Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts Calls by a former special advisor to ex UK Prime Minister David Cameron to allow the circumvention of end-to-end encryption to monitor terrorist suspects have come under fire from security experts. Rohan Silva, government policy consultant turned co-founder at Shoreditch-based tech incubator/workspace startup Second Home, …
+1 I was effing and blinding too - good thing no one paid me any attention or I'd have been pulled over!
PS. Thankfully, El Reg covered this - I was going to have to start cross posting in another article if it wasn't!
PPS. Actually, I'd be DELIGHTED if all communications were tapped 100% of the time if the penalty for the slightest misuse of that information no matter how minor was slow, painful public execution Pour Encourager Les Autres...
>Unfortunately that is a real-time reflection of how many fucking idiots are present in society.
But not everyone knows enough to be able to pick out fuckwits like Rohan. I dont doubt that that the other interviewee did know enough, but when it came to tricky things like stringing a sentence together, making a coherent argument and explaining things in ways that typical R4 listener might understand she couldn't compete. If the tech industry wants to be taken seriously, they need to send serious sounding people to be interviewed. Its a shame because this is yet another instance where our politicians are simply lying to us and it would be good to have had someone say so more cogently.
"If the tech industry wants to be taken seriously, they need to send serious sounding people to be interviewed. Its a shame because this is yet another instance where our politicians are simply lying to us and it would be good to have had someone say so more cogently."
Presumably the good Revd Adrian Kennard (AAISP) is now banned from being interviewed by the BBC, as his previous inverviews he has:dared to criticise BT and dared to criticise government policy. He's still doing it for Sky and RT, but does anybody watch them? In the past he's been on the BBC too.
So you think any non-tech person is a fucking idiot?
Can you do the job of a doctor, dentist, cardiologist, optician etc? DO you know how to build houses, install central heating systems, do plumbing... the list goes on.
No? then I guess by your own logic, you must also be an idiot for not knowing how to do all the things that other people know how to do.
I am a techy as well, the difference is that I have respect for the jobs other people do, and do not arrogantly expect everyone else to be good with computers and technology.
Except most people don't go through life having to perform surgery, repair teeth, or take care of eyes professionally. Most people in today's society don't have to do those things, as they're specialised jobs.
OTOH, most people use their fondleslab and even computers on a regular basis (i.e. daily or more) and should be expected to understand the basics, or at least be able to tell the difference between an expert and someone completely clueless, like this fuckwit Rohan Silva.
On second thought, this is going up as AC
Probably because they would need 18,000 people to monitor all suspects in real time around the clock. Plus a tenth more to cover for sickness and holidays, and even more when the Maybot cracks down on anyone who has ever travelled to Libya or Syria, even as a kid.
Does anyone have a list of 20.000+ Arabic-speaking people with a security clearance? Let's ask the wonderful and thoroughly-informed Rohan.
Well, it's understandable that one lauded as an expert is just so clueless.
After all, it's not like FVEY have bothered to install middleware to fork microphone and camera data, to transmit via a covertly, network install applet, to their central monitoring software and it then transcribes everything said for automatic analysis.
That's a 21st century technology! We're nowhere near - oh, wait. We are in the 21st, we can and have that capability and use it constantly.
You can, as long as you advise them 100% of the time that they are 100% correct 100% of the time.
A Yes Man seems to be the qualification required for crypto expertise in some gov circles. And it is worrying that so many of our leaders have not yet grasped the very basic concept that you can't have safe backdoors guaranteed to be unusable by criminals through some magic fairy dust. Wherever else you stand on the surveillance/privacy divide wrt terrorism prevention, how can supposedly smart people just not understand that basic fact? Or take the word of the experts in the field?
'And it is worrying that so many of our leaders have not yet grasped the very basic concept that you can't have safe backdoors'
Hypothetical government minister. 'You are quite right. I am not calling for a backdoor, I am asking for a special golden key which acts just like a backdoor but can only be used by the good guys.'
Interviewer. 'Thank-you for your time, is there anything else you would like to share with a grateful nation?'
And therin lies a massive part of the problem: too many elected officials are clueless when it comes to math, science, and reality.
We need to get more people with practical degrees (not to demean non-STEM fields) to run for office in order to make the government more logical and rational.
"But what else do you expect when parliament does not have one science or engineering degree between 650+ people."
This makes me sad. I'd like to see a list of what bullshit they have got merit badges in.
Inst there some acrnym at oxbridge for politicain studies ? PPBA
for Politics, Philosophy, bollocks and arselicking or something like that .
And this is why my new startup "Quantum Time Developments" needs government funding to take our ideas from the drawing board (ok...scribbled on the back of a beer mat) to someplace that only a massive injection of public money can possibly achieve.
All of us here in "Quantum Time Developments" look forward to the exciting new possibilities this funding will give us and society as a whole.
Note: "society" as a whole may or may not extend past local drinking establishments, suppliers of recreational pharmaceuticals and artistic venues with "girls" in their title. And any politicians who need convincing of the merits of our brave new world.
Why aren't 'people' asking the government what would be different if they had access to every bit and byte that exists, in real-time?
They aren't interested in stopping attacks, all they are interested in is tracking down the contacts of the perpetrators once they've committed an act of atrocity. It serves their purpose to have the general population fearful and rubber-stamping draconian laws that will come back to bite us all on the arse.
It doesn't require prescience to see this, just a view of history. Power is as power does.
"Metadata" is _much_ more important than the actual data. With it you can automatically track networks and people. And surely the secret services already had access to that....
...it's just that secret services are not the police. They are not responsible for stopping crime, their tasks are, obviously, secret. Usually they are supposed to work more or less like a news organisation, but keeping their findings secret. More and more they seem to be occupied with trying to find some justification in a time when they fail more and more often. (apparently US secret services were completely surprised by the fall of the Berlin Wall)
Also they assume that there was some "network" behind it, giving orders and commands. There doesn't seem to be any indication of that.
Dear Government,
Two terrorist attacks have taken place in the past two weeks by people that were reported to you as terrorists and you didn't monitor them anyway so asking for real time monitoring and the breaking of encryption smells of bullshit.
Kind Regards,
The People.
P.S. When you eventually try to put that totalitarian regime in place you can be sure I and many others would die for our freedoms and the freedoms of our families. Vive la revolution.
Dear The People,
Under our current system of law, we tend to require evidence of wrongdoing before we can imprison someone. There are tens of thousands of extremists in the UK right now, only some of which will actually end up killing people. Precisely how do you intend that we monitor these people without something like bulk surveillance? Or should we just lock all these people up without charge?
Kind Regards,
The Government
The reality is that you know someone is dodgy, and you know he knows dodgy people. Unless you have concrete evidence that he's about to murder a bunch of people, our current innocent-until-proved-guilty system says you cannot just throw him in jail. By the way, according to the police anyway, this is lost 2, won a dozen or so, in that they "disrupted" about a dozen terror plots in the last few years.
And anyway, we are talking tens of thousands of people here. We'd have to build a few prisons just to hold them. And if we start engaging in the habitual internment of Muslims in the UK, how many more extremists do you think that will generate?
I don't know what the solution is, but some kind of automated surveillance is going to be necessary because of the sheer numbers of Islamic extremists involved. If there are 10000 extremists, and each needs a team of five (absolute minimum) to watch them, on £50000 each (salary, pension, equipment, cover, etc.) then that's £2.5bn. And that's to employ 50k people just to follow them round. It's not feasible.
And we cannot deport them because most of them are British citizens.
"Under our current system of law, we tend to require evidence of wrongdoing before we can imprison someone."
...but just in case we'll assume everyone is guilty and put them under surveillance just in case. We'll ignore the fact that the core of strong encryption S/W went public decades ago and that there are enough tech-savvy people* amongst terrorists who will put something together entirely out of our control and even if there aren't there are others who'll do it for cash. We'll also ignore the fact that we will also be attacking British business's ability to compete in a world where security of communications is regarded as essential. We just want all your data.
*We only wish we had a few in our government.
FTFY
@DavCrav. Sadly, I agree with just about every point you make. Despite your 7-1 thumbs down to up ratio, everything you said regarding the current situation seems 100% accurate. The only one I don't agree with is your solution. Creating a police state (and enforced monitoring is a firm step in that direction), might do the trick of stopping attacks, but by doing so you hand the perpetrators the exact victory they were looking for.
There is only one way to fight this kind of 'war'. It's been tried and tested for thousands of years, and looking through history books, I've yet to see a single instance of something else working.
That way is harsh, unapologetic, brutality.
I know this isn't what any right-thinking human being wants, regardless of political bent. It's the antithesis of just about everything we believe in. But the thing is, it's NOT what the radicalized believe in.
Despite our best intents, you simply cannot import a world view that was formed in the relatively luxurious west, to a region that doesn't have the same comforts and sensibilities.
How many of us loved seeing what happened during the "Arab Spring"?
How many thought, uh oh, maybe we shouldn't be removing the strong men who have been keeping all the religious nuts in line the past 50 years or so?
So, unless we are willing to emulate the Sadams and Muammars we helped boot out, we better get used to these attacks, because they have no reason to stop them.
You want it to stop? Once you've identified one of these monsters, emulate them. Make life a living hell for everyone they have ever known. Let them know that if they pull this sort of thing, we might just find their entire families and do the same to them.
Personally, I hate to think about it, and have hundreds of arguments against my own rant.
But it's been historically proven to be the only method that has ever worked against fundamentalism.
We need to stop pretending the attacks are just a passing fad that can be stopped be changing government policy. They aren't, and it won't.
If anyone has a better solution, that takes into consideration the global situation as it is, and not as you'd like it to be, then please enlighten me.
Because it sucks to think there is no other solution.
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