Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Pedophiles are voting Tory. Lets ban the Tory party.

Edit: Mathemagician is a troll, why tf do I even bother?

Edit2: Now I'm thread started? tsr sort your **** out lol

(edited 6 years ago)

And this is a surprise??
Terrorists shop in supermarkets, thieves use coffee shops , rapists drive cars, murderers use public transport.
Shutting Facebook, WhatsApp and twitter is not the answer

Reply 2

Sammylou40

Original post by Mathemagicien

Ban cars and other transport too. Not only pedos use them, but also terrorists.

Lets make the UK a safe space once and for all.

Yes. Because then we'll all be locked safely in our houses, starving to death, cold, lonely and miserable. Without utilities, electronics and any form of communication. How lovely.
Get a grip

Reply 3

looloo2134

Original post by Mathemagicien

Facebook and Whatsapp too.

Won't someone think of the children?!

https://twitter.com/tompeck/status/915174619769921536

Pedophiles are people who are sexuality attracted to children. Pedophilia is having sexual activity with a child. Only a small number people who are unfortunately born sexuality attracted children go on to sexually abuse children.

Let ban Labour too and all other parties than because sex offences vote for them too.

Reply 4

Carbon Dioxide

"That really nasty bloke who leads the local street gang votes Labour. I reckon we should ban Labour to stop gangsters voting for them."

...yeah, right! :rolleyes:

Reply 5

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

She is clearly pushing the classic "think of the children" technique employed by our politicians in order to justify clamping down on freedoms

Why does an ordinary citizen in a Western democracy need hard encryption for their personal communications? Other than very specific things like banking data and health information, why do ordinary citizens need to be able to encrypt their text messages to their friends and family?

I personally do not subscribe to the idea that there should be communications that the government cannot surveill and wiretap if they need to and have a judicial warrant.

Reply 6

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

Of course. I'm not proposing building in back doors; I'm proposing that appropriate organisations (banks, hospitals, etc) shall have access to hard encryption and ordinary citizens will have access to appropriate software that will permit them to transmit data to these organisations securely. If the government needs to tap this data, they will go to the organisation to get it.

Other than that, I don't think that citizens need hard encryption for their personal text messages and internet browsing. There really is no need for an ordinary person to have it.

WhatsApp is used extensively by activists and others, in countries where the governments aren't as seemingly benign as our own

And those people could be provided with appropriate technology. But their situation is different from someone living in Surrey demanding that his text messages to his friend in Scotland must be hard encrypted and that no government should ever be permitted to access it even if they have a warrant.

Besides, even if the government is relatively trustworthy now, who is to say all future governments will be too?

The likelihood of that happening is very low; the spectre of some future, dystopian tyrannical government is often used by people who want to keep their guns / encryption. But the reality is that encryption or no has no real bearing on whether the government becomes tyrannical.

The Anglosphere has remained without a dictator since the 1680s because of our political culture and norms, because we value the rule of law, we value precedent, because we have a moderate and sensible political culture, which we share with Australia, Canada and New Zealand. There would have to be enormous social and political changes, over many decades, for us to come even close to having some kind of tyrannical government in the Commonwealth Anglosphere (UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand).

The real question is, do you believe that a person's communications should be inviolable even if a judge orders a wiretap? Let's say MI5 has received intelligence from one of their informers that, I don't know, Mr Abuja is communicating with an ISIS attack planner in Iraq and they are co-ordinating a terrorist strike. MI5 applies to the Home Secretary for a warrant, which is duly signed and approved by the judicial oversight committee (as the new process goes).

Your opinion is that even with that warrant and those very good reasons, they shouldn't be allowed to wiretap Mr Abuja's communications?

Reply 7

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

And of course, it isn't just our government we are talking about here - in reality, we are talking about intelligence agencies, in particular the American ones, since ours share all data with the Americans. Do you trust the current American government, let alone all future US governments? Do you trust the FBI and CIA? The latter two are really dodgy.

Yes, I trust the CIA and FBI. I trust the National Security Agency too. I know that the people in our intelligence community, and those in the national security apparatus of our Anglosphere allies, are dedicated, intelligent, hard-working public servants who are genuinely committed to the safety and security of their nation, who feel personally devastated when there's a terrorist attack and they missed stopping it, who are under a great burden and responsibility to keep us safe from not just terrorism but also espionage, cyberattacks and subversion by hostile states.

So yes; I trust those people and I haven't been given any reason (at least any in the last 30 years) to distrust them. I have friends in that world and I know what they are like.

The conspiracy view that they are plotting to bring in Illuminati control of the planet or whatever, that they engage in false flag terrorist attacks, is all puerile nonsense.

Reply 8

Drewski

Original post by Mathemagicien

...I think people are somehow misinterpreting my OP as a serious suggestion, so I will explain my point

People on TSR not getting a joke?

I've never heard of that before!...

Reply 9

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

I like how you had to specifically exclude the most important member of the Anglosphere, the US, from that last sentence. :rofl:

I like how you completely fail to respond to any of the substantive points I made.

And when I say like, I mean I think it's a bit pathetic and probably indicative of the level of serious debate I can expect.

Reply 10

username402722

Police cuts by the Tory government could help some paedophiles evade justice.

Reply 11

ChaoticButterfly

Original post by Mathemagicien

Building in backdoors to encryption weakens security for everyone. Eventually, a malicious organisation or person will discover the backdoor, and use it itself to gain access to everyone's data. You cannot make a secure backdoor. Can you accept why that might be a bad thing? Do you leave your front door unlocked just in case the police feel like searching your home? Do you want to ban envelopes too?

It isn't just ordinary citizens in Western democracies using these services, though. WhatsApp is used extensively by activists and others, in countries where the governments aren't as seemingly benign as our own, precisely because the encryption enables them to be safe expressing outrageous views such as being pro-democracy, being atheist, or being gay.

Besides, even if the government is relatively trustworthy now, who is to say all future governments will be too? What if being a socialist becomes too politically incorrect, after a supposedly left-wing plot to blow up a bank is discovered?

And of course, it isn't just our government we are talking about here - in reality, we are talking about intelligence agencies, in particular the American ones, since ours share all data with the Americans. Do you trust the current American government, let alone all future US governments? Do you trust the FBI and CIA? The latter two are really dodgy.

People like that would be happy to have the government monitor our mouth to mouth conversations if they could.

Original post by Mathemagicien

Reminds me of when all those idiot Liberals were fretting over Trump having access to all the illiberal **** Obama did.

Also news just in, middle aged Tory doesn't have a ****ing clue about technology.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 12

ChaoticButterfly

Why is the resident Tankie the one defending privacy rights? :rofl:

Reply 13

zezno

More Mathemagicien savagery

Ugh! Troll!

Original post by AlexanderHam

When I knowingly vouchsafe my 'digital footprint' to a state entity, I place my most sensitive communications and private activities beneath the auspices of any and all governments thereafter in perpetuity, including those that may seek to institute retroactive forms of persecution predicated upon 'thought crime'.

Now, while I don't personally subscribe to quite so paranoid a worldview, one could yet argue that this balance is more delicate—and precarious—than you might think: Donald Trump's domestic surveillance policy isn't Barack Obama's domestic surveillance policy, but those NSA databanks sure as hell don't purge themselves every four years, and if Theresa May weren't so laughably ineffectual I'd trust her about as much as I do the former.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 16

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

Banks, shops, all sorts of websites rely on peer to peer encryption. You want us all to send passwords as cleartext over the internet?

You didn't read my post. Do me the courtesy of actually reading it, then come back to me.

Why aren't you using your real name to post here, citizen? Why do you use passwords?

Apples and oranges. I post here using a pseudonym. That's a different proposition from saying that MI5 shouldn't be able to intercept my communications between this computer and the website should they obtain a judicial intercept warrant.

Reply 17

AlexanderHam

Original post by Mathemagicien

I'm not saying MI5 shouldn't do that.

Except that widespread hard encryption in consumer apps like Whatsapp denies MI5 effective means of intercept.

Do me the courtesy of actually reading it, then come back to me.

Except I haven't misconstrued anything you've said. We're disagreeing, that's a different thing.

I'm saying there shouldn't be backdoors

Ugh. How many times have I said I'm not advocating for back doors? (in the sense of deliberately weakened crypto) Why do I have to do all the work in this conversation?

If you'd bothered to read the post to which you were replying, you'd realise I said that organisations like banks and hospitals and other similar vendors should have access to hard encryption so that people can transmit their data securely over the internet. If the security services need a wiretap, they can do it at the bank end; the bank simply provides the data to the government (that is not a backdoor; that's just the bank providing data upon request).

So citizens would have access to apps and software from companies with whom they do business that would allow them to transmit data securely over the internet. Said businesses would have to provide any such data upon request with a judicial warrant.

Businesses would also have access to hard encryption to secure their own data, networks and intellectual property.

The difference between your position and mine is that citizens would not have access to messaging apps that had hard encryption. So when they're doing bank transactions online, their data would be perfectly secure. No backdoors, no change from now. The only thing they wouldn't be able to do is have apps like Whatsapp and Telegram that use crypto protocols like Needham-Schroeder to make normal communications between citizens highly secure and resistant to decryption even with significant computing power given over to brute decryption.

I'll give you two scenarios. In the first scenario, which is how things are currently, citizens have apps like Whatsapp that have hard crypto built in to it and all messages are automatically encrypted and even the app provider isn't able to see them and has no backdoor. Let's say MI5 issues a warrant to wiretap Mr A so they can see his communications with Mr B, which are occurring over Whatsapp. They can't get Whatsapp to turn over the data to them as the company can't access that data. They can't wiretap the connection between them as all they will have is the encrypted text, which would take massive computing power to brute force it.

If they want to wiretap Mr A's whatsapp conversation, they have to mount a significant operation to somehow get malware installed onto the phone. That's a huge undertaking; it would take a number of agents a significant period of time to work out how and where they can inject malware onto the phone. Or else they have to install bugs in his house and car to physically listen to what he is saying and, to the extent possible, watch him.

That's different to if MI5 wants to get hold of Mr A's banking transactions; although the transactions and data are encrypted when they travel over the internet, the bank itself has the data and can provide it to MI5 upon request if needed.

Requiring MI5 to mount a significant operation to install malware onto a target's phone every time they want to tap their comms is a huge impost on their resources. Given there are around 5,000 jihadis on MI5's watch list and they only have 4,000 employees (of whom perhaps only 40% might be assigned to counterterrorism), the only way they can keep an eye on large numbers of jihadis is with electronic surveillance; that is the advantage the Security Services have had. The availability of hard crypto for normal messaging conversations nullifies that advantage.

So here's the second scenario. MI5 obtains a wiretap warrant for Mr A's communications. Hard crypto for normal civilian communications (other than that provided by banks, healthcare, and organisations who have access to the data at the other end and can provide the information to law enforcement on request) has been outlawed in this scenario. Instead of having to mount a large operation with maybe up to a dozen agents working out how and when they can inject malware onto his phone or bug his house and car, they can simply log into a system like Xkeyscore and open up Mr A's whatsapp communications.

MI5 doesn't care that some hippy in Brighton likes Corbyn or voted Green, or that some dude in Manchester likes big butt porn. They do care about Mr A's communications with his ISIS controller, and the prohibition on hard crypto in consumer messaging apps means that they could use electronic surveillance to even up the score just a little bit, given the huge number of jihadis and the very limited resources MI5 has in terms of keeping an eye on all of them.

Now I'm not saying you have to agree with this proposition, but at least characterise it properly rather than claiming I'm advocating for weakened crypto for everyone including business transactions, banking, health etc. My position is hard crypto for banking, health etc, (situations where MI5 can always just request the data from the organisation/company) but not for consumer-level messaging apps. A person not having access to encrypted personal messaging apps doesn't make their computing insecure, and if they really want to, they can encrypt it using shared keys or some similar thing. But for general, consumer-level messaging apps (the sort jihadist sympathisers might be likely to use), hard crypto built-in would not be available. I don't see how this is really any serious imposition on civil liberties, but it does provide MI5 with the necessary electronic surveillance advantage over the jihadis to keep (as far as is possible and realistic) as many of those 5,000 under surveillance as they possibly can.