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Cameron Asserts UK Gov't Will Leave No "Safe Space" For Private Communications
An anonymous reader writes with the story from Ars Technica that UK prime minister David Cameron "has re-iterated that the UK government does not intend to 'leave a safe space — a new means of communication — for terrorists to communicate with each other.'"
That statement came Monday, as a response to Conservative MP David Bellingham, "who asked [Cameron, on the floor of the House of Commons] whether he agreed that the 'time has come for companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to accept and understand that their current privacy policies are completely unsustainable?' To which Cameron replied: 'we must look at all the new media being produced and ensure that, in every case, we are able, in extremis and on the signature of a warrant, to get to the bottom of what is going on.'"
This sounds like the UK government is declaring a blustery war on encryption, and it might not need too much war: some companies can be persuaded (or would be eager) to cooperate with the government in handing over all kinds of information. However, the bluster part may leave even the fiercest surveillance mostly show: as Ars writer Glyn Moody asks, what about circumstances "where companies can't hand over keys, or where there is no company involved, as with GnuPG, the open source implementation of the OpenPGP encryption system?"
Or Tor?
Well, at least he included "on the signature of a warrant". That's something that seems to be going away swiftly.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
It's like guns in the US. If they were outlawed then those who don't care about the laws would still use them. Encryption is out there, it is widely available. And the more that governments try to block it the more determined companies and individuals will find more convenient ways to use it. It's a lot of bluster but not very practical. And ultimately (IMHO) the availability of rapid communications does more to help humanity than to hurt it.
Man, Tor has been a joke for years now. It's commonly accepted that it's compromised with dozens of documented or secretive exploits all over its endpoints. It feels like it offers about as much security as putting a password on a zip file: enough to discourage someone who doesn't really care.
Don't let the people have privacy, because there are bad guys that might abuse that privacy to do bad guy stuff. Same argument as "don't let the people have guns because there are bad guys who might use those guns to do bad guy stuff".
Has every one forgotten Lavabit already? It was only two years ago. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... They found out the hard way. http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
"Glyn Moody asks, what about circumstances "where companies can't hand over keys, or where there is no company involved, as with GnuPG, the open source implementation of the OpenPGP encryption system?" Or Tor?"
"Ladar Levison, founder of the encrypted email service Lavabit that shut down last year because of friction with U.S. government data requests, has an article at The Guardian where he explains the whole story. He writes, 'My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company's network. ... I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would hand the U.S. government access to all of the messages â" to and from all of my customers â" as they traveled between their email accounts other providers on the Internet. But that wasn't enough. The federal agents then claimed that their court order required me to surrender my company's private encryption keys, and I balked. What they said they needed were customer passwords â" which were sent securely â" so that they could access the plain-text versions of messages from customers using my company's encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only made this demand because of my "noncompliance".) ... What ensued was a flurry of legal proceedings that would last 38 days, ending not only my startup but also destroying, bit by bit, the very principle upon which I founded it â" that we all have a right to personal privacy.'"
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Hello NSA, propaganda still the most effective way to break tor?
As somebody that almost religiously reads tor papers and news on it, the only thing with some significant issues at this point in time is hidden services, but even that is relatively limited. You are free to argue that every case where somebody using tor got caught because of stupid stuff they did when not using tor or not using tor correctly that its all parallel construction, but there is no proof for it. In none of the cases was it shown that the person did not in fact do the stupid things which the law enforcement found, so even if they do parallel construction, they could have found everything about as easily using just the mistakes. The only thing all of this proves is that it is extremely hard to handle privacy/security correctly all of the time. More so because you have to have practiced it in the past for it to work well in the future. If you want to become private tomorrow, either your past must have been private as well or you must disconnect yourself entirely from your past.
How many people have been killed in Britain by terrorists since the IRA was assimilated? Or how many terroristic threats have been nullified thanks to any measure of government surveillance other than plain old policing? So how is this justified?
It's not just Cameron. The people I know in the UK support this kind of thinking. A few years ago there was legislation introduced to assign a caseworker to *every* child in the UK. It didn't have as little support as you'd think. They are, broadly, a bunch of well-behaved socialist conformists who are afraid of the real world, and think that a panopticon surveillance state will make them "safe". It is disgusting.
It's not just Cameron. The people I know in the UK support this kind of thinking. A few years ago there was legislation introduced to assign a caseworker to *every* child in the UK. It didn't have as little support as you'd think. They are, broadly, a bunch of well-behaved socialist conformists who are afraid of the real world, and think that a panopticon surveillance state will make them "safe". It is disgusting.
Just wow, socialism does not advocate panopticon surveillance, infact I don't think socialism has anything to say about matters relating to observation of the population. This is the sort of bullshit that got the US in the hellhole they're in now. I think the most applicable term for it is fascism.
Again, I stress that *EVEN IF* absolutely everything was working exactly as such a government intended...
This is because laws don't actually *stop* people from breaking them, they only ensure that something that is considered appropriate punishment will follow when people do. Unfortunately, such punishment cannot always negate the effects of the harm that was done while someone broke the law in the first place.
And again, this is even *IF* their system for eavesdropping on encrypted communications was function as best as they can possibly intend.
So hey, Mr. Cameron.... I can sincerly appreciate that you might have the very best of intentions, but your goals will deprive entirely innocent people of the ability to even have the most rudimentary protections from people that will use the same abilities that the government has, however illegally, to cause very harm to people who have done nothing wrong except to follow a law that says they are not allowed to take precautions against such means.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Tor isn't compromised, it's secure for what it does. Compromised end points are not something it is designed to protect against. It isn't a substitute for HTTPS or checking certificates. It doesn't stop you being an idiot and giving away your location or software on your computer leaking your real IP address. That's not what Tor is.
Also, passwords on zip files have actually been effective for over a decade now, when AES encryption was added. Zip file encryption is now actually quite good, covering both data and filenames, and using a secure hash to generate the AES key from your password. Essentially it is as strong as the password, and has been since V6.2.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's the media. When it was pointed out that Twitter informs users who are the subject of data access requests by the government they framed it as Twitter tipping off terrorists that they were being investigated. Not as Twitter protecting its users from over-use of surveillance and being transparent with them, but as colluding with the enemy. It was disgusting.
Also, what kind of bizarro definition of "socialist" implies wanting a surveillance state? If anything, the more socialist states in the EU tend to be the ones that have better protections for privacy and freedom because they understand that the government works FOR the people.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Fascism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens.
Capitalism uses the power of the state to ensure its corporations can oppress its citizens.
Communism uses the power of the state to oppress its citizens and ensure its economy remains in shambles.
Socialism grants significant power to the state with the expectation that it will use that power for good, and then its citizens are shocked and outraged when the government uses that power to oppress its citizens.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Actually it is conservationism that demands bigger government and often big business to avoid accountability, usually to enforce their moral values on the people and also to create an enemy to get the people behind them, patriotism is always a good way to stop people from thinking. David Cameron is a conservative and like most conservatives, believes the governments role is to spy on the people and support the authoritarian types who run big business
Many socialists want small government and small business to avoid the tyranny that comes from any organization with too much power, they also want the people to be in charge. This is the reason that during the American Revolution conservatives were attacked by the revolutionaries (tar and feathered at first, then their property removed through Letters of Attainment, forced to leave the colonies and finally Lynch pushed extra-judiciary hanging), they wanted the people to be in charge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is one example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism