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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.
New application for CryptoWall in GB. We have encrypted your data on your hard disk and it is illegal in your area, the password to decrypt it is "password". If you do not pay 1 Bit Coin, we will notify the authorities.
Cameron sees the world of V for Vendetta as a utopia [1].
[1] Or rather, "Eutopia", for those who know the etymology.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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".
Source?
I look forward to communicating with point-to-point encrypted neutrinos. Try to block those.
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.
Just use spam terms in the body and it still can be received but the stupid software says it's not what it is.
Only non-techies think spies are good at what they do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Which is just as well considering Scotland wanted their separation from the rest of the UK.
Good luck to them when all their funding is cut from London / Westminster, let's see how you can afford free Universities et al after that.
The SNP taking the 'left wing' Labour parties votes in Scotland was the best thing that ever happened to this country in recent years.
- Dan
No government on this planet wants or accepts private communications. In one sense of the term secrecy is in itself a hostile action and not just by nations but by individuals as well. A simple example is Russia. Because we do not know exactly what the Russians are doing at all times we carry a heavy expense burden of trying to be able to defend against any hostile actions by any new imaginable technologies. So secrecy is sort of an act of war. Taken down to the man and wife level any degree of secrecy puts stress on the party who does not know all about the mate. A parent must take precautions and purchase various forms of insurance as it is so well known that teens will keep secrets from their parents. It all boils down to secrecy being a rather overt, hostile act. And it works in both directions. It means nothing to be able to vote when a government is allowed to keep secrets from the public. Should I vote for a man who wants to shrink our military when i am not allowed to know the true strength of our weapons?
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'
No. In American terms, are paries are "Left, Super-left and Mega-left". Or, to put it another way, what you consider Left, we would consider Extreme Right.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Do the Brits just not want any rights? Why do you tolerate this? At least American politicians still have to pretend to give a damn about basic civil rights while they try to scare us into forgoing them. Communication in the modern world is an unstoppable force. Even prison gangs that live in a tightly controlled environment where they are forbidden from free communications and have little or no technology, find ways to communicate without authorities knowing the contents of their communications. Spying on all communications all the time may sound good in theory strictly from a security standpoint, but the moment the actual bad guys know that is the environment in which they operate, they will find ways to evade that scrutiny. Everyone else should not have to tolerate being constantly observed just so the government can pretend that it offers reasonable assurance that they will get the intelligence they seek from the small number of actual persons of interest.
You can't stop people from communicating with each other sub rosa. You can make it awful tough for them if they use a cipher (SSL). A cipher is pretty obvious, and you can use force to compel them to give up the key if they don't destroy it first. And you can immediately see if the key works. So they don't use a cipher. They use a code. "The oranges are falling from the tree in Grant Park". That could mean "attack against Fort Sumter the third week of August". Or it could mean "The pigs discovered cell number 377". Or it could equally well mean "I left three joints of marijuana for you at the agreed place". Want to know what it means? The target can tell you it's not written down anywhere, and he's not telling you. Hell, street slang is a code that is not written down.
Or they can just go into the woods and whisper to each other. They can send runners. Carrier pigeons.
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.
The ability of the UK to reconcile every network packet in and out of the UK makes any message sent from an UK ip to an UK ip in the UK an easy daily database task. /phone id).
The random path around the world does nothing to hide the UK origin and UK destination ip at a service provider level (a persons ~modem like device/residence/cell
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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
what if my choice is not to have an "oppressor"? where does that vote go?
No such system exists.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
You don't know what you're talking about. There are some people in the UK who fit that description, but they are a minority.
Take a guess at the number of firearms now legally owned in the UK..... It'll be a hell of a lot higher than you think. Also, there are some guns that are legal in the UK that are illegal in the US (though getting a license for them might be tricky). I could get a shotgun within a few weeks if I wanted one, despite having a criminal record.
Personally, I'm pragmatic, generally. When we banned hand guns in the UK in the late 90's, hand gun crime (ie. crimes using hand guns, not ownership of a hand gun, which might well have been expected to go up) went up for years afterwards, despite having had being going down previously. The ban actually seemed to increase hand gun crime.
David Davis (for one) Is very influential in the conservative party, just to show one person who is very concerned about privacy issues.
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.
That would be the American(tm) definition of socialism. As in the U.S.S.R. was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, therefore Socialism is completely equivalent with the Soviet system, and so it is anti-American(tm).
It's a really simple calculus: If you're a simple minded American(tm) Patriot(tm)(R) who is informed of world events solely by the one true Media: Fox News, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, then Socialism == USSR == Communism == Bad.
HTH.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Perhaps you don't know very many people in the UK? David Cameron's coalition partners in the last government were considerably more socialist than David Cameron's own right wing party, yet they were the ones putting the brakes on this kind of State overreach and they were the ones try to protect the privacy of the people. You've clearly got some misplaced biases against socialism and considerable ignorance about the UK.
Also, stop and think about the suggestion of assigning a caseworker to every child... does that sound like something the UK could afford, and if they did do it, just what kind things would they be able to achieve given the current budget conditions? Sounds like a nonsense to me.
I live in the UK BTW.
Tor does in fact mask such traffic. It randomly merges and splits packets, adding in random padding data too, and small random delays. It is designed to prevent just such packet tracing, even if multiple nodes along the way are compromised.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Actually, the socialists over here are amongst the most vocal in opposing the ubiquitous monitoring. The lobby for the monitoring is from our equivalent of the Republicans who want a docile and obedient workforce so they can exploit us for profit.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"Almost all of the current state overreach started during Labour governments (Blair and Brown)."
Blair was and is an anti-socialist. He helped deregulate the financial industry and banking and gave tax cuts to the richest while raising taxes on the poorest.. Blair was best friends with George W Bush, not exactly a left wing president..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..