UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked

We've fallen quite far from the tradition of policing by consent as developed by Sir Robert Peel:

- Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime.

- An effective authority figure knows trust and accountability are paramount. Hence, "The police are the public and the public are the police."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

Edit: another choice quote from that article, from the Home Office itself in 2012:

"The Home Office defined the legitimacy of policing, in the eyes of the public, as based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so."

The problem is the people nowadays can be easily convinced that everything should be accessible, because

Ekhm

They have nothing to hide and...

Ekhm

They will be more safe

Thus the arguments about fighting terrorism and paedophilia...

And in reality it has nothing to do with terrorism, nor paedophilia.

What does it have to do with in reality?

Obedient workers.

Can you expand on that? I don’t follow, sorry

How to measure "lack of crime" if depends mostly on people responsibility than policing? You cannot put a policeman watching everyone and themselves.

E.g. I believe Oaxaca must have lower crime rates than Tampico simply because one is convenient drug port and other is not, not because better police.

When you're frightened and live in a glass house, you stay silent and obedient to prevent any stones from inadvertently hitting your house.

Since it's transparent, you can't do anything which others don't like anyway, and if you even manage, you'll be taken away silently.

IOW, read 1984 and Brave New World and create a synthesis of it.

Measuring this relatively simple - sociologists take a survey, sample appropriately, and find out how many people are victims of crime, including ones not reported to police.

I mean I am not against the investigations at all. Also I believe that in such cases (terrorism) better way of extracting the secret key is sourcing it from the suspect him(or her)self.

I.e. https://xkcd.com/538/

Ok, let's say it shows that Tampico has way higher number of crime victims. Is their police better or worse than another place with a lower number?

We're on the same page. As one step further, I don't support "advanced interrogation techniques".

> How to measure "lack of crime" if depends mostly on people responsibility than policing?

The thing is, a holistic approach to policing is key, and it's not just about putting bobbies on the street, it's far far FAR more what's needed to create a healthy society.

You need a social safety net for the unemployed, decent housing to prevent homelessness and its associated side effects (such as people taking dumps on the sidewalk), an accessible and affordable system of physical and mental health care, accessible options for education (not just of children but also for adults who need to switch careers for whatever reason), assistance programs for released convicts to find stable employment and a place to live, "third places" for the needs of all generations from young to old...

Police as an institution is absolutely needed, but in a healthy society it should be a matter of last resort, not a routine tool that kills or otherwise hurts people. When you as a government have to resort to hiring ever more (and ever more dumb, because the supply of smart people is limited) police to keep the peace, something has gone very wrong at the foundations of the stack that we call society.

To add, think of the common joke “I’m not going to google that, I don’t want to end up on a list”. The fact that it is known that government agencies monitor internet activity and keep “lists” has a pervasive cooling effect on what people are willing to search for. Not all things and not all people but the effect is real.

>I am not against the investigations at all.

I mean, investigations when you're a suspect is one thing. A system setup to monitor everyone and everything that treats everyone like a suspect is another.

>You cannot put a policeman watching everyone

At least until we cover the planet in advanced technology, of which we are getting closer to every day.

I guess I am too dumb to understand. The argument that if you don’t have anything to hide makes more sense to me than nefarious secret spies are going to read your shopping list. I just don’t see what all the paranoia is about. I realise this is an unfashionable opinion to have on HN, and I’m not looking to debate or change anyone’s mind, but to understand with a substantive argument rather than one sentence replies.

Because while you might agree with the current regime, laws, etc, and they may not be abusing their all knowing powers, allowing government (or any corporation) such power means they can change the rules, for example in an authoritarian direction, and you have 0 recourse, power, or leverage in the situation.

Many government policies around multiculturalism and immigration have gotten to a stage where criticism against it can be seen as incitement to violence / disturbing the peace. Protected class communities have a hecklers veto whereby responding to even mild criticism with violence they’re able to send those who criticize them to jail, often more so than the jail term for violence. States care more about criticism than the violence.

This has an effect of making criticism of government policy a heavily punished crime. A situation the government has fostered.

Multiculturalism is incompatible with free speech and since multiculturalism is government policy free speech has to be sacrificed.

It’s a slippery slope and it’s been going on for some time so very little can be done about it.

I don't think you're dumb or trying to change anyone's mind or you have an agenda in general, and just trying to understand. Also, the "fashionability" of your PoV doesn't matter for me, because we're discussing here, and trying to learn from each other.

There are two problems with this PoV.

First argument is, we really don't understand how much private information we have, and how making it public is creepy. Your finances, what you own, how much you earn, your sincere chats with people you love or care are your private information. These things maybe known by limited parties, but when all of it is public to anyone, even to an algorithm reading it, and making it searchable is creepy and unsettling. I don't want a copy of asking my friend about their personal well being indexed anywhere.

This brings the second argument, and the above paragraph becomes a dangerous precedent. Consider you were chatting with your friend, spouse or child. One party says something and it can be very dangerous if it's taken out of context. One person shared an anecdote about their Alexa device. They found a recording in their account, their child saying "Why daddy always beats me?". Think about it for a second, and how dangerous this can be... The context was they were playing Uno, and dad beat their children in the game.

Again, take this recording or a couple more. Fine tune an AI sound engine with it. Extrapolate from there.

You see where this is going...

We want privacy not because we do nefarious things, but because we don't want our private matters to be publicized and not abused to harm us. This is why you put a password to your phone. Not because you hide something, but not to leave everything lying there.

Lastly, in the words of Edwards 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."

More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

Many of your remaining freedoms are provided by dissidents who fight for them, not you. Their fight against the state requires secrecy and plausible denial. If the state is able to peer into all aspects of your life and others they can route out dissidents by process of elimination. States naturally evolve to be fascistic and the culture required to prevent that generally decays as the memory of what exactly ‘Chesterton fences’ were preventing is lost to time.

I find this argument incredibly frustrating.

My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.

It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.

OK but how exactly do you propose to make that work? With current encryption technology there is no way to give up a bit of privacy: it's all or nothing. Either you have the keys or you don't. If a government has the key then it will inevitably be leaked or misused. The UK government in particular has long been heavily penetrated by Soviet / Russian intelligence.

They can physically search a device (like silk road) put malware on a device, use encrypted metadata on who's calling who and so on.

If you really want to catch serious criminals like mafia you have to do something they are not really expecting.

I don't buy that. I've met uk politicians and they are not really like that. However it may be more about being able to say to the voters that we are taking action against terror and paedos than actually catching any.

I do neither, however what I wanted to highlight (in this black humour way) that the burden of de-encrypting lies on the police/govt. Also opening some encryption on ever person's device just because some government wants to check a few people is stupid. First of all: today it's let's say "good government" and tomorrow it'll be the "bad government", and secondly it can be used to fight the opposition (non-democratic behaviour)

I don't trust anyone to handle my private details properly, especially not an institution that will suffer no repercussions should it mishandle those data.

The naive belief that having more data means the organization will be more effective at carrying out its goals.

Doesn't matter what data - the algorithms/AI will figure it out.

Doesn't matter how messy the data - the algorithms/AI will figure it out.

Post-9/11 governance is filled with the CYA view that if we collect enough data we can connect the dots before another event happens.

Privacy issues aren't important, as the organization's goals are good, with strong guards against corruption. (While DOGE accesses highly personal data entrusted to the IRS.)

While the world's data centers are smothered in unused data, collected because it's too hard to figure out what not to save and the Thiel and his malign ilk promise that their tools are good for us.

Bits on a storage device can never (in anywhere remotely resembling a free society) be a crime by itself. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason for unfettered access to it.

If someone has done a crime, they must have done something, other than store bits on a disk. So go catch them in that act, the way criminals used to be caught before computers existed. If there is no act, there is no crime.

It is definitely partly about just to be able to claim "we did something".

Yes, that's exactly what I think: it's hard to measure police effectiveness when it's just a piece of the puzzle.

exerting control over powerful people who aren't as politically connected as the people who have access to this private data, in addition to finding excuses to spend money on military stuff (with kickbacks)