Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private Brits have delivered a fairly unambiguous verdict on giving the government access to their encrypted messages: no, thanks. New polling commissioned by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) found that 93 percent of British adults believe they have a right to private conversations online, while 89 percent think nobody should …
>sooner this sort of idiocy goes away, the better
Indeed. But are any of the political parties that might form a future government saying they'll put a stop to it?
Because unless they do it isn't going to go away. It'll become normalised and it'll increase.
So remember folks, next time someone comes knocking on your door asking for your vote, tell 'em what they've got to commit to.
> saying they'll put a stop to it
Preelectoral promises are never binding, as (wherever you're living) you might have noticed by now. And since privacy is against any government's interests (keeping tabs on the unruly masses), if somebody actually said it they would be brazenly lying in your face.
> In which case let's not waste our time telling our politicians at every & any oppurtunity what we do & don't want.
That's a good example of the so-called "package-deal fallacy": There is no reason why not believing politicians should prevent us from telling them our expectations. Apples & oranges...
Perhaps it's more a case of not collecting our Got Fooled Again Awards over and over and over again when they say one thing, and then do another.
If you want something different you have to vote for someone different, and I don't mean the people from the last-but-one regime wearing different rosettes.
But are any of the political parties that might form a future government saying they'll put a stop to it?
The Lib Dems have their 'Digital Bill of Rights' concept. Use of end-to-end encryption is one of the few really concrete rights to go into that (the rest being TBD).
The idea being that by elevating it to an untouchable right you really do put a stop to it. But that only works if the public is overwhelming supportive of the entire bill of rights, and/or other parties are broadly in agreement at the time it's legislated. Which means a risk of watering-down, adding loopholes, or else the inevitable 'revoke the digital bill of rights to save the children' policies at the following election.
Normal people everywhere think that sort of thing is a bad idea. The thing is that people who involve themselves in government don't tend to be normal. They're there to Fix Things, and it's very important to their worldview, even their self-image, to see giving just about any kind power to government as a good thing. Because then they could use it to Fix Things, you see.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
My mum who has been an OAP for sometime asked a lond while ago what backdoored encryption was. It had come up in a news story* and she was genuinely curious about it. So I started off with basics about where she used encryption every day, things like WhatsApp, online banking etc. We went into the different levels of security through encryption, and the reasons for needing them. I explained using Crypto AG as a real world example of when backdooring had been used and said as soon as someone else finds access to the backdoor, the encryption is fairly useless. She got this concept quite easily and realises that it’s not as simple as some people (mostly politicians etc.) make it out to be. Her final comment was that if she could understand this why couldn’t the politicians?
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/25/mi5-chief-asks-tech-firms-for-exceptional-access-to-encrypted-messages We chatted during lockdown which meant I had plenty of time to give detailed answers.
Two words: wilful blindness.
There will of course be a few politicians who do understand the main concepts of encryption and why backdoors are unworkable. They won't say this in public because they'll get pilloried by the Daily Heil's "won't someone think of the children?" morons and be accused of enabling terrorism, porn, drug dealing, child abuse, etc.
Two other words: Don't care.
This gets in the way of their unfettered desire to return everyone (else) to serfdom. Such a person clearly doesn't care about the unintended consequences (assuming, of course, that they are unintended) of any actions designed to reduce the vast unwashed populace into serfdom.
G.W. said the (heretofore) quiet part out loud: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
Sometimes I feel sure things will and they don't, other times I'm surprised about the things that do. In that latter category I place opposition to Flock cameras. People like me have been talking about that stuff for years but no one cared, now all of sudden there's a big backlash against them. Big enough that Ring got scared and made some changes to make it harder for police to access videos in an Apple like "we tied our own hands to make it so we can't respond to subpoenas" for video more than 24 hours old. The fact they did that so quickly after the rise in Flock vandalism started making national news makes me think they had this capability built and ready to go as a "break glass in case of privacy or police overreach backlash" scenario.
If the US resistance to AI datacenters and Flock cameras turns into a more general backlash against Big Tech maybe those of us who live in the US, land of the free (dom for businesses to harvest the data of everyone with almost no guardrails) will finally start catching up with the EU in terms of privacy rights.
Google, Facebook, and Microsoft might soon have more trouble on their hands than just opposition to their datacenters.
Now Flock is an interesting example. In the US it's a private company doing 1984-esque work for the government. Here in Italy, license plate reading cameras are everywhere (at least they are in my own town) and they are installed by the town itself, not a private company. And no one has ever cared about them, no one has protested them, no one is damaging them.
If you think the US is bad at privacy, you should check the EU first. Or at least Italy.
If they are installed and operated by the town then I assume it would be rather difficult for the police three towns over, or your national police, to get access to them? Flock is a problem because it is one company nationwide that owns, installs and controls the cameras. So from the perspective of the local police getting access to Flock camera information three towns over is quite simple.
It is much easier to abuse when you have a single nationwide system that is controlled by a corporation with zero oversight. If my city was owning and operating its own camera network separate from Flock, even if it used the same technologies and capabilities, I would be much less bothered by it. Not that I trust my local police to not have the same instincts for abuse that police everywhere do, but because there would be local oversight and control. If there were allegations of abuse the city council would have the power to look into it and access to all the logs and so forth. With Flock they control the flow of information and since they see the police as their most important customer they will act to protect them and hinder attempts by other local government officials to exercise oversight - that has been reported time and again.
Not saying I want my city to install cameras, but if they do I would want it to be a system owned/controlled by the city even if it meant paying a few bucks more in property taxes. That would be well worth it to me to not have Flock or any similar corporation that ties them into a nationwide system that allows warrantless police snooping with zero oversight ability for my local government.
Nothing will stop the government from doing it. They have two working models: Govt/citizens as Parents/childen and as Farmers/sheep.
Still, when they hack our messages, they will just find out how much we hate them. They can't lock us up for that - they don't even have the space to lock up criminals.
They will just a) have their friends in the police put the "frighteners" on to make an "example"
B) have their friends in the meeja do the same by branding someone a child molester apologist or something
c) cut a deal with some 3rd world nation (el Salvador perhaps??) to house our prison excess
d) ensure someone's social security/pension payments get paused for ""review" or their banking access gets cut off, ditto technical issues with their phone service/internet/mobile
e) a nasty "accident" for the worst offenders
People see that government seem to have abundance of tools to tackle whatever it needs tackling, but instead of actually tackling them, they invent another excuse, ahh no we can't do anything yet with those crimes, we need more data. Just moving goal posts.
Now, what they'll do when people start saying they just role play on chats and don't actually say what they mean. The next logical step will be implants in the brain.
Everything but doing the job tax payers pay them to do.
"84 percent worried that mechanisms allowing access to encrypted messages could introduce vulnerabilities for hackers and criminals"
This is worrying. It means that 16% can't work this out for themselves. It's a lot of people and as security only needs one weak link to fail it means it's going to be almost impossible to reduce the number of break-ins.
Quote: "....Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private...."
....but even so, 100 per cent of Brits are quite happyy to subcontract their
privacy to a few huge foreign corporations.
"Who they?" I hear you say..........
Well........Apple, Signal, Meta, Amazon, Google, Telegram, Microsoft .......
I don't hear ANYONE arguing that citizens might actually take some
personal responsibility for their own privacy........
.....say by abandoning the "cloud"....or by using more air gapped processes....
.....or by adopting PRIVATE encryption........
Yup...."I want privacy"......but "I want SOMEONE ELSE to give it to me".
Sigh!!!
You lost me at your inclusion of Signal in the list of "huge foreign corporations" - and not because Signal is developed by the "Signal Foundation", which hardly qualifies as "huge".
I wouldn't normally post this sort of reply to a minor error like this, but there may be readers who are not familiar with the relative strengths of private communications solutions... and the fact remains that Signal likely the most secure messaging solution available to us mere mortals.
Important caveat: it's not 100% secure - not because governments will necessarily be able to crack the encryption, but - because in many cases, the meta-data is more important than the content of a message. [Sender, recipient, date and time, etc., which make it possible to map associations]. In fact, if you'd like a really good explanation of his this works, I recommend this fantastic 10-minute read from Kieran Healy:
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/
@Sproggit
You forgot one important point.......................
......namely that Signal messages are ONLY SECURE WHEN IN TRANSIT!
That leaves the obvious possibility that NSO Pegasus or Paragon Graphite
(deployed by governments or other malign snoops) can read messages
in plain directly on an end point.
So much for "Privacy and Signal"!
Remember Jamal Khashoggi!
Yes, but if either endpoint is compromised then security/encryption goes completely out of the Window anyway. The messages have to be in plaintext at some point otherwise neither party can read them.
It takes some degree of effort to compromise say a particular person’s phone, so it’s likely to be used sparingly, towards particular targets. If the security services have a special interest in a specific target and feel it necessary to go to those lengths, then fair enough.
This is different to what HMG wants to do now which is to be able to read everyone’s messages with little or no effort. The chances of this being abused is vastly, vastly greater than if it were necessary to hack everyone’s phone.
"Yes, but if either endpoint is compromised then security/encryption goes completely out of the Window anyway."
And there's more than one way of being compromised. MPs use things such as Whatsapp. They also have a tendency to blab - like the one who handed over all his messages to a biographer. They'll have learnt to regard it as insecure so if it's backdoored it won't make a difference hence there's no reason why it shoudln't be.
To easily exploit automatic update you need to have some connections… I’ve yet to see a man-in-the-middle style of exploit (and associated kit) where I, knowing a persons phone number, can readily use the auto update functionality to load my spyware app without them having to explicitly do anything to facilitate the install.
>” This is different to what HMG wants to do now which is to be able to read everyone’s messages with little or no effort. The chances of this being abused is vastly, vastly greater than if it were necessary to hack everyone’s phone.”
For a modern day example of this, I suggest researching the multi-year Israeli intercept of all communications (phone, cctv etc.) within Gaza and among Hamas leaders, their usage of AWS to process the data has been touched on by ElReg. It is the level of data they were gathering that’s leads credence to the viewpoint that Israeli intelligence services and high command knew about the then upcoming October 7th incursion and decided to let it happen…
>” because in many cases, the meta-data is more important than the contentt. … In fact, if you'd like a really good explanation of his this works, I recommend…”
Or practically anything about the work of Gordon Welchman. “ The Hut Six Story” is an excellent read, but significantly longer than 10 minutes…
I don't hear ANYONE arguing that citizens might actually take some
personal responsibility for their own privacy........
.....say by abandoning the "cloud"....or by using more air gapped processes....
.....or by adopting PRIVATE encryption........
Most people are not skilled in the mechanisms of running their own mail servers, or private encryption, they need help.
For most people, a PC is like a oven, they use it to get stuff done, they don't want to have to fiddle around trying to get it to work.
If we want people to use private encryption, we need to make it easy to do to everyone.
The first rule of cryptography is to get an expert to do it.
I know a fair amount, but am definitely not an expert. So I use libraries and tools that are made by experts, and package them up. Which means trusting the groups that made said libraries and tools.
The average Clapham Omnibus traveller knows less about this than me, so they need prepackaged libraries and tools.
Which means trusting some group to have chosen libraries and tools, and to have packaged them well.
So yes, the vast majority of the public have to trust Apple, or Google, or Signal etc. Which means everyone has to, because otherwise nobody can talk to the knowledgeable or the experts.
Suspect the survey didn’t ask about how people felt about the corporates (FB, X etc) reading all their communications as normal business practise and passing on “pseudo anonymous” data to “carefully selected: third-parties.
I get the distinct impression the real purpose of these types of surveys is to deflect people from looking at the businesses who are actively exploiting their data…
Funny how people are more worried about “the government” knowing what their communications contain, than some random weirdo’s business algorithm deciding to force feed them suicide assistance ad’s, just because they once-upon-a-time clicked on something related… Funnily, I’m less worried about “the government” knowing that at 4pm I am regularly outside a school than the social media companies et al who will almost certainty inundate me with child related advertising and because of the age checks that material might also be even more questionable…
You know those can both be problems? Opposing one doesn't prevent you from also opposing the other, and there's no reason a survey has to ask about both simultaneously or make people pick between them.
But one little difference that may not matter to you but should is that governments have more power to misuse data they collect than corporations. I try to keep my data away from both, and one of the primary reasons is that one of the misuses from corporations I most want to avoid is them selling the data they collected back to governments, employers, and other institutions with extra power over me.
>and one of the primary reasons is that one of the misuses from corporations I most want to avoid is them selling the data they collected back to governments
Not come across this one, government (agencies) only need to ask to be given free and largely unfettered access to the data help by corporates.... so whilst on the surface they are different, dig a little and the government still gets your data if they really want it...
Agree there is no reason a survey has to ask about both simultaneously, however, I suggest the absence of this asking a group of related questions means the intent and purpose of the survey is to get a desired result - ie. I expect those commissioning this survey knew what the majority answer would be, given the number of previous surveys etc on this specific matter and all have given the same result...
You are evidently unaware of large data markets and their misuse by both governments and other corporations. For example, in the US, they recently required a court ruling to inform law enforcement that, when you don't have a legal right to collect location data, buying it from others who collected it also isn't allowed. Before that, and likely still, they were buying lots of data and using it for ... oh, that's right, they don't have to tell us how they were using it, whose they bought, whether they still have it. Are they still doing it? Who knows; the court decision says it's not allowed to be used in court, not that they can't still buy it.
But that's the US. We all know they don't have privacy there. Such a thing couldn't happen in the UK or EU, like this case where Irish journalists were able to easily buy location history data for thousands of people. I want to prevent all of this, but if I'm only allowed to pick one, I want to prevent the one with the most likelihood of having severe consequences and advertising isn't that.
>For example, in the US, they recently required a court ruling to inform law enforcement that, when you don't have a legal right to collect location data, buying it from others who collected it also isn't allowed.
thanks for the memory jog - there was an ElReg article on this.
>I want to prevent the one with the most likelihood of having severe consequences and advertising isn't that.
Trouble is this sort of negative advertising (government data collection bad) would seem to encourage the use of the corporates as the data collectors and for the relationship between them and (certain) government agencies to be more remunerative...
They're not mutually exclusive, that's been proven, often.
Encryption hampers surveillance, it always has done, there are cyphertexts from the middle ages and earlier that still g emt been deciphered.
It rarely stops a thorough investigation because the evidence required can almost always be gathered in other ways.
And this is, partly, why I'm opposed to giving up all my privacy to a government agency for whatever abuses they care to perpetrate. (And we *know* they overstep, that's been proven many times)
"Enemy has landed in greater strength than anticipated. Send reinforcements and a better helmet. — Harold."
Ald. Blaecnaedre: "Baldrick, have you finished deciphering the royal message yet ?"
Baldrick: "Sorry sir. I used the book to start the kitchen fire last week. Trying another book."
Ok, vellum made from sheep skin wouldn't be much chop for starting fires but is a fair substitute for a goose's neck.
I think where I was going with this is that the public are fickle. As are the news media - who will shout "Nanny State" one day and then "Something Must Be Done" the next. Those of use who understand the tech know that secure encryption isn't going to go away - even if quantum computers can now factor numbers as high as 27.
Way back, when they started marketing PCs and internet access to civilians, I remember thinking that this couldn't end well. However, we are where we are.
>when they started marketing PCs and internet access to civilians, I remember thinking that this couldn't end well
How can you think such a crazy thing!
Consider where we'd be if "civilians" didn't have internet access. We'd all still be beholden to the old media, all of which is/was relative child's play for a government to control & censor.
So much of what we know nowadays about what is going on in the world we'd never know about had the internet not broken the stranglehold governments used to have on news & information.
Which is of course precisely why governments are doing their damnedest in so many diff ways to gain control of the internet.
We should all be enormously grateful for the internet and how it's turned out - could be even better of course, but it's still pretty fantastic compared to if we didn't have it.
Sure, I get the point, mine was that we can have strong encryption *and* strong efforts to combat crimes, but to do so people need to be aware that their privacy shouldn't and doesn't have to be the price.
The Daily Heil and it's ilk (almost all the media across the political spectrum) are massively to blame in this
Exactly what I thought. And then I went through some details of the study.
«Some people argue that giving law enforcement access to encrypted messages containing sensitive information without users’ knowledge or prior court approval would help prevent serious crimes. Others say, law enforcement could use other tools to tackle these crimes, like targeted surveillance with a court order. Which of the following comes closest to your view?»
With the following results for Canada - the UK results seem not to be published (yet?) and I just assume that the same question was included in the UK poll:
24% agree that «Law enforcement should fight serious crime with continuous monitoring of the public's encrypted messages»;56% agree that «Law enforcement should fight serious crime without continuous monitoring of the public's encrypted messages»; and
20% don't know.
> two-thirds said they would not trust either the current government or any future one
Is this just a manifestation of a widespread disdain with politics, politicians and the general state the country is in.
As for:
> The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.
If this poll was executed with the level of accuracy of election polls, I feel this margin should be much, much, wider. Say +/- two-thirds.
Spot on...
The resource "Statbase UK Population Data" suggests that there are approximately 55.2 million UK citizens aged 18 and over, yet this survey interviewed 2000 of them and claimed an accuracy of +/- 2%.
I'm not a statistician, but it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that interviewing 0.003623188% of the target group and then claiming an accuracy of +/-2% is a bit of a stretch.
Sampling theory I think.
I recall even with non parametric (distribution free) statistics - used in the biological sciences - a sample of ~30 would give you a decent estimate of the population mean and variance. There is a Central Limit Theorem in mathematical statistics plus a whole lot more seriously brain damaging mathematics which I trust justifies this. As I always suggested to users having trouble with their statistical analyses - go to a statistician (or was it - to buggery?)
A sample of 2000 would, I imagine, give you a fairly decent estimate even considering the actual UK population is rather heterogenous - more a population of populations.
The truly difficult part of any genuine survey is framing the questions as not to influence the answers - unless that is the skulduggery you intended. Questionaire design is devilishly difficult as is selecting a truly random sample etc all adding to the black art of polling which has to be admitted doesn't have a great track record.
Although the result is not a great surprise given I am sure 99% of the population don't trust the government (or politicians) any further than they could kick them - not that 100% would be averse to donning the wellies and giving it the good old college try.
The basic problem with all these surveys is that they take a frozen-in-time snapshot. Even if their sample is statistically valid, the questions unbiased and the analysis is perfect, they cannot account for the thousands of environmental factors that influence the outcome.
And as the collective sentiment can change apruptly and significantly in a matter of hours - depending on everything from headlines to the weather - those results have an incredibly short shelf-life. Possibly shorter than the time needed to publish the result.
Another problem is that polls don't determine how much someone cares. You can ask me whether I have a preference on an issue, I do and I tell you what it is, but then, because that preference is only a minor thing, I don't bother to vote based on it so it doesn't really matter.
> Sampling theory
One of the things that got me back in my uni. days was the total absence of Statistics from my first year maths degree course, even though it was a part of my A-level Maths course.
I would hope that those wishing for a career in AI R&D have studied relevant branches of Maths such as: Statistics, Game theory, Chaos theory, Matrix maths and Vector algebra.
>” The truly difficult part of any genuine survey is framing the questions as not to influence the answers”
One of my favourites with psychology students was an experiment involving scissors - they regarded scissors as not being handed - I simply swapped the “normal” scissors with my left-handed scissors and watched the fun…
> interviewing 0.003623188% of the target group and then claiming an accuracy of +/-2% is a bit of a stretch
Why? The accuracy is certainly about the interviewed, not about the rest of the population.
Nobody would claim "I can predict with 2% accuracy what people I've never spoken to would have answered", unless you claim to be a psychic mind reader...
>” Nobody would claim "I can predict with 2% accuracy what people I've never spoken to would have answered" “
You will find Pollsters do and their polls compared to the actual results get better the closer to Polling day they poll, hence why in the UK pollsters are prohibited from polling and publishing resulted on Polling day.
>oozing out of the US-Augean stables
That's a excellent point you make - even though it is a bit cryptic how you've said it.
Turns out the people who commissioned the poll, The Center for Democracy & Technology, are US based, with sponsors ranging from Zuckerberg to Google and Apple.
None of which means I'm now trusting the poll any more or less because of it, but it is something I would wish to know, and the article should have mentioned it.
From the article.....
“....while 89 percent think nobody should be able to access their personal messages without a court order.”
Which is missing the point. A properly end to end encrypted system will render the messages unreadable to anyone other than the sender and receiver irrespective of any Court orders - it’s simply impossible to comply in much the same way that a Court order instructing someone to flap their arms and fly is unenforceable.
If it is possible to read a message then by definition the whole system is insecure and in principle anyone could get to read it. It’s been argued ad nauseum that a backdoor that only the good people can use is impossible, it’s like ordering Smith & Weston to make a gun that only shoots bad people!
>” Funny how songs you haven't heard for decades can just appear in your head word perfect from just seeing the title.”
I’ve found playing Trivial Pursuit after a couple of doses of “muscle relaxant / inhibition reducers.an eye opener. I though I had spent much of the 1980s and 1990s inside computer rooms etc., it turns out the mind had hoovered up a lot of other stuff without me being really aware of it.
At the very least, in a democratic society, the government should be open about what it does. The idea of forcing companies to keep quiet about the backdoors is not only Orwellian, it's stupid. The existence of the backdoor is known anyway sooner or later, and then you've gained nothing, except that the public justifiably loses trust in the government.
You'd the would-be surveillance-nut Fascists and Nazis would have clued in by now that society will not tolerate spying without a properly vetted and signed judicial approval for same. These constant childish attempts to get their way just makes them all look like the very children they keep claiming to be "trying to protect" because "think of the children."
BULLSHIT.
What you mean is "Think of the sheer power such intrusive monitoring gives our favourite overlords!"
They are working overtime to change opinion.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk57lg7566o
That was yesterday.
It seems people forgot about prism and five eyes. They already have access. What they need to do is make it legal. That's what it's all about so when you message your neighbour to ask them bring your bins in a day late they can fine you automatically. Obviously that's not extreme enough for what they actually want to do with it but it's a good example of where they will start. There are too many ants in this world and if they work together they will be able to overthrow the grasshoppers.
have to do is force their friends in the media to print "Only pedos* use encrypted chat to share their disgusting pictures with each other and we need to know who they are and what they are sharing in order to jail them."
*Pedos can be mean actual pedos, also terrorists, far rights, far lefts, journalists we dont like, V-bloggers, ordinary bloggers and that guy over there taking pictures.
If you've done nothing wrong then you've got nothing to hide. Is the response from the state security apparatus when people object to blanket surveillance of their private msgs. In that case and in the interests of fairness, we should have access to all government communications.
I suppose that depends on your definition of "state security apparatus". Politicians have frequently used it when defending a new law against protests by people who cared about their privacy. The most famous and recent case I remember was Richard Graham, a conservative MP who used the "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" version when defending a stronger investigatory powers regime in 2015. Earlier, then foreign secretary William Hague said something which is either something quite similar or a slip of the tongue when defending GCHQ's use of spy systems described in the Snowden leaks:
"The net effect is that if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and personal life, you have nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the content of your phone calls or anything like that."
The vagueness of that version is striking, since the interception mostly consisted of metadata, so calling out the "content of phone calls" as the thing they didn't need to fear stood out, and also because he didn't say that they couldn't or wouldn't listen, just that people had "nothing to fear about the British state [...] listening" which could mean either that they didn't have to fear it because it wasn't happening or they didn't have to fear consequences from it happening because they weren't breaking laws.
The exact phrase doesn't matter that much. The sentiment is very real and commonly used, for example when people objecting to the OSA on privacy grounds were accused by supporters as enabling child abuse. The argument that privacy is less important than crime, and therefore that people advocating privacy must have a malign reason for their opinion ranging from lack of consideration for victims up to direct complicity, is a perennial one.
I've done a bit of digging myself and in addition to your Hague utterance I found
2008 HoL Committee referred to "The Home Office slogan If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear".
2015 HoC report on public attitudes to privacy described "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" as a UK government slogan used to justify privacy intrusion.
So I was wrong and it isn't an urban myth. But what bastards they are.
Well, if anyone says it to me I'll shoot straight back at 'em "I've got my privacy to hide, now clear off!".
I have several family members who keep parroting this. At least until I ask questions like should their bank statements be sent to their house in a transparent envelope, or medical appointments with full details be sent on a postcard...
MPs still haven't learned from 10 years ago when they were pushing the Investigatory Powers Bill, and it transpired that GCHQ could monitor all the "private" communications between MPs and their constituants, which of course caused a flurry ... MP David Davis: “The House of Commons administration has serious questions to answer - On whose authority was ‘consent’ granted to view members’ emails? How did they manage to obtain that consent from every one of the 650 members whose constituents’ confidentiality is affected?"
Always nice when they push "our rules shouldn't apply to us"...
From TFA:
The reasons will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the encryption debate for more than five minutes. 84 percent worried that mechanisms allowing access to encrypted messages could introduce vulnerabilities for hackers and criminals, while 82 percent were concerned the powers could be abused.
<sarcasm>Oh, sure, nothing like abusing powers <mumble>Flock</mumble> could ever happen in Blighty, no siree!</sarcasm>
…unless something bad happens to them, and then plod should have access to catch the n’er do wells.
This is a boring endless cake-and-eat-it debate that fuels a multi-billion dollar hacking industry. It does nothing to improve security.
Trouble is the increasing use of biometrics etc. really does mean only the living user has the potential to access their data.
Run an online only stocks and shares account there is a real risk your executor will be unable to access the wealth it contains…
So you do need to allow for and plan for suitable third-party access, only this access doesn’t need to be able to support real-time eavesdropping or readily available to people other than those the user has authorised.
Erm OK then...
I still can't believe the government runs it's business on WhatsApp, that is what I would be seriously questioning. Sure it's end to end encrypted, but when Meta own both ends of the pipe, they can do whatever they want in side channels post decryption....
Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
It's a fundamental treaty of the United Nations that the UK is a signatory to, so by interfering with privacy and correspondence, they are in breach of fundamental human rights.
