They've done these things before WhatsApp and will continue to do it no matter what changes are made to the law. As long as there are bad people, they'll find a way. This is just another, hard-to-criticise vector to undermine privacy for the vast majority of people who are not criminals.
There's a scary, completely secret communication method that bypasses almost all law enforcement surveillance technology we have, and worse, it's existed for a long time and is already in common use with pedophiles and terrorists alike.
It's called "talking to somebody behind closed doors."
Luckily, we have Internet of Things to remedy that unacceptable situation. With the advances of machine learning, we won't even need that. We will be able to tell if you are a criminal from the way you walk on the street which are full of surveillance cameras.
I wonder when some country will try to implement the idea from Jacek Dukaj's "Black Oceans" - a society in which you can have private space, but if you've disabled cameras and/or are out of their view and anything happens you you, you don't get insurance.
They along with the tech industry are quickly ending that option, too, to the point where as soon as it happens, they'll act as if it's criminal to try to hide what you're talking behind closed doors.
Why aren't they also calling out ISPs, computer manufacturers, and the national grid for enabling criminals to communicate in secret?
If we want to stop criminals from being able to access neutral services, surely we should be starting with running water, supermarkets, restaurants, and anyone else who supplies food or drink. That would put a stop to the problem much more quickly.
Also every other communication service. It's ridiculous how they are singling out Facebook for this. Why not the others that specifically tell their users that their conversations are not saved or searched through in any way (see Telegram and others).
To be fair, whatsapp makes it super easy - far easier than it's ever really been - to communicate so easily and securely with so many people. It's never black and white - you cant ban crypto and you also cant give criminals carte blanche for uncrackable crypto. The middle ground is the very difficult thing.
I mean, the argument is "only non-criminals should be entitled to privacy". The problem is that, if you knew who the criminals were, you could just lock them up and be done with it, so all the governments err on the side of "nobody should have privacy, just in case they're a criminal".
Everyone here wants "everyone should have privacy, and if criminals get it too, then so be it; after all, criminals could get privacy some other way anyway".
I really don't care if the contents of my Whatsapp/Messenger/SMS/etc. comments/posts are made public, FWIW.
Nor do I mind that GCHQ can probably listen to all my calls and certainly not that they use meta-data to look for links with organised crime (eg terrorism).
My impression would be that in the UK outside of fora like HN that position would be pretty common.
Of course you don't, you're a middle-class straight white male. A society with perfect surveillance is a society with perfect law enforcement, which is a society that never has enough dissidence to evolve.
Tell homosexuals in the 60s that they shouldn't care if GCHQ can read their messages. But who cares about poofs, right? They're mentally ill anyway.
FWIW I've been racially abused in the street multiple times, am often shunned due to my appearance, was always searched at security checkpoints through my twenties; have been stopped by the police for "random checks", etc..
If you're US American you wouldn't consider me middle-class.
Did we return to the 60s?
Your parent comment said "Everyone here wants [...]", which may or may not be true, my sole point was that in the UK I doubt that's a majority viewpoint in all sectors of society.
But thanks for laying in to me with your sexist, racist prejudice, and attempts to smear me by putting words in my mouth, it surely adds a lot to the conversation. /s
Ah, alright, I'm sorry, I misread your point. By "everyone here" I meant HN, and if your point is "factually, most people don't care about privacy", that's probably right. But that's also the "first they came for the Socialists" viewpoint. It may be statistically true that many people hold that view, but they shouldn't.
Edward Snowden: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." [¹]
"When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights."[²]
One-time-pad is so easy to use that a child could figure it out and is literally unbreakable. Even if you outlaw "hard encryption" this extremely easy encryption method will always be available and will always offer 100% secrecy for anyone needing it. This is just a smokescreen, as always.
Which is exactly what they want. Britain seems to be pushing to open up every communication channel their citizens use, it's ridiculous. They are on the best way to build "V for Vendetta"'s political system, it's a joke.
It's more like you'd have a map with a line that shows where the terrorist has been, you can overlay on that map everywhere every other whatsapp user has been and pull out any that spend a significant amount of time with the known terrorist. Then you know exactly who they associate with and can interrogate their profiles directly to see if they are viable suspects.
Once you have a known event, then you can use the information that you know about that to start asking more questions.
Proximity is an obvious one, who was near or in contact with the alleged terrorist in the hours, days, weeks beforehand. Were there recurrences of close proximity amongst those individuals previously not considered persons of interest.
This methodology is precisely the same as how fraud and money laundering risk is mitigated. Once you work back from a KE (known event) to build up the pattern of related activities you can use this as a signature on observed future behaviour to try and identify future activity that you'd like to investigate more closely or act on.
Genuine question, Are guns allowed in UK just in the same way as in US ? Also, is it so hard to come up with another way of secure communication if they ban whatsapp ?
Some UK police officers most certainly do have access to firearms - for example airports generally have fairly heavily armed officers patrolling about:
Sure, but your local street-patrolling officer does not have a gun with them. There might be one locked in their car but your ordinary policemen don't carry weapons.
If the US is any example, it is the worst-trained scaredy-pants who walk up to every traffic stop with their hand on the holster, and the cops most "up to the job" who are willing to engage suspects with words, time, and humanity.
I think there are also philosophical reasons why the British people aren't keen on the further militarisation of the Police, especially routine patrols.
It's traditionally been the job of the Police to uphold the law with the consent of the People.
It's the job of the Military to extend the will of the Politicians by bringing violence to enemies of the State.
By further militarising the Police, it implies the People (or sections of) have become enemies of the State, which is not a great situation to be in... also this is why a lot of British people consider US Police Departments to be insanely trigger-happy.
We do have armed police but they're on specialist deployment - you see them at events (also at ports of entry). They deploy relatively often in my area I assume they're attending drugs busts.
Regular police carry tear gas spray (or perhaps pepper spray?) and tazers as a matter of course.
Saying "police don't have them" is a bit misleading.
To take your example further, rented trucks have also been used for killing people, so logically, trucks should be banned since criminals have used those.
WhatsApp enables everyone to communicate in secret, including the >99% of people who are not criminals. This is an equally valid way to frame the debate.
Maybe the effects of the equifax breach or a successor will be widespread enough to make the general population appreciate end to end encryption and proper security...
I think the p2p keys generated for a WhatsApp chat should be sent to certified contractor such as Equifax for their secure mainframes to store, and their staff to monitor the communications under a 5yr non-revokable GCHQ contract...
The interesting thing about all these debates, that many here seem to forget is: these actions are awful, but in the grand scheme of things, they are actually good and a sign of progress.
The reason governments do this is that due to the Internet, for the first time in human history, humans can have access to truly secure telecommunications. I'm pretty sure that before they could just phone tap/bug their way to all the communications they wanted to follow and this is proving harder today. That's why they're making so much noise about it.
It will be a fight to keep the (favorable for individuals) status quo, but in my opinion the status quo is an evolution over what we had say, 40 years ago.
There's a fundamental difference to both the pre-phone and the pre-Internet age:
In the grand scheme of things phone tapping is a relatively new affair. Before the general availability of phones you needed actual human snitches to spy on dissidents and deviants.
Even once phones were widely used oppressive regimes still needed a huge number of human agents because not every conversation happened on phone.
Physically spying on others is both dangerous and expensive, which is why it's usually done selectively.
All of that changed with the general widespread use of digital means of communication: Not only do most dissident, potentially 'dangerous' conversations take place in digital media but those conversations are also easily available for governments to harvest and draw upon to whatever end.
I find it incredibly difficult to comprehend that any UK politician would use the phrase "protect people from pedophiles" with a straight face: This is a political class which has, for decades, protected its own pedophiles from prosecution.
It is highly troubling that this would be being used as a public button, when there is much evidence that UK politicians have no desire, whatever, to actually prosecute the biggest pedophiles in their state - those within their own ranks.
Criminals also have access to fast automobiles and efficient dual carriageways that enable their escapes. Further, they are using a powerful radio network to communicate with ease. We must act now to remove these things for the good of the people!
The UK is part of the international "five eyes" mass surveillance group. The NSA certainly has access to all Whatsapp messages. Therefor, the UK has it too.
Therefor, this article certainly is nothing but propaganda.
You are so full of shit it is hard to know where to begin. End to end encryption means that WhatsApp does not have access to the messages, so the NSA most certainly does not. What is most annoying about delusional paranoid comments like this is that you distract from where the real fight is.
We have accepted that you can curtail certain rights for criminals, so I can't see why we couldn't add "not using Whatsapp" to them.
All you have to do is prove a certain person is a criminal. Innocent until proven guilty, due process, the justice system - any of these minor details ring a bell to Amber Rudd?
Everyone gets their apps from two places: the Apple app store and Google Play. To enforce a ban on whatsapp, all the government has to do is compel Google and Apple to pull them from the app store.
The common user is currently entrenched in two walled gardens for almost all of their activity, and banning encrypted communications for 95% of the population is now feasible, and perhaps quite likely. That sucks.
Most people would switch to something that is compliant with government legislation, very quickly. Because most people don't know or care what encryption is, they just want to talk to their friends.
At least amongst Android users, packaged apps passed around for side-loading are fairly common.
Just last week I saw a non-technical colleague side-loading Messenger Lite from an APK mirror site as it is not available through the Play Store in the UK.
WhatsApp even have a direct APK download on their website, cutting out the middleman.
74 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadIt's called "talking to somebody behind closed doors."
If we want to stop criminals from being able to access neutral services, surely we should be starting with running water, supermarkets, restaurants, and anyone else who supplies food or drink. That would put a stop to the problem much more quickly.
/s
Why should only criminals be entitled to privacy?
Everyone here wants "everyone should have privacy, and if criminals get it too, then so be it; after all, criminals could get privacy some other way anyway".
Nor do I mind that GCHQ can probably listen to all my calls and certainly not that they use meta-data to look for links with organised crime (eg terrorism).
My impression would be that in the UK outside of fora like HN that position would be pretty common.
Tell homosexuals in the 60s that they shouldn't care if GCHQ can read their messages. But who cares about poofs, right? They're mentally ill anyway.
If you're US American you wouldn't consider me middle-class.
Did we return to the 60s?
Your parent comment said "Everyone here wants [...]", which may or may not be true, my sole point was that in the UK I doubt that's a majority viewpoint in all sectors of society.
But thanks for laying in to me with your sexist, racist prejudice, and attempts to smear me by putting words in my mouth, it surely adds a lot to the conversation. /s
"When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights."[²]
-- ¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/just_days_left... ² https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/edward-snowden-new-yorker-...
for example, you could find out who associated with a terrorist by their location history.
Once you have a known event, then you can use the information that you know about that to start asking more questions.
Proximity is an obvious one, who was near or in contact with the alleged terrorist in the hours, days, weeks beforehand. Were there recurrences of close proximity amongst those individuals previously not considered persons of interest.
This methodology is precisely the same as how fraud and money laundering risk is mitigated. Once you work back from a KE (known event) to build up the pattern of related activities you can use this as a signature on observed future behaviour to try and identify future activity that you'd like to investigate more closely or act on.
edit: also, if i could have worded that better ?
Regarding guns, no. Even police officers don't have them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_unit
- Not all want that responsibility, even if they don't routinely have to carry
- It's expensive to train them
Criminals rarely have guns in the UK so enforcing the law with firearms is not usually necessary.
It's traditionally been the job of the Police to uphold the law with the consent of the People.
It's the job of the Military to extend the will of the Politicians by bringing violence to enemies of the State.
By further militarising the Police, it implies the People (or sections of) have become enemies of the State, which is not a great situation to be in... also this is why a lot of British people consider US Police Departments to be insanely trigger-happy.
We have specialist armed police units for times when weapons are required, and most of the time they are not.
Regular police carry tear gas spray (or perhaps pepper spray?) and tazers as a matter of course.
Saying "police don't have them" is a bit misleading.
This policy of banning end-to-end encryption is beyond stupid. They won't stop a single terrorist from using end-to-end encryption.
But I think they know this, too. They just don't want everyone else's conversations to be secret either.
automatic weapons have no civilian use case
The reason governments do this is that due to the Internet, for the first time in human history, humans can have access to truly secure telecommunications. I'm pretty sure that before they could just phone tap/bug their way to all the communications they wanted to follow and this is proving harder today. That's why they're making so much noise about it.
It will be a fight to keep the (favorable for individuals) status quo, but in my opinion the status quo is an evolution over what we had say, 40 years ago.
The horse has bolted, it is not possible to prevent (good or bad) people communicating securely?
In the grand scheme of things phone tapping is a relatively new affair. Before the general availability of phones you needed actual human snitches to spy on dissidents and deviants.
Even once phones were widely used oppressive regimes still needed a huge number of human agents because not every conversation happened on phone.
Physically spying on others is both dangerous and expensive, which is why it's usually done selectively.
All of that changed with the general widespread use of digital means of communication: Not only do most dissident, potentially 'dangerous' conversations take place in digital media but those conversations are also easily available for governments to harvest and draw upon to whatever end.
It is highly troubling that this would be being used as a public button, when there is much evidence that UK politicians have no desire, whatever, to actually prosecute the biggest pedophiles in their state - those within their own ranks.
Therefor, this article certainly is nothing but propaganda.
All you have to do is prove a certain person is a criminal. Innocent until proven guilty, due process, the justice system - any of these minor details ring a bell to Amber Rudd?
The common user is currently entrenched in two walled gardens for almost all of their activity, and banning encrypted communications for 95% of the population is now feasible, and perhaps quite likely. That sucks.
I would honestly love to see UKGOV try that. There wouldn't be enough popcorn in the world for what a disaster that would be on every level.
Most people would switch to something that is compliant with government legislation, very quickly. Because most people don't know or care what encryption is, they just want to talk to their friends.
Just last week I saw a non-technical colleague side-loading Messenger Lite from an APK mirror site as it is not available through the Play Store in the UK.
WhatsApp even have a direct APK download on their website, cutting out the middleman.