Slashdot Mirror
British PM Seeks Ban On Encryption After Terror Attack (boingboing.net)
"British Prime Minister Theresa May has used last Saturday's terrorist attack to again push for a ban on encryption," according to ITWire. Slashdot reader troublemaker_23 shared their article, which quotes this strong rebuttal from Cory Doctorow:
Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the "good guys" are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption...
Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for. For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction... any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in 'golden keys' that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.
In the real world, people just buy a set of knives from Lidl, rent a van, and discuss the plans in someone's living room. Banning encryption isn't going to stop any of that.
Well, you did it U.K.
First, massive monitoring of your citizens with country wide CCTV, that didn't help crime statistics at all, so you extended that with the worlds most advanced facial recognition system.
Second, laws on what you look at, what you view and thought crimes, congratulations, you're now only ONE step away from draconian laws Orwellian surveillance state.
Third phase, Brexit - no one comes in, no one goes out. We decide who does what in OUR country, the mindless sheeple will do what WE say. Sip your tea and shut up sir. Pomeroy.
Fourth and FINAL phase - Total monitoring of every citizen, forbid all encryption, have anything to hide? You are hereby found guilty by the court of LAW until WE say otherwise.
How did you guys manage to let all that slip past you? Are you this desperate? My God - England! You're letting them take every ounce of dignity and freedom you had left.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
If one outlaws encryption, only outlaws will have encryption.
Couldn't we just ban politicians from making laws about shit they have no clue about? I'm aware that this means we'll get WAY, WAY fewer laws but then, you take a look at the laws we've gotten recently and try to tell me with a straight face that it would be a bad idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only people who can get into the backdoor'd encryption are good governments stopping crime and terrorism, and every dictatorship out there intending to keep their own people down for ever and ever.
And good governments won't ever abuse it secretly to aid those in power, nor fall from freedom to dictatorship, because we have no historical examples of that ever happening.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I guess we all know by now that these power grabs have nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with consolidating power. ....wait....
I wonder, do these dip-shits every stop to think what would actually happen without encryption? For fucks sake, your average basement dwelling hacker already has a relatively easy time of it, may as well just open everything up.
Sure, out credit cards will be stolen every other week, but at least we will can finally end the 10's of thousands of deaths every year in the UK by terrorism
We've only had an elected Primeminster for 1 year out of the last 10, that should be a ridiculous enough situation to bring about some politcal reform and actually have some representation but we're apparently stuck with First Past the Post regardless of it not working for over a decade now.
I've voted every time I've had chance to, been strategic too knowing the failings of our system. It's in a spirallng stall hurtling towards the ground now our country. Tempted to leave.
The attackers were known to police and MI5. Oops! And PM May is responsible for firing 10000 police officers. Oops again! So this anti encryption and controlling the internet BS is simply a red herring to soothe people.
Despite the Conservatives being the largest part in 2010 under Cameron who was then PM via the LibDem coalition through 2015, then on their own merit until 2016 (almost six years), the UK has *never* had an elected Prime Minster. We elect MPs to the House of Commons and the party with the most MP then gets to put forward whoever they want to be Prime Minister and form the government. Normally that's the leader of the party at the time of the election, but that doesn't actually have to be the case, and couldn't be the case if the party leader in question had lost their seat for some reason.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Two things about this...
A) This will not stop terrorism or terrorists, and it will not make it harder for them to communicate in any meaningful way. They were able to "get it done" before encryption, and they are motivated to the extent that they will get it done without.
B) It's irrelevant anyway because there is simply no way to ban encryption or even require "back doors" because there are too many absolute requirements for encryption in numerous systems and situations, and people will not stand for back doors. More than that, if encryption was banned, people would do it anyway.
Remember in the early days of PGP? To download and install the software you had to "certify" you were an American on American soil? And of course anyone on American soil or with a VPN could do all that, or download it in the US and burn it to a CD and send it off to whoever, as many did. You just can't "ban" something that is already out in the wild, it doesn't work that way.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, you've had an elected prime minister for 0 years out of the last 10.
That's because in the UK the public doesn't elect the prime minister. They elect ministers, the ministers chose a prime minister amongst themselves.
Okay then you go and login to your bank's website unencrypted.
Oh wait, you don't want to do that? So you are saying that you DO have something to hide.
Got it.
Also we'll be requiring you to deposit the keys for your house and your safes in your home, in case we need to see what is inside there. Then we won't need to worry about "warrants" since we have your consent since you "voluntarily" handed over the keys to us.
Gotcha.
That's all very techically true but what I meant is;
2007-2010 Gordon Brown become PM when Blair resigns,
2010-2015 David Cameron PM but his party didn't have a sole majority casuing the coalition,
2015-2016 David Cameron spends 1 year as PM who's party has actually won a majority then resigns after EU Membership referendum,
2016-2017 Teresa May becomes PM after all competition withdraws from Tory Leadership Contest,
2017 to Present Teresa May possibly to remain PM after losing majority and seeking to form a new coalition with the DUP
You description of the system we have is accurate on paper... but not in public perception or what actually happens. The majority of the campaigning focused on the leaders not on the local representatives and has for some time now. The average voter picks based on party rather than candidate because it's parties that have power, not our representatives.
To quote another famous British character:
"Something must be done.
This is something.
Ergo, this must be done."
The public are afraid. They demand action to stop the terrorists. Politicians are obliged to provide action, if they value their careers - even if there is no good action they can take within available resource constraints, that just means they need to come up with a bad idea. At least if they put into force a bad idea, they will be seen trying - a better option then to be seen as uncaring or dismissive.
What leads May or her advisers to believe that this attack might have been thwarted if they had the powers that they ask for? This is just another tick-mark on the Five Eyes agenda. Conceivably any event could be used to support their argument, no mater how weakly related.
Have gnu, will travel.
The modern internet runs on encryption. Any time you send a login you (hopefully) are using encryption, otherwise it's trivial to steal credentials. Any time you enter your credit card information into a website you (hopefully) are using encryption, otherwise it's trivial to steal your card number. The modern world absolutely requires encryption for day-to-day activities, even if you're not using encryption on files/messages/whatever to avoid others looking at them you ARE using encryption to power your modern life.
Anybody that thinks an encryption ban isn't something to worry about doesn't know how or where encryption works. Your ignorance is obvious to anybody even slightly in the know. If you're not alarmed by the fact that your government is even considering an encryption ban then obviously you're exceptionally uneducated on the subject and you should sit down and shut up while the grown ups are talking.
The attack was horrible yes, but we are talking about a couple of deaths per year in a country of 50 million. Automobile safety, antibiotic resistant bacteria/viruses, air pollution, and many more kill several orders of magnitude more people and are a far bigger real threat to human safety and well being - not even mentioning long term issues like the environment. This obviously about easily hyping up a tragedy so the government can stick its spyglass wayyyyyy up where the sun dosent shine.
But why, one might say, is this so important if it won't help terrorism? The answer is simple - when you have full access to every humans detail in your entire country, you can far more accurately hold snap elections at key times to grab PM seats, you can shut down activist groups by getting or planting dirt on them or creating an effective smear campaign targeted to the right people. You can do just about anything with that much information, no oversight, enough computational power and resources, and enough time. It's happening in the USA and Europe right now.
"country wide CCTV, that didn't help crime statistics at all"
Fake news.
BTW regardless of the size of the impact, one of the greatest benefits of CCTV is objectivity. When minorities commit more crime on camera you can simply show the images, avoids all the social justice systemic X lies and stupidity.
If you are not doing anything wrong: why do you shut the door when you have a shit in some public toilets ?
The thinking goes back to Defence of the Realm Act 1914 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Breaking Enigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . The Uk looking at all other nations 1910 to 2017 embassy codes.
Every call in the Soviet Union, East/West Germany, France, Japan been looked at for things of any interest to the UK.
Crypto was great for the UK in the Falklands War too. The UK could read everything in real time. Except some South African hardware, but that was solved too.
That was all hidden away from the wider public and interesting people kept chatting away thinking that call could never be detected.
The first changes to that was a policy shift between the UK and USA.
The USA wanted to share results within the USA, to allow police, mil, contractors to use raw collection results and get results.
More people looking, more results.
The UK knew results would leak to lawyers, police, human rights groups, spies, criminals and bad people would just understand not use phone/internet again.
The US policy finally won and now collect it all and using the results in public.
Courts, police, mil, gov can share results and the public soon knows its been collected on 24/7.
So who is right? The US with collect it all, sort it all, study it all, police it all?
Or the UK method of the 1970-80's? No courts, no police, no lawyers, no human rights groups, no media, no political groups working out methods.
Just groups like the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch worked with raw material. Action was then taken and nobody knew anything or could request any details.
Was it an informant? A phone call? A copied paper file? A computer file? Something in the funding from the USA to Irish groups? The UK police was kept away from any and all raw information, the UK press did not know who to ask, UK lawyers did not see anything in any type of courts. Telco workers did not see changes to the amount of police/court requests.
Its a generational change between a US view of more contractors, the private sector, courts, police, lawyers, telcos been fully trusted. Collect it all, use it all.
Or the older UK view of only trust the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch.
Breaking encryption only works if nobody ever knows and the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch could then go get results.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If you took all the money and time spent on ineffectively fighting terrorism's tiny blip in the homicide rate and directed it to really saving lives, how many additional people would be alive today? Even if you focus it strictly on preventing homicides, those billions could've achieved significant crime reduction through detective/beat work alone and certainly through better mental health care.
This space intentionally left blank
... is that people are not allowed to talk in a language that the powers that be don't know, and talking in such a language is criminally punishable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't know. I mean, I am pretty sure they can make it illegal. They can make farting illegal. It's not smart and it's impossible to effectively prohibit it, but they can make it illegal.
At the same time, laws don't really prevent anything. They just provide a means of punishment and may be selectively enforced. People still rape and murder, after all.
So, they can make it illegal, methinks. It'd be stupid, but they can do it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I think it's far beyond a "loose money" situation...the UK would have to implement some RADICAL restructuring of all their internet traffic. From what May wants, they would have to strip off all HTTPS traffic, put everything back into plain text. They couldn't use cellular tech like CDMA, SSL, PDFs, and would need to develop all new systems that incorporate this "back door". It would be a colossal undertaking that would take years and millions of manhours. They basically would be cutting themselves off from the rest of the planet electronically. Their economy would collapse, identity theft would run rampant, and basically "the sky would fall" as soon as this backdoor is compromised (which it quickly would be). This idea is on the same level as Trump's wall but 100x more idiotic.