ios14's comments

Also, odds that the govt has secret radically advanced quantum computing tech and does have a QC to recover using Shor’s? (Yea, probably unlikely as it would takes millions of qubits to achieve this..)

How long before lattice based crypto is sufficiently vetted for wide deployment?

What are the odds that big tech and big brother are in bed creating a huge dog and pony show to counter the post-Snowden “going dark” reality?

Given: The public knows about mass surveillance. Big tech deploys supposedly unbreakable end to end encryption. The public feels more safe and protected from Big Brother yet again.

Theory: Meanwhile, behind the scenes, government and big tech have, in secret, the ability to recover such encrypted comms. The DOJ initiative would then be part of an elaborate psyop to further deceive people into believing that FB “has their back”.

I’m going to guess that third parties have extensively reverse engineered apps such as fb messenger to ensure that it is essentially impossible for the above to be the case, since E2EE occurs at the endpoints.

Can an encryption expert weigh in here?

Edit: this also raises general concerns I have about trusting an App Store to install what is supposed to be installed, and not a backdoor’ed version of an app. Something like: Let the reverse engineers have an unmodified app, while distributing alternate versions to other unsuspecting users.

One unfortunate example doesn’t make for a case either way.

My understanding is that FB (for example) would hold the keys and turn over only when compelled via warrant. Not mass surveillance.

Also, Snowden’s propaganda has worked like a charm in sowing discord in American society. Without a doubt, even if you support his actions and cause 100%, concurrently the Russian government consider the NSA to be the crown jewel of the IC. And Snowden’s actions and ongoing politics support Russia’s long term “Active Measures” campaign against the United States.

We would need statistics to assert one way or another. I suspect it’s the opposite: give people the means to easily maintain their own communication networks completely out of view of the government, and some will abuse it for other kinds of low level crimes beyond petty drugs: stalking, for instance.

I’d also bet that many criminals (those beyond petty drug pushers) aren’t even sophisticated enough to understand what’s at play here, and will use FB messenger regardless of the encryption implementation. In this case, offering a means to recover encrypted comms in exceptional, warrant-backed circumstances would only be of help towards criminal investigations.

If I understand right, in this example FB would hold the keys to recover the cleartext and turn it over to law enforcement only when compelled to do so with a warrant.

This isn’t extreme at all.

Sorry, not following how this counters any of my points. Shenanigans via anachronistic laws or corrupt cops isn’t related to encryption, and we know sophisticated criminals can employ their own privacy tools.

Not following your slippery slope argument.

Offering lawful access to widely deployed encryption is hardly an extreme view. Our IC and their partners, as well as our bureaucrats, are mostly in agreement.

An extreme view might entail banning certain forms of math on the internet entirely, rather than simply regulating the widely deployed frictionless math.

Bananas and bowling balls.

Based on your description, the situation you described is a shame and a failure of law enforcement to keep us safe. Not an encryption issue.

Forgot to add: I don’t trust the consumer devices including a fully patched brand new iPhone. I am far more concerned about the various private interests abusing data access, data brokers, hackers potentially getting into my endpoint directly or to any of my consumer cloud assets, than I am about lawful access to recoverable encryption

Yes, removing such spof’s should be a design requirement.

Yes, it’s a difficult problem with social implications, and not simply technical challenges, as you noted.

Yes, Snowden shouldn’t have so easily been able to steal so much data. Apparently the IC has installed numerous checks and balances to help prevent another such insider threat.

Frictionless E2EE at scale is cancerous on society and the FYEV/JP alliance know this all too well.

As this subject has been iterated over many times, will keep this comment short.

* FB deploying frictionless, unbreakable encryption at scale makes the job of law enforcement harder, and makes it easier for less sophisticated criminals to get away with conspiracies (a word which, by the way, simply refers to two or more people secretly collaborating on criminal activity).

* As math cannot be stopped, more sophisticated criminals, as well as those with general concerns about privacy from big brother can still use their own open source tools.

Long before the internet, comms via telephony were anything but secure. We’ve tested the waters post-Snowden with E2EE which likely resulted in numerous secret case studies on the effect E2EE has on an orderly society.

* Don’t bring gizmos into your home if you want a modicum of privacy at home

* FB offering a frictionless, global private network out of reach of law enforcement isn’t a constitutional right. We can still gather in a home, use strong encryption when it matters (in more extreme cases, on an offline device, with write-only outgoing media transported via sneaker net to the transmission device).

* I’d rather have hardened devices and lawful access to the deployed encryption by major service providers, rather than flawed by design consumer device architecture. Then I can employ strong encryption software on those devices and have more confidence in preventing big brother from snooping at all.

>criminal empires

True, you can’t stop math but you can try to police it. You can regulate consumer access. Doing so means one less “gone dark” area, which makes LE job easier.

>security exploits

To your point about low level criminals: Now that the cat is out of the bag, yes, surveillance worked way better when people didn’t know about it. Yes, more sophisticated criminals will try to employ their own encryption. If I were in LE or the IC, I’d still rather not deal with the oceans of data produced by essentially unbreakable encryption via big tech.

Will address point about uncapped value to an encryption exploit below.

>Snowden-style leak

Yes, which is why it is imperative to continually improve and audit such systems, including maybe removing such single points of failure as you noted, both from an insider threat perspective as well as from exploit discovery processes.

It would be helpful to consider how to build recoverable encryption in a way that minimizes the risks of the existence of the exceptional access mechanism, from all angles: technical, social, etc

Unpopular view, but unrecoverable encryption deployed at web scale is a cancer on society. While unrecoverable encryption provides additional privacy to law abiding citizens, it normalizes low level criminal activity at scale.

There has to be a better trade-off here that minimizes the risks of 3rd party access, and gives law enforcement and the intelligence agencies the tools they need to do the best possible job.

If I had to choose, I’d rather my consumer endpoints be hardened but have vetted and protected exceptional access mechanisms on the encryption.

In practice, this bill is likely to lead to cut corners by big tech, who won’t be legally mandated to actually build increasingly responsible encryption recovery mechanisms for LEO. This will enable big tech to say, “I told you so”, because they were simply doing the minimum amount that was required of them legally.

Maybe this is possible instead with homomorphic encryption.