what could happen in the future. It's just too much potential harm in exchange for the convenience of simply not having to do targeted spying instead of mass surveillance. Nobody likes terrorists but mass surveillance is just way too open to abuse.

ummonk 7y ago

Well there is a middle ground - one where any conversation could be examined after the fact but only with an auditable warrant-based investigation.

consp 7y ago
Which still requires a backdoor or control agency which is insecure and can be exploited by anyone by grace of existing and given some time/effort.
- ummonk 7y ago
  The same can be said for the organization distributing E2EE messaging app binaries (or source + compiler) even without any official backdoor.
humantiy 7y ago
There isn't though unfortunately. If you allow it audit trail or not it can and will be abused. FISA court being an example of that exact type of warrant abuse. Even without a warrant someone would have to hold the master key or keys that any nation state would go to great lengths if they weren't in possession of them and if that did hold it; they will abuse it. They seem to unlock most of this info though by attacking the endpoint itself anyway.

gnode 7y ago

> Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them? Intelligence agents willingly sacrifice much of their personal privacy as a condition of their security clearance, so by selection bias would be more willing to subject others to loss of privacy.

JoeSmithson 7y ago
Also, there is no exception in the law for LEOs or intelligence officers, the same rules literally do apply to them.
- hestipod 7y ago
  On paper yes. In practice no.
humantiy 7y ago
I wasn't referring to personal so much. More so the conversations they have that they are trying to keep a secret.

vineyardmike 7y ago

So I broadly agree with your point (that 'backdoors are bad'), but I'm both curious, and want to play devil's advocate. > its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused. Is there actually any good, cite-able instance of government backdoors being abused? I believe it is possible, but i don't know of any instance of it happening.

bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
Food for thought: Some of the zero days we have heard about could intentionally have been left in there at the behest of the government for their use.

Barrin92 7y ago

>Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused. I'm going to defend what is probably the minority opinion on this site and say yes, I'd rather live in a society where communication is open to surveillance. The reason being that the situation appears to me very binary (and I think most people would agree on this), either there's strong encryption in which case almost all communication is not subject to surveillance, or the state has the capacity to eaves-drop. The first scenario scares me because it essentially eliminates the ability to engage in surveillance when it is needed. Be it financial fraud on a wide scale, terrorism, crime, radicalisation or whatever else, and society has a vested interested in having the capacity to prevent this. I don't think the two most cmmon criticisms hold up. The first one is that surveillance affects many people adversely. I don't think that's true. Nobody has an interest in eaves-dropping on average citizens, it's simply a waste of resources. The second one is the slippery slope line of argument you brought up. I don't think there is a lot of evidence that, in states of law, surveillance has been abused or employed illegaly.

bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
Here is some evidence that in states of law like the US, surveillance has been abused. [1] [1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-routinely-misuse-state-federal-databases-stalk-romantic-interests-business-partners-family-even/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-ro...
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I don't think that falls into the category of surveillance in the context of encryption, because individual police officers abusing privileged databases will still be a thing in a perfectly encrypted world, unless we take all information away from official agencies. I was thinking more along the lines of targetting of political dissidents, building unlawful programs, arresting people on the basis of information not lawfully collected, and so on. The Snowden revelations brought this topic up when it comes to US intelligence abroad, but I don't think such violations ever occured inside the US. (or respective western countries, say).