Comment by ben_w
2 months ago
While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
>While I agree with the sentiment, you need to think like a state to stop this kind of thing.
I'm thinking like state already, i would never trust ANY state with such powers, even the one that was perfectly aligned with my political views.
It's not issue of state, but dilution of responsibility and the way the votes are counted.
It is also an issue of unelected officials deciding things - the whole system is broken.
Before you say that heads of state were elected - this is highly contentious issue, no one ran on this in internal campaigns, and votes on this issue are counted country-wide(all for or all against), without any regards to distribution of populace's opinion on this subject.
>Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
You're enacting legislation that will actually empower those entities this way!
Criminals - surprise surprise - can just break the law, and use devices/software that just.. does not do content scanning, and uses true E2E encryption. Even over insecure channel by using steganography and key exchange over it.
Espionage can be handled the same way, probably even easier as they can easily use one-time pads and key phrases established beforehand in their country of origin!
Meanwhile only group affected by it are just normal citizens.
I keep seeing this fallacy argument about some bad actors and criminals etc. etc. Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens. I don't understand how someone can be apologetic for totalitarian state.
> Every government have structures and laws to prevent such activities, in absolutely no shape or form it does not need to read every single message of it citizens.
Indeed, the state doesn't need all of them.
That it's all-or-nothing is due to how the tech works, in that you can't break it *only* for the targets — a point I make when I'm trying to explain the dichotomy to the politicians who want to spy, that this absolutely will be abused to reveal *their own* secrets, too.
The way politicians talk about this stuff, suggests they think computer code is like law, that words may have precise meanings but there's still an element of human judgement and common sense, and at human speed, not cold logic operating on bits faster than us by the degree we are faster than geology, where the potential harm from errors can be irreversable total loss of an entire business due to one single error made one time by one person, nor where mistakes from 20 years ago might be discovered and exploited at any time.
That's why I said "I can't even square the circle". If I thought the government position here was just absolutely fine, it wouldn't be difficult to square the metaphorical circle.
The difficulty is that despite their wrongheadedness about the consequences of what they're trying to do, what they're trying to do is actually necessary.
And that's just the crypto parts of this.
I left the UK for two reasons: The Investigatory Powers Act, and Brexit. Kinda related cause I thought Brexit would make it harder to fight the IP Act. Went to Westminster to talk to my MP to try and convince them to vote against the IP Act. I remain convinced that the British government was straight up lying about its reasons for having that Act.
Organized criminals (especially state actors) will find ways to communicate in the dark regardless, including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
> including just continuing to use illegal encryption.
First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
Second, what gets talked about in public (the only thing any of us knows for sure, but also definitely not the whole picture) includes foreign governments recruiting locals via normal messenger apps.
More of a problem is that the back-doors can be exploited by both criminals and hostile powers.
> First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
You're assuming they continue to use monitored channels to carry it out.
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