If it can’t even be bypassed by its own designer, then it is dangerous and it does not belong in the hands of the public.
Please, tell us how encryption is dangerous.
Do you even know what encryption means? Because even a basic understanding of encryption has to tell you that broken encryption is not encryption at all. It’s TSA locks all over again.
You’re basically saying it is dangerous for the public to own or use functioning locks.
I’m saying it’s dangerous for the public to own a lock that can’t be picked or broken and renders whatever’s behind the lock completely inaccessible to anyone, including the police, unless the person with the key wants to let them in.
Also, he is saying that he is a contemptible hypocrite for continuing to personally use cell phones, computers, or the internet.
There is no need for you to repeat exactly what DrCube already said.
In any case, the people with a strong understanding of the relevant issues (i.e. the tech industry) have addressed the question to the satisfaction of the people who have a fair-to-middling understanding of the relevant issues (e.g. pretty much everybody else here). The people with no understanding of the relevant issues, such as yourself, are consigned to the sidelines to yell at the clouds.
I understand that you’re saying that. I asked if you could explain why. Do you feel the same way about safes?
Yes.
You do realize that we’re talking about the UK, right? The nation which is laser-focused on realizing George Orwell’s vision of a futuristic police state.
I am neither British nor a fan of Apple, but I have to agree that this bill is a TERRIBLE idea. From the looks of it, this isn’t all that dissimilar from the USA PATRIOT Act. And here in the US, there’s always been means of transmitting and communicating privately that criminals, terrorists, and other enemies of the state have access to.
Consider the Fourth Amendment. Smugglers use it, terrorists use it. But I use it too. I don’t want the government just being able to go through my car, my apartment, my person, whenever they feel like it. Yes, I’m not doing anything illegal, but it’s not my responsibility to prove that, it’s their responsibility to do their job, find evidence, establish probable cause, and get a search warrant.
Sure, I guess a cop or fed could browbeat someone into letting them search and denying them that right, but how is that a desirable situation? Law abiding citizens should not live in fear of law enforcement, nor should law enforcement need to rely on people’s ignorance of the law or willingness to waive their rights to enforce the law. No, law enforcement isn’t easy, and we should do what we can to make their lives easier, but not at the expense of our basic rights.
The only real difference I see here between a cop just searching a car because he has an unsubstantiated hunch and the government going through my encrypted chat logs is that the government can’t just willy-nilly crack encryption. If it forces the government do actually do some investigation and respect our rights and the law, that’s a good thing.
Do you want to live in a society where everyone just has to do what the government says, even if it’s expressly against the powers that the government expressly has? The other thing that a lot of people who support this kind of crap don’t get is that access to unlimited information doesn’t even really help.
Consider, for a moment, that the overwhelming majority of people who use iPhones, Facebook, etc. are not dangerous criminals. We’re talking about tiny fractions of a percent of the people out there. If we create expert systems to browse through all of this data, considering what a tiny amount of real hits we’re going to get, by forcibly adding all this extra data, we’re just creating a lot more noise which just means a bunch of false positives. So now we’re not only violating peoples rights, but we’re wasting resources to do all this extra work, and then we’re pursuing further investigation and prosecutions on innocent people that never would have been suspected if we hadn’t violated their rights in the first place.
Seriously, even using encrypted chat, I seriously doubt any terrorists are sending Facebook messages over their iPhones with detailed attack plans. Do people REALLY think that if we just go through everyone’s encrypted messages we’ll just stumble on a list of terror plots?
Data mining isn’t about having as much information as possible, it’s about having USEFUL information. In most cases, you’re actually better off having less information if it’s of higher quality; in fact, typically the first step is removing data that are noisy. And, to that end, we’re unlikely to get much if any useful information through just blanket surveillance of people’s encrypted chats, and much more likely to get better information through other means of actual investigation.
So, again, not a fan of Apple, and even if they are more motivated by the bottom line than actual ethics, they’re still right on this. The alternative is to be motivated by fear into violating fundamental human rights.
Which is good and which I fully support, but it’s not the issue we’re looking at here. We’re talking about an issue where even when the government acquires that warrant, they still can’t conduct the search because they can’t break the encryption. This basically makes compliance with any search warrant against data optional if the person whose data is being searched doesn’t feel like giving them the key.
We already live in one. We’ve never not lived in one. Nobody has ever not lived in one. We’re fortunate enough to live in one with a judicial system that checks the power of the government and obliges it to play by the rules.
I’m not talking about “going through everyone’s encrypted data”. I’m talking about making sure that the government can go through someone’s encrypted data if they have justifiable cause to believe that person is engaged in criminal activity.
No human has the right to commit a crime.
I feel it is somewhat interesting that people are pulling US Constitutional Amendments into a discussion about UK privacy laws. The UK has historically had a very different notion of the privacy rights of citizens (hence why in the US, the Constitution includes Amendments 3 and 4, among other things). The UK also has, if I am not mistaken, tons of cameras all about the place, which people from the US would consider “Orwellian”.
Anyways, the question becomes not necessarily an electronic privacy one - though that is part of it - but how much power and authority do governments have to craft their own laws in a world of international corporations having so much control. It’s an interesting one.
Meh. If the documents are in a safe that incinerates the innards when somebody breaks in, or buried somewhere that nobody else knows about, the same situation obtains. That’s life.
Ah, if only the courts has some sort of recourse against people who showed contempt toward them… Maybe there already is some system for dealing with a showing of contempt toward a court, though I don’t know offhand what it might be – it probably has some highfalutin’ Latin name…
This is one reason why universally deployed strong encryption would actually improve security. (There are others, to be sure, such as the fact that opening a gaping hole by installing crypto backdoors into the infrastructure would give every terrorist organization a bigger money pool than Scrooge McDuck, but let’s focus on this one.)
Human nature being what it is, any open-ended giveaway will be unreasonably exploited by some, ruining it for all. This is why, for example, paper-towel dispensers are designed so that you can’t just pull out a big wad of them – if you could, some people would do that instead of buying their own to use at home.
Similarly, limiting the current golden age of surveillance so that three-letter agencies have to do a bit of work (e.g. hack a computer, install a shoulder-surfing hidden camera, etc) to surveil a target works to insure that they devote their attention to targets, and not spread it around willy-nilly. The effectiveness improvement of this approach is obvious. For example, if this had been in place before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Feds would have been more likely to actually get off their butts and do something when the Russians warned them “those Tsaranev guys are bad news, you might want to keep an eye on them”.
Holy crap, this is silly.
This can be done by anyone right now. Get a clue. It is called a one time pad which has been in use for quite some time.
Slee
And we all know how well that turned out.
As long as we have democratically elected government with appropriate constitutional protections, the voters are that counterbalance.
Smapti wants to outlaw math in addition to locks and safes.
Reminds me of the description of the Stasi always operating in trios – one who could read and write, one who could add and subtract, and one who was politically reliable enough to keep an eye on the dangerous intellectuals.
Maybe we should ask if he feels the same about plain-vanilla unencrypted electronic communications:
Don’t hold your breath for the fearmongers (be it Some Guy On The Internet[tm] or actual officeholders who ought to know better) to slap their foreheads and give a mea culpa apology.