So it sounds like "being friendly to terrorists" is actually code for securing user data and ensuring privacy. Yes, it's possible that terrorists could use these services. However, I don't think the global population should give up liberty and privacy for the negligible amount of safety that removing this encryption would provide.
"It[technology] can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them ... and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that."
"We all love the benefit of the internet and all the rest of it, but we need their support in making sure that they're doing everything possible to stop their technology being exploited by terrorists. I'm saying that needs to be front and centre of their thinking and for some it is and some it isn't."
-- Unsurprisingly, the main argument here is that creating more surveillance-proof software is essentially the same as being friendly with terrorists.
I beg to differ on that.
This is a typical biased perspective from someone whose job is to deal with the worst of humanity every day. It seems more realistic to assume that the threat from terrorism is very small, and there are other threats that are much greater. Those include threats that good security and privacy technology help to mitigate. They also include threats from which strong civil liberties protect us.
So no, preventing technology from being exploited by bad people should not be "front and centre" of its creators' thinking. That attitude just leads to never building useful things. Should we also stop building good quality roads, because being able to drive faster is friendly to bank robbers? Should we abolish cash, because being able to transact quickly and anonymously is friendly to fraudsters?
> This is a typical biased perspective from someone whose job is to deal with the worst of humanity every day.
And this is giving too much credence for people that were already caught abusing their powers.
No, evidence is that those people are not biased. They have a clear view of their goals, and they are trying to keep the population terrorized enabling them to gather more of government's power. They are terrorists themselves, using terror to enable a coup.
"we need [tech firms to do] everything possible to stop their technology being exploited by terrorists"
Such absolutism is foolish. The only way to guarantee technology cannot be used by terrorists is to never invent any technology. In the real world we need to offset the tiny benefits to an extreme minority of bogeymen against the enormous benefits to typical consumers.
I am surprised he did not also try for the paedophile angle. Those are the 2 old chestnuts always pulled out to justify government/police surveillance.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, government is using terrorist introduced legislation to spy on people overfilling their garbage bins....
The lock on Mr Rowley's front door is friendly to terrorists, as it prevents the security services from legally entering his unlocked property without a warrant. You never know what he might be hiding!
Perhaps he should do an open house, in the nude. Only then can we be safe from this potential predator. He locks his door! He must be hiding something sinister. The evidence - his use of a technology to restrict access to information about his self - points to a guilty conscience.
"We will continue persecuting you until you trust us!"
Really, this feels like a large-scale version of a spouse, caught cheating, refusing to admit any wrongdoing and then getting ripshit about not feeling trusted.
As long as there are police, they'll be saying things like this to justify their demands for ever more power. It's in their nature. If you don't want to hear it, you'll have to get rid of them. Otherwise there's really nothing for it, and certainly no point in offering any kind of substantive response. The viper's nature is to bite; one does not attempt to educate it into peaceful coexistence but opts instead for avoidance or extermination.
The police are like an aggressive guard dog. The aggressive nature is what what makes it a good guard dog, but occasionally that aggression turns back on those it's supposed to protect. It's important as the owner of this beast to keep it on a short leash, redirect it as needed, and chastise it when it's been bad.
The police don't want power for power's sake, they really do want it to do their job better. Unfortunately, they lose track of the fact their job is ultimately to uphold the laws and our way of life by aggressively pursuing the short-term goal of reducing immediate threats. The police are a force for good, and we are better off for their presence, but like the guard dog above, they require attention to keep inline.
We are the owners of the guard dog. Those between us and our guards are our employees, and if ever they forget this, they are just as in need of redirection and chastisement. Failure to do that is our own failure, as it is our job to manage our tools and resources. We cannot expect them to run themselves.
To strain the analogy further, the employees have rebelled and no longer listen to the board of directors, and they've limited the hiring pool to people just like them.
That may be true, but it also makes what needs to happen obvious. When those tasked with representing your interests no longer do so effectively, they need to be replaced.
This, of course, isn't anything new or groundbreaking.
The only way to "fix" this problem is to completely abolish the institution. The great majority of cops, including all upper ranks, would have to be permanently removed. A new heavily emasculated entity could be created, stripped of all military overtones, with the guiding principle that the organization has no authority and no right to question its own limits or lobby for changes to them (except to impose more limits following even the slightest whiff of potential abuses, which must be reported immediately). Only people who want to serve under those terms, and will hire others of similar disposition, could be considered for membership in the new organization. Termination of anyone demonstrating less than total subservience would have to be immediate and unappealable.
Such an entity would not be recognizable as a "police force" to anyone currently living, as most are heavily militarized and populated almost exclusively by individuals with a pathological need to exercise absolute power over others. But yes, in principle such an entity could be created to replace what now exists.
There are two major problems: first, the individuals making up today's police forces won't just go away, any more than piratical sailors did following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession or the Ba'athists did following the fall of their government in Iraq. They're still going to be somewhere, seeking unlimited power by whatever means they can, lawful or not. Something has to be done to prevent them from reconstituting themselves somewhere else. De-Ba'athification turned out to be harder than it looks; abolishing an institution takes more than removing its members from the public payroll.
Second, as most scholars probably would accept, risk-aversion among politicians is an essential failure of representative democracy. It is usually impossible to find the political will to do anything that could lead to "headline outrage" later. This is a basic feature of this form of government; simply throwing out a particular group of bums won't address it. No rational politician would vote to reform the police in any radical manner because any subsequent "heinous crime" would be dumped on his or her doorstep (regardless of whether any police force conceivable could have prevented it), and of course the former cops would encourage this process and milk it for all it's worth. The rational politician is interested in maximizing opportunities for reelection, not the good of humanity.
The two analogous historical comparisons I might make, in which public institutions were replaced wholesale with the mandate that horrific errors of the past never be repeated, are the Bundesbank and the Japanese SDF. The Bundesbank has effectively been replaced after only a few decades by the pro-inflation ECB, and the SDF's pacifist restrictions, after decades of being whittled away, are now under discussion for outright removal. So the historical track record of "never again" isn't very compelling, nor is the historical track record of firing large numbers of armed and dangerous "public servants" with limited skills and a history of supporting one another through corruption and perjury. And we know that no representative democracy's politicians are ever going to support such an act. Your ideological commitment to the ballot box is laudable, but does not provide any real solution to the problem at hand, nor does it refute my essential characterization of today's police institutions.
> The only way to "fix" this problem is to completely abolish the institution.
Even ignoring the question of whether doing so would fix the problem, which I give you it could, you've provided nothing to show that it's the only way besides your own assertion.
You're going to redirect and chastise people with a total monopoly on the means of war and control of the majority of the nation's wealth and media? There's a quick and simple way to deal with threats when you're in that position. Car crash, suicide, incriminating evidence found that gets you locked up for some moral crime....
That assumes that the majority of that group are in need of corrective action and that they are completely unwilling to do so themselves (on top of the unwillingness to carry out the public's wishes, as presupposed by this thread). I don't believe that's the case.
I also don't believe this group is the same as the group that controls most the media. There may be some overlay, and some shared interests, but ultimately the politicians do not control the media. Both politicians and the media pander to, and manipulate, the public. It's obvious the public has the actual power here, and it's just a matter of asserting it and making it's will known. Of course, that's not necessarily an easy thing to do.
There are several possibilities. It could be that when you don't catch all defectors in such a system the remaining defectors reduce your ability to catch future defectors. It could be that the power structure, and associated politics, of the group mean that defecting is a move that increases your relative fitness - in terms of the power that you will wield within the group and over its moral character - dramatically (imagine if the person investigating a complaint is a defector, or someone performing public interest tests when deciding whether to prosecute has some incentive to prosecute regardless....) It could just be that most people within the group are in fact good, but that the systems that allow them to publicise and correct malign actors within the system are not present, or are very ineffective.
It seems to me that you only require that the majority of the group be in need of corrective action, and be completely unwilling to do so themselves, if you think that the group is ruled by a majority... If you believe that power between the members of the group, is roughly evenly distributed, and can be as easily turned to any end. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that the moral character of the group taken as a whole is uncertain, but that a few very powerful people establishing the character of the system are operating under fairly perverse incentive structures... and that there's no readily apparent way to get rid of them.
That is to say, that there is no candidate you can vote for where your vote translates into meaningful action in removing them. That, if you were an individual policeman, there is no action you could take there to remove them either. That even if the majority of the group were good, there are problems of detection and power disparities that they would have to act in concert to overcome (perhaps even on a national level)...
That as such the chance of anything significant to being done to curtail abuses of the system, before they can grow and become the nature of the system, (if they are not already,) are very low. You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. A few people in the right place, that you can get to do what you want them to, will do perfectly well. It doesn't even need to be the case that they're evil if you can feed them the wrong intelligence. The people who turn up to arrest the person might honestly believe that they're a criminal.
They may even be right. Everyone's guilty of something these days and selective enforcement would be a fantastic weapon if you were a hypothetical evil master-mind type. You arrange for someone to be looked more closely at, and they'll be effectively eliminated even by people who are trying to impartially uphold the law. You get to eliminate your problems while thumping your chest about how impure the world is and how you need more power to protect it....
Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.)
I don't believe the conditions you outlined make it impossible to change the system, but they do outline a situation that makes it very hard. At a minimum, voting to aggressively replace incumbents in all offices for a few terms would definitely shake up any existing internal power relationships (as I said, hard). But if we can outline way out of the scenario you outlined above that possible, we can work backwards from there to see what is a necessary condition for the desired outcome and how we can achieve it by iterating on a known possible solution (even if initially unlikely).
> You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian.
No, but you need a fair percentage of people, or people in power to be, to do it continuously without getting caught. Additionally, as long as general consensus is against specific group actions, they will eventually come to light. Just as there is a chance that a normally lawful person may occasionally, due to some aspect of their personality or environment,break the law, there is a chance that a person that normally breaks a specific law will decide that this instance of it occurring within the group is inexcusable in the way it previously was, and make it public. That is, groups that exhibit aberrant behavior with regard to the social norm will eventually be exposed, and society in general will take steps to correct that behavior if it is aberrant enough. I.e. The group defined by getting just a little too close when greeting people will face little or no social correction, while the group that spits in your face instead of saying hello will face some heavy corrective actions.
> Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.)
I'm not sure any system is incorrectably abominable. Nature seems to abhor steady state systems (if it seems to be steady, perhaps the scale is too small), cyclical seems more common. and cyclical implies change (and return, to be fair).
Nice./s Next stage of terrorism infection is starting to set in; metastasis of turning on one's own. As someone with a more classic understanding of terrorism, it is both amazing and chilling seeing the social pathogen injected on 9/11 coursing through the "Anglo-Saxon" west.
>> "It can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them ... and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn't do that."
If you're making tech that is not creating challenges for law-enforcement, in light of all we know now, you're doing it wrong.
Sort of- if you care about liberty and freedom and all those enlightenment ideals.
Let's not forget there are people who enjoy increasing their power, tracking political enemies, exercising authority over other people, and all other forms of winning-at-other's-expense.
If one thing is "friendly to terrorists", that's cranking up the panopticon. Maybe M. Rowley should turn himself in and get an appointment in room 101.
There's been an awful lot said about the philosophy of "freedom vs security" in these comments, but it seems to me that the disconnect tech people feel with law enforcement is at least equally due to a technical gap. In the spirit of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," I'd imagine that if those making policy decisions understood exactly what it would take to make the internet completely or even significantly transparent to intelligence agencies they would be less comfortable leading the crusade against encryption in the name of combating terrorism and pedophilia.
Those making policy decisions will always listen to the spooks over the people and they have an interest in saying they were tough on terror/criminals/paedophiles/drugs/whatever so I reckon that's probably wishful thinking...
Paranoia is always influential, but it's not all-powerful and it's not valued over everything else like you imply. Reality, and education about that reality, is also very influential. That's not wishful thinking. Look at cannabis legalization and gay marriage.
True, though cannabis is still illegal here, Gay marriage was suddenly and abruptly legalised here in the uk in a move that surprised and delighted me.
Didn't think our politicians had it in them, so perhaps there is some decency and concern left.
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,"
Some might attribute that soundbite to malice rather than stupidity...
They have a very clear idea what they want. They want central keyholding authorities with master keys that they can use... This could then be used to keep the banking system safe enough (NB safe enough rather than safe) whilst allowing no private communications.
It's a good point that this vision they have is specific and technical to some extent. But it's also not very well thought out from the perspective of an elected official and the general public (their bosses, even if we want to go all the way to the level of an inherent social contract).
What are these agencies/governments doing? They say that companies are friendly to terrorists and expect what reaction? If you want cooperation you need mutual respect and the UK/US government are acting out of line.
They're not trying to win over the companies, they're trying to put pressure on them by convincing the public that the companies are harming the public's safety.
They're not looking for trust with companies. They're manipulating public thought so the next wave of laws won't be opposed by any significant percentage of the population. "Oh, terrorism you say? Oh, well ... OK, I guess. You know what's best."
If they were serious, they'd name and shame the supposed terrorist friendly companies, and encourage the public not to do business with them.
> Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during investigations.
And law enforcement has to think about the distrust of government by its supposed citizen/masters that it's causing by indiscriminately spying on everyone. Snowden isn't the problem. The problem is that there was something worth exposing.
If spies and law enforcement worked indisputable within the bounds of expectation and law (and not merely within law that they essentially drafted, for their convenience), rather than in the shadows, then I'm quite sure that businesses and others would mostly have no problem working with them.
If I know that you're going to be honest, I have no reason to protect myself against you specifically. If not, you're just another threat.
Come back into the fold, law enforcement. We miss you.
Privacy vs having 1/1000000 chance of dying from terror act. I know which I choose. I suppose that is with those guys - they know how tiny and useless their job is.
> Mark Rowley, the national police lead for counter-terrorism, said companies needed to think about their "corporate social responsibility" in creating products that made it hard for the authorities to access material during investigations.
Doesn't it also make it hard for terrorists to access the authorities' materials as well? A tool is a tool.
>"Snowden has created an environment where some technology companies are less comfortable working with law reinforcement..."
I'm pretty sure that the governments are the parties responsible for this environment.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread"We all love the benefit of the internet and all the rest of it, but we need their support in making sure that they're doing everything possible to stop their technology being exploited by terrorists. I'm saying that needs to be front and centre of their thinking and for some it is and some it isn't."
-- Unsurprisingly, the main argument here is that creating more surveillance-proof software is essentially the same as being friendly with terrorists. I beg to differ on that.
So no, preventing technology from being exploited by bad people should not be "front and centre" of its creators' thinking. That attitude just leads to never building useful things. Should we also stop building good quality roads, because being able to drive faster is friendly to bank robbers? Should we abolish cash, because being able to transact quickly and anonymously is friendly to fraudsters?
And this is giving too much credence for people that were already caught abusing their powers.
No, evidence is that those people are not biased. They have a clear view of their goals, and they are trying to keep the population terrorized enabling them to gather more of government's power. They are terrorists themselves, using terror to enable a coup.
Such absolutism is foolish. The only way to guarantee technology cannot be used by terrorists is to never invent any technology. In the real world we need to offset the tiny benefits to an extreme minority of bogeymen against the enormous benefits to typical consumers.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, government is using terrorist introduced legislation to spy on people overfilling their garbage bins....
Which would be very funny if it were not true.
Sounds like a great story to share. What's happening in the UK with garbage and surveillance?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-counc...
Seven years old: don't know if it still goes on.
Please read all my email because I want to keep all the children safe!
Perhaps he should do an open house, in the nude. Only then can we be safe from this potential predator. He locks his door! He must be hiding something sinister. The evidence - his use of a technology to restrict access to information about his self - points to a guilty conscience.
Really, this feels like a large-scale version of a spouse, caught cheating, refusing to admit any wrongdoing and then getting ripshit about not feeling trusted.
If my neighbour performs an illegal action, I will not report him unless I believe the action to merit punishment.
I do not believe secure communications are bad and therefore I will not aid in their destruction.
Simple.
The police don't want power for power's sake, they really do want it to do their job better. Unfortunately, they lose track of the fact their job is ultimately to uphold the laws and our way of life by aggressively pursuing the short-term goal of reducing immediate threats. The police are a force for good, and we are better off for their presence, but like the guard dog above, they require attention to keep inline.
This, of course, isn't anything new or groundbreaking.
Such an entity would not be recognizable as a "police force" to anyone currently living, as most are heavily militarized and populated almost exclusively by individuals with a pathological need to exercise absolute power over others. But yes, in principle such an entity could be created to replace what now exists.
There are two major problems: first, the individuals making up today's police forces won't just go away, any more than piratical sailors did following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession or the Ba'athists did following the fall of their government in Iraq. They're still going to be somewhere, seeking unlimited power by whatever means they can, lawful or not. Something has to be done to prevent them from reconstituting themselves somewhere else. De-Ba'athification turned out to be harder than it looks; abolishing an institution takes more than removing its members from the public payroll.
Second, as most scholars probably would accept, risk-aversion among politicians is an essential failure of representative democracy. It is usually impossible to find the political will to do anything that could lead to "headline outrage" later. This is a basic feature of this form of government; simply throwing out a particular group of bums won't address it. No rational politician would vote to reform the police in any radical manner because any subsequent "heinous crime" would be dumped on his or her doorstep (regardless of whether any police force conceivable could have prevented it), and of course the former cops would encourage this process and milk it for all it's worth. The rational politician is interested in maximizing opportunities for reelection, not the good of humanity.
The two analogous historical comparisons I might make, in which public institutions were replaced wholesale with the mandate that horrific errors of the past never be repeated, are the Bundesbank and the Japanese SDF. The Bundesbank has effectively been replaced after only a few decades by the pro-inflation ECB, and the SDF's pacifist restrictions, after decades of being whittled away, are now under discussion for outright removal. So the historical track record of "never again" isn't very compelling, nor is the historical track record of firing large numbers of armed and dangerous "public servants" with limited skills and a history of supporting one another through corruption and perjury. And we know that no representative democracy's politicians are ever going to support such an act. Your ideological commitment to the ballot box is laudable, but does not provide any real solution to the problem at hand, nor does it refute my essential characterization of today's police institutions.
Even ignoring the question of whether doing so would fix the problem, which I give you it could, you've provided nothing to show that it's the only way besides your own assertion.
I also don't believe this group is the same as the group that controls most the media. There may be some overlay, and some shared interests, but ultimately the politicians do not control the media. Both politicians and the media pander to, and manipulate, the public. It's obvious the public has the actual power here, and it's just a matter of asserting it and making it's will known. Of course, that's not necessarily an easy thing to do.
It seems to me that you only require that the majority of the group be in need of corrective action, and be completely unwilling to do so themselves, if you think that the group is ruled by a majority... If you believe that power between the members of the group, is roughly evenly distributed, and can be as easily turned to any end. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that the moral character of the group taken as a whole is uncertain, but that a few very powerful people establishing the character of the system are operating under fairly perverse incentive structures... and that there's no readily apparent way to get rid of them.
That is to say, that there is no candidate you can vote for where your vote translates into meaningful action in removing them. That, if you were an individual policeman, there is no action you could take there to remove them either. That even if the majority of the group were good, there are problems of detection and power disparities that they would have to act in concert to overcome (perhaps even on a national level)...
That as such the chance of anything significant to being done to curtail abuses of the system, before they can grow and become the nature of the system, (if they are not already,) are very low. You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian. A few people in the right place, that you can get to do what you want them to, will do perfectly well. It doesn't even need to be the case that they're evil if you can feed them the wrong intelligence. The people who turn up to arrest the person might honestly believe that they're a criminal.
They may even be right. Everyone's guilty of something these days and selective enforcement would be a fantastic weapon if you were a hypothetical evil master-mind type. You arrange for someone to be looked more closely at, and they'll be effectively eliminated even by people who are trying to impartially uphold the law. You get to eliminate your problems while thumping your chest about how impure the world is and how you need more power to protect it....
Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.)
> You don't need everyone in the police to be corrupt to silence a potentially problematic civilian.
No, but you need a fair percentage of people, or people in power to be, to do it continuously without getting caught. Additionally, as long as general consensus is against specific group actions, they will eventually come to light. Just as there is a chance that a normally lawful person may occasionally, due to some aspect of their personality or environment,break the law, there is a chance that a person that normally breaks a specific law will decide that this instance of it occurring within the group is inexcusable in the way it previously was, and make it public. That is, groups that exhibit aberrant behavior with regard to the social norm will eventually be exposed, and society in general will take steps to correct that behavior if it is aberrant enough. I.e. The group defined by getting just a little too close when greeting people will face little or no social correction, while the group that spits in your face instead of saying hello will face some heavy corrective actions.
> Not everyone needs to be evil for the system as a whole to become abominable, even incorrectably so (at least just going by number of good vs bad participants.)
I'm not sure any system is incorrectably abominable. Nature seems to abhor steady state systems (if it seems to be steady, perhaps the scale is too small), cyclical seems more common. and cyclical implies change (and return, to be fair).
If you're making tech that is not creating challenges for law-enforcement, in light of all we know now, you're doing it wrong.
Let's not forget there are people who enjoy increasing their power, tracking political enemies, exercising authority over other people, and all other forms of winning-at-other's-expense.
Didn't think our politicians had it in them, so perhaps there is some decency and concern left.
Some might attribute that soundbite to malice rather than stupidity...
They have a very clear idea what they want. They want central keyholding authorities with master keys that they can use... This could then be used to keep the banking system safe enough (NB safe enough rather than safe) whilst allowing no private communications.
If they were serious, they'd name and shame the supposed terrorist friendly companies, and encourage the public not to do business with them.
This is no different from Joe McCarthy's list of government employees who were communists, which he always waved and never shared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
"An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013."
omg h4x0rz
And law enforcement has to think about the distrust of government by its supposed citizen/masters that it's causing by indiscriminately spying on everyone. Snowden isn't the problem. The problem is that there was something worth exposing.
If spies and law enforcement worked indisputable within the bounds of expectation and law (and not merely within law that they essentially drafted, for their convenience), rather than in the shadows, then I'm quite sure that businesses and others would mostly have no problem working with them.
If I know that you're going to be honest, I have no reason to protect myself against you specifically. If not, you're just another threat.
Come back into the fold, law enforcement. We miss you.
Doesn't it also make it hard for terrorists to access the authorities' materials as well? A tool is a tool.