6 ms·

I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, whil

by vbo 3y ago

I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this has always been the status quo, then any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin. We have capitulated on privacy, because it's a vague concept and we don't equate it with freedom, or perhaps our sense of being free is so ingrained in modern societies that we see no risk to it being lost lest something drastic and immediate takes it away, when in fact the very system designed to protect our freedoms (led by people that look like us, think like us and enjoy these freedoms as much as we do) is malfunctioning and slowly erodes rights that previous generations enjoyed. We're not collectively trying to harm our freedoms and yet here we are. And shortsightedness on the side of lawmakers is baffling. Nobody takes responsibility for vision, we just go along with implementing solutions without considering broader impact or history. If the government has all your correspondence and the government falls into the wrong hands, you're toast, assuming you do not align with the leadership. We're writing that possibility off, but someone gets to brag that they've written legislation to stop the bad guys -- and maybe they did, but the cost was our collective freedom.

lynx23 3y ago
To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years. This basic argument for encryption is often raised in combination with countries which we already consider non-free. But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this message during COVID times. I would never have expected society deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect anything frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to encrypt communication even stronger for me.
- sbarre 3y ago
  Yes, this is something a lot of people don't think about: What is acceptable (even legal) today may not be tomorrow, or in X years (10, 15, or more).. If we allow all our private conversations and messages to be permanently archived (and you know they will be, disk space is effectively infinite), who is to say that wouldn't be used against us in the future when laws, or even social standards, have drastically changed?
  - t-writescode 3y ago
    And we literally have examples, right now, of Facebook handing over private messages between people talking about abortion and then those were used to convict someone. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion It's the first like 4 links right now
  - Toenex 3y ago
    Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data, which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do, who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist just because they've never heard of a park run.
  - throwaway914 3y ago
    You can demonstrate this to folks with a very recent change in government: Abortion and LGBT rights. How much do you want to bet states like Texas or Florida will use government surveillance to prosecute folks seeking medical care? I give it a month before we hear about someone being charged with some form of conspiracy to leave the state before their poor kids are taken. "Exhibit A will show the defendants intent to move their children across state lines..."
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      If you think that's bad, just wait until Abbott/DeSantis-like politicians take over the White House and Congress.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  Yep, this just gives them the tools when they go full fascist. For example the USA had a recent coup attempt, and that same person attempting the coup will be running again for president and there is a non-zero chance that he will win. He has openly stated that he wanted to "reform" the government and install only loyalists, that is the type of regime you don't want to have instant access to all communications.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  You assume your current government to be benevolent. We see a lot of political prosecution from these benevolent governments even today.
_8j50 3y ago
> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority I'd like you to back up that claim because from what I had seen about surveillance and terrorism most people supported it(even the patriot act had popular support in the polls). Only people smart enough to know about encryption oppose this. Most people who don't understand tech pretty much assume the government is already looking at messages. Long before snowden, illegal phone tapping was a public secret people were fine with so long as the government doesn't abuse that access. Even before computers, they had secret rooms where they opened to read people's letters without a warrant. Not one major political candidate that I can recall since 9/11 has mentioned expiring the patriot act or investingating the NSA and recommending criminal charges in their campaign, nor does it get brought up in their town halls.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Anti encryption? Not sure most people support that specifically. But generally speaking, I dont think you’ve emphasized it strongly enough. People arent just supportive of trading privacy and freedom for the promise of safety. They are literally begging for it.
- schoen 3y ago
  I think you parsed the comment you're replying to backwards. Like you, the previous commenter suggested that opposition to surveillance is uncommon.
dralley 3y ago
>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new. The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with fundamental rights! Had those rights been respected all along instead of exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of how easy it was, it wouldn’t be such a shock to lose the ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services despite government threats. It would seem like the Human Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don’t know if it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private In principle they were not private but in practice they were because in most places the police had to realize that there was a conversation of interest, get a warrant, and use scarce resources. Now the authorities are able to use machines to monitor traffic patterns for almost all communication the cost of interception is much lower.
  - stuart78 3y ago
    The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way. Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warrantless-searches-us-citizen-data-plunged-2022-rcna82061 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.
- jen20 3y ago
  The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling your location - and there is no restriction on law enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly rosy in the US either.
- adra 3y ago
  This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)? I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?
  - nwsm 3y ago
    Is TFA not a good enough example?
    - makeitdouble 3y ago
      It's more complicated than that. First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov. also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities instead of getting a clean entry point) Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default. There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99% of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK ones.
  - 3y ago
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major social media players? Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and getting outlawed in many places?
- vbo 3y ago
  They could and they did, the problem is they’re now attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  It's not just about encryption and privacy. That's missing the forest for the trees. For a democracy to function, people need to be able to have free and candid discussions about any topic without the fear of being ostracised, persecuted or whatever. Only that way can ideas be exchanged and people get a hunch of what others think about stuff of relevance. Only that way can people partake in sensible democratic decision-making. Framed opinions pushed onto you by one-way media are no substitute. That's dictatorship in disguise. "Classic" ways of public communication, like town halls, pubs, marketplaces or whatnot, cannot fill that role any longer. But online, places like Twitter, Reddit and some chat services that closed the gap now get killed off, too. This dystopia cannot be let come to pass.
- lanstin 3y ago
  I used PGP Phone with my dad, which means it was pre-Dec 1999. The crypto battle is kind of orthogonal to general privacy concerns. Stuff like being allowed to sell location data from your phone is not related to building back-doors into encryption. The argument against crypto backdoors is pretty simple: bad guys can get good crypto, and backdoors invariably end up providing access to bad actors, via hacking or secret leaking or corruption.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable communication even more. I’d like to believe we’re reverting back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation but now over long distant.
hiatus 3y ago
It's crazy that we allow this at all. The government can't observe clandestine conversations that occur in person, does that mean they can mandate us to carry a government recording device? That people don't equally balk at requests to encumber encryption is baffling.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  > a government recording device Many people believe this is happening with your phone. It's a recording device after all, and usually carried by most people. If not you then someone nearby likely has one. All these conversations can be transcripted automatically and the vast amounts of text can be analyzed by AI for whatever purpose they want. The infrastructure is already available.
- Nellyz 3y ago
  [dead]
- ashton314 3y ago
  I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.
  - datalus 3y ago
    Yeah... the crux is should electronic conversations be afforded the same rights, and by extension are they assumed rights for all communication? Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.
    - itronitron 3y ago
      By analogy, what if I have multiple pairs of tin cans, where each pair of tin cans is connected by a string, and sell those pairs of cans to people so that they can have private conversations at a distance from one another. If I provide privately owned physical infrastructure for protecting those strings and facilitating the routing of the strings am I obligated to make that available to the government for eavesdropping?
b59831 3y ago
[flagged]
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  If the definition of free speech doesnt feel over inclusive then its not free speech.
- eli 3y ago
  Cmon who is saying that? Plenty of people believe in limits to free speech but very very few would draw the line there.
- wilg 3y ago
  Wait, do you think there are people who think “Let’s Go Brandon” is anything but a hilarious conservative self-own?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Yeah. Literally everyone who says it unironically. So the original usage.
    - wilg 3y ago
      I thought of this immediately but was too lazy to edit so this is what I deserve
  - crackercrews 3y ago
    How is this a self-own?
    - flangola7 3y ago
      Bad faith questions don't get entertained. Shoo.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Because it makes people look like pathetic muppets. If you mean "Fuck Joe Biden", say "Fuck Joe Biden", don't clutch your damn pearls about it.
cmiles74 3y ago
An insidious part of this discussion is this idea that these laws do not interfere with encryption. IMHO, it's a dishonest stance to take but when debated, the first thing defenders of this legislation say is that this "does nothing to break encryption" or "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive — we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers." In this plan messages are sent to a third party for analysis. Sure the messages sent to the third party are encrypted but your privacy is entirely violated. https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/
JohnFen 3y ago
> [...] any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker

by vbo 3y ago

lynx23 3y ago

To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years. This basic argument for encryption is often raised in combination with countries which we already consider non-free. But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this message during COVID times. I would never have expected society deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect anything frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to encrypt communication even stronger for me.

sbarre 3y ago
Yes, this is something a lot of people don't think about: What is acceptable (even legal) today may not be tomorrow, or in X years (10, 15, or more).. If we allow all our private conversations and messages to be permanently archived (and you know they will be, disk space is effectively infinite), who is to say that wouldn't be used against us in the future when laws, or even social standards, have drastically changed?
- t-writescode 3y ago
  And we literally have examples, right now, of Facebook handing over private messages between people talking about abortion and then those were used to convict someone. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=facebook+police+abortion It's the first like 4 links right now
- Toenex 3y ago
  Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data, which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do, who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist just because they've never heard of a park run.
- throwaway914 3y ago
  You can demonstrate this to folks with a very recent change in government: Abortion and LGBT rights. How much do you want to bet states like Texas or Florida will use government surveillance to prosecute folks seeking medical care? I give it a month before we hear about someone being charged with some form of conspiracy to leave the state before their poor kids are taken. "Exhibit A will show the defendants intent to move their children across state lines..."
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    If you think that's bad, just wait until Abbott/DeSantis-like politicians take over the White House and Congress.
lost_tourist 3y ago
Yep, this just gives them the tools when they go full fascist. For example the USA had a recent coup attempt, and that same person attempting the coup will be running again for president and there is a non-zero chance that he will win. He has openly stated that he wanted to "reform" the government and install only loyalists, that is the type of regime you don't want to have instant access to all communications.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
You assume your current government to be benevolent. We see a lot of political prosecution from these benevolent governments even today.

_8j50 3y ago

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority I'd like you to back up that claim because from what I had seen about surveillance and terrorism most people supported it(even the patriot act had popular support in the polls). Only people smart enough to know about encryption oppose this. Most people who don't understand tech pretty much assume the government is already looking at messages. Long before snowden, illegal phone tapping was a public secret people were fine with so long as the government doesn't abuse that access. Even before computers, they had secret rooms where they opened to read people's letters without a warrant. Not one major political candidate that I can recall since 9/11 has mentioned expiring the patriot act or investingating the NSA and recommending criminal charges in their campaign, nor does it get brought up in their town halls.

nonethewiser 3y ago
Anti encryption? Not sure most people support that specifically. But generally speaking, I dont think you’ve emphasized it strongly enough. People arent just supportive of trading privacy and freedom for the promise of safety. They are literally begging for it.
schoen 3y ago
I think you parsed the comment you're replying to backwards. Like you, the previous commenter suggested that opposition to surveillance is uncommon.

dralley 3y ago

>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new. The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.

jonhohle 3y ago
Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with fundamental rights! Had those rights been respected all along instead of exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of how easy it was, it wouldn’t be such a shock to lose the ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services despite government threats. It would seem like the Human Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don’t know if it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
> Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private In principle they were not private but in practice they were because in most places the police had to realize that there was a conversation of interest, get a warrant, and use scarce resources. Now the authorities are able to use machines to monitor traffic patterns for almost all communication the cost of interception is much lower.
- stuart78 3y ago
  The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way. Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warrantless-searches-us-citizen-data-plunged-2022-rcna82061 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...

tick_tock_tick 3y ago

> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.

jen20 3y ago
The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling your location - and there is no restriction on law enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly rosy in the US either.
adra 3y ago
This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)? I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?
- nwsm 3y ago
  Is TFA not a good enough example?
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    It's more complicated than that. First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov. also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities instead of getting a clean entry point) Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default. There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99% of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK ones.
- 3y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major social media players? Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and getting outlawed in many places?

vbo 3y ago
They could and they did, the problem is they’re now attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.
Loquebantur 3y ago
It's not just about encryption and privacy. That's missing the forest for the trees. For a democracy to function, people need to be able to have free and candid discussions about any topic without the fear of being ostracised, persecuted or whatever. Only that way can ideas be exchanged and people get a hunch of what others think about stuff of relevance. Only that way can people partake in sensible democratic decision-making. Framed opinions pushed onto you by one-way media are no substitute. That's dictatorship in disguise. "Classic" ways of public communication, like town halls, pubs, marketplaces or whatnot, cannot fill that role any longer. But online, places like Twitter, Reddit and some chat services that closed the gap now get killed off, too. This dystopia cannot be let come to pass.
lanstin 3y ago
I used PGP Phone with my dad, which means it was pre-Dec 1999. The crypto battle is kind of orthogonal to general privacy concerns. Stuff like being allowed to sell location data from your phone is not related to building back-doors into encryption. The argument against crypto backdoors is pretty simple: bad guys can get good crypto, and backdoors invariably end up providing access to bad actors, via hacking or secret leaking or corruption.
jonhohle 3y ago
In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable communication even more. I’d like to believe we’re reverting back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation but now over long distant.

hiatus 3y ago

It's crazy that we allow this at all. The government can't observe clandestine conversations that occur in person, does that mean they can mandate us to carry a government recording device? That people don't equally balk at requests to encumber encryption is baffling.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
> a government recording device Many people believe this is happening with your phone. It's a recording device after all, and usually carried by most people. If not you then someone nearby likely has one. All these conversations can be transcripted automatically and the vast amounts of text can be analyzed by AI for whatever purpose they want. The infrastructure is already available.
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]
ashton314 3y ago
I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.
- datalus 3y ago
  Yeah... the crux is should electronic conversations be afforded the same rights, and by extension are they assumed rights for all communication? Where to draw the line? It's definitely murky.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    By analogy, what if I have multiple pairs of tin cans, where each pair of tin cans is connected by a string, and sell those pairs of cans to people so that they can have private conversations at a distance from one another. If I provide privately owned physical infrastructure for protecting those strings and facilitating the routing of the strings am I obligated to make that available to the government for eavesdropping?

b59831 3y ago

[flagged]

nonethewiser 3y ago
If the definition of free speech doesnt feel over inclusive then its not free speech.
eli 3y ago
Cmon who is saying that? Plenty of people believe in limits to free speech but very very few would draw the line there.
wilg 3y ago
Wait, do you think there are people who think “Let’s Go Brandon” is anything but a hilarious conservative self-own?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Yeah. Literally everyone who says it unironically. So the original usage.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I thought of this immediately but was too lazy to edit so this is what I deserve
- crackercrews 3y ago
  How is this a self-own?
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Bad faith questions don't get entertained. Shoo.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Because it makes people look like pathetic muppets. If you mean "Fuck Joe Biden", say "Fuck Joe Biden", don't clutch your damn pearls about it.

cmiles74 3y ago

An insidious part of this discussion is this idea that these laws do not interfere with encryption. IMHO, it's a dishonest stance to take but when debated, the first thing defenders of this legislation say is that this "does nothing to break encryption" or "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive — we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers." In this plan messages are sent to a third party for analysis. Sure the messages sent to the third party are encrypted but your privacy is entirely violated. https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/

JohnFen 3y ago

> [...] any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker