UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked

And in reality it has nothing to do with terrorism, nor paedophilia.

I find this argument incredibly frustrating.

My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.

It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.

> How to measure "lack of crime" if depends mostly on people responsibility than policing?

The thing is, a holistic approach to policing is key, and it's not just about putting bobbies on the street, it's far far FAR more what's needed to create a healthy society.

You need a social safety net for the unemployed, decent housing to prevent homelessness and its associated side effects (such as people taking dumps on the sidewalk), an accessible and affordable system of physical and mental health care, accessible options for education (not just of children but also for adults who need to switch careers for whatever reason), assistance programs for released convicts to find stable employment and a place to live, "third places" for the needs of all generations from young to old...

Police as an institution is absolutely needed, but in a healthy society it should be a matter of last resort, not a routine tool that kills or otherwise hurts people. When you as a government have to resort to hiring ever more (and ever more dumb, because the supply of smart people is limited) police to keep the peace, something has gone very wrong at the foundations of the stack that we call society.

Measuring this relatively simple - sociologists take a survey, sample appropriately, and find out how many people are victims of crime, including ones not reported to police.

>You cannot put a policeman watching everyone

At least until we cover the planet in advanced technology, of which we are getting closer to every day.

> untouchable

Surveillance of even just one participant in these communication networks will give the police access to everything they see. And technology massively helps police in this surveillance - hidden microphones (or a laser reading vibrations off a window), cameras, and telescopic lenses and drones can reveal the contents of a screen, the password being typed, every word said out loud. The device can even be fitted with a hardware backdoor, or sabotaged, and its replacement intercepted and backdoored, as the NSA did.

But it can't be done en-masse, against every citizen.

That mere encryption makes communication immune from surveillance, or that there is anything remotely approaching the "going dark" problem, is a naked lie by the surveillance state to scare us into giving away even the tiny scraps of privacy we have left. The truth is law enforcement has far greater abilities to surveil even people trying to hide (to say nothing of the data they get from people sharing their thoughts and social networks on Facebook, or carrying phones with them that let the phone company triangulate them at any moment) than at any point in history. In light of that, we should be talking about further limiting their authority, not increasing it.

The problem is that weakening encryption in public services only hurts law abiding citizens.

The criminals per definition don't care what they use, as long as it's unbreakable, so in the event that strong encryption is outlawed, they'll just switch to illegal encryption, or any other form of secret communication.

If you implement a backdoor in iMessage, criminals will stop using that, and switch to Signal (they probably already have long before this), or setup private message services, or anything in between.

Governments falsely claim that they've always had the right to pry in your private data, but while they've always had the option (provided proper paperwork from courts) to tap your phone and read your mail, they've never been able to simply dig through everything you ever wrote at any point in time. All the so called privileges they had were reactive, going forward in time after they had proven in a court that you should be the target for investigation. If they purposely weaken encryption, they will have unrestricted access to everything you've ever said or written.

Worst case, Weakening encryption for the average user only leads to "minority report" style arrests, where you can be arrested for "thoughtcrime" for something you're written and never published, but because it's no longer a secret, "anybody" can read and interpret on it.

The only healthy "middle-ground" with secure communication is fully secure, non-negotiable. The fact that some criminal enterprises can use it and aren't trivially exposed to random searches/fishing trips isn't worth abandoning that principle. Normal effective human policing, collecting physical and digital forensic evidence (once through the secure pipe), whistleblowers etc are all sufficient by themselves, but are expensive and require officers not to be lazy. And politicians hoping to trawl for 'thought crimes' and politically expedient criminalisation of free speech becomes much harder and more expensive if secrets are secure, again: just as it should be.

In the olden days, when law enforcement wanted to intercept a letter, they would locate the sender, nab the letter before it got whisked away, and read it. (If the letter was sealed, they would copy the seal, so they could convincingly re-seal the letter after reading.) Law enforcement wasn't able to do this with whispered conversations, nor easily identify disguised people without following or arresting them. Things still got done.

I don't understand why computer-mediated communication means we have to choose between a panopticon, or the end of law enforcement. It seems to me that good old-fashioned detective work is still perfectly possible. Sure, there are cyber-enabled crimes, and new classes of cyber-dependent crimes, but each of those is a crime because of an interaction with the physical, human world. Those interactions haven't gone away, and are still amenable to investigation. (At a basic level: how do you know a crime has happened in the first place?)

The problem is that the cats out of the bag when it comes to encryption.

Let’s just say we can wave a magic wand and make every phone manufacturer include a way that allows only lawful decryption with court orders and the like.

What stops the criminals spinning up their own service that doesn’t? Sure you could make such services illegal, but when has something being illegal stopped criminals from doing it?

All backdoors do is weaken security for everyone else while those who really want secure communications/ storage for their ill gotten gains will still find a way.

Refusing to decrypt is already a crime in the UK (iirc up to 2 years, 5 if the underlying suspicion is terror related).

Fighting encryption in my opinion is like treating the symptoms not the root cause of the problem.

Either there are ways of intercepting information or there aren't. If there aren't then even criminals can keep their conversations secret. If there are then even criminals can intercept your conversations.

If all of this surveillance made the UK a safe place maybe you could argue it’s worth it. But it doesn’t. Phones are getting snatched, you’ll never see it again. Cars are being stolen in broad daylight. Burglars are getting months in jail. It’s pointless filing a police report for any reason other than for your insurance.

I live in Japan at the moment and the difference is night and day. There are unattended shops here. People feel comfortable leaving their belongings in public. It feels like a massive weight off my shoulders not having to worry and watch constantly.

The problem is that in the past you could rely on laws protecting privacy. You send a letter to someone, and it was illegal to open it. You couldn't eavesdrop on a phone call without breaking the law.

You could thus have a judicial system allowing the invasion of that privacy.

Reasonable people don't have a problem with the court system issuing say 200 wiretaps a year when provided with appropriate levels of evidence on a specific person. People don't have a problem with searching reasonable suspects either.

Even when you ignored the law you couldn't do it at scale. The CIA might plant an illegal wiretap, but that will cost them significant resources, they can't do it to a thousand people for a year, let alone indefinitely to a billion people.

Thus it was limited. The police have always been able to assign 50 people in performing a tail on a suspect. That doesn't scale.

Today though you can scale up. If you spoke on a phone, 99.999% of the time nobody will have heard it, despite it being in the clear, you can track people by following their phone signals. Everyone is tracked all the time, and you just need the warrant to pull the tracking detail - including data from before the warrant.

The next step is using that data and feeding it into AI. Currently the bottleneck is analysis - you can track a billion people. but you can only look at 1,000 of them. Feed that into an AI engine and you can analyse everyone.

With wiretapping, today if you send something without end-to-end encryption, your message is read, possibly modified, by trillion dollar companies designed to extract value from your message, so you need end-to-end encryption.

The problem society has is that judges can't then authorise wiretapping, which society agreed was a reasonable action 30 years ago, and 300 years ago. Even in the US with the optional constitutional amendments, allows for

> Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized

End to end encryption removes this possibility, there's no middle ground, because you either have

* fully encrpyted and thus immune to warrants

* encryption with backdoor and thus leakable and thus used against you (by corporations or foreign security agencies)

The problem is the scale that modern technology allows, and that means we need new understandings on what's possible. But public debate doesn't do that, it's still routed in the "nothing to hide".

Yes, but this is the country that invented the CCTV.

I don't know of any country with fully open governance.

There are always decisions or information which is kept secret/illegal to publish.

I don't think it's fair to tar Meta with that brush. WhatApp have said repeatedly they'll leave the UK before disabling E2EE.

Surely you're not saying that leaving the EU wasn't democratic?

Well it is because the judiciary smacked the secrecy side of it down pretty hard to make sure that it was done in public. That's a pretty strong indicator of a functioning democracy.

Come on pal.