- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37443248
Answer
Question no. 1425 (General part) from the Danish Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee:
“Will the minister elaborate on the minister’s statement to TV2 on the 21st?”
August 2024, where the minister says: "We have to break with the totally mistaken notion that it is every man’s freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services
(…)”?”
Answer:
We know that social media and encrypted services are unfortunately largely is used to facilitate many forms of crime. There are examples on how criminal gangs recruit completely through encrypted platforms young people to commit, among other things, serious crimes against persons. It is an expression of a cynicism that is almost completely incomprehensible.
We therefore need to look at how we can overcome this problem. Both in terms of what the services themselves do, but also what we from the authorities can do. It must not be the case that the criminals can hide behind encrypted services that authorities cannot access access to.
Therefore, we, as a government, will also strengthen the police’s capabilities in the area of decryption, of course under appropriate legal guarantees, as is also the case today. In addition, the Ministry of Justice has The Criminal Justice Committee has just started working on a terms of reference that will look at the challenges that technological developments present to the police investigation, including the use of encrypted messaging services.
I also note that steps have been taken within the EU towards a strengthened regulation of, among other things, digital information services and social media platforms.
For example, the European Commission has proposed a new Regulation on rules for preventing and combating sexual abuse of children. The proposed regulation contains rules on obligations for certain online services to minimize the risk of their services being misused for online child sexual abuse, and the services can, if necessary, be required to track down, report, remove and block access to material showing sexual abuse of children.
There is AI. Facebook doesn’t have to forward encrypted messages. The internet can be locked down to prevent encryptes messages.
How? I doubt you’re able to propose a solution that can’t be broken in 5 minutes, the only solution is to either accept it or block 100% of the internet, if you leave even a single write access allowed it can be used to communicate, and if it can be used to communicate, it can be used to send encrypted messages.
Single messages can be hidden in random conversations e.g. by typos or other patterns. But the AI will flag anything that could be used to send more than twitter messages.
If network access is only allowed for bootlocked phones, how would you send those messages but by typing them by hand?
So there will be 10 messages or more for one meaningful message.
That’s useful for activists but destroys any ability to organise a movement that needs to recruit followers.
That’s all it takes, cryptographic communication is a list of single messages, if you can pass one without being detected you’re done.
First of all that is impossible, TCP/IP is an open protocol, you can build your own small computer and connect it to a network. But let’s for a moment assume this was possible, you can encrypt/decrypt messages with an offline machine and send them to the online one by any number of means, e.g. Build a QR code and scan it with your phone.
A movement that needs to recruit followers won’t encrypt their messages since they need people to be able to read them. They could use public key encryption to ensure that people could send messages to them and they can sign messages, but encrypting the messages is pointless. You only encrypt messages when you trust the other party, otherwise anyone could intercept and encryption is pointless.
The Internet can’t be locked down to block shit.
Tell me what you do if only registered messenger services are allowed, that run on phones with intact boot loaders?
Then forbid any peer to peer connection that wasn’t requested by those services.
No VPNs, no unlicensed servers.
There can be a free internet in Africa but Europe can be locked down more than China if so desired.
You do know that cryptography predates computers right? Anything that can send text can be used to send encrypted messages, don’t believe me? Here you go:
There’s no way you will be able to read the message above unless I give you the key for it. How would they stop me from sending that?
Also, are they going to firewall my VPS? What about my personal server? What if we use text files on my personal server, using ssh keys to connect to it? There’s no way to block all cryptographed communication without blocking all communication.
If you can only send facebook messages, facebook can block anything with more than 5 random characters.
VPS - virtual private server? The server is behind a router. Of course it can be firewalled. It’s also on a host server so all your files can be read without you noticing.
Everything can be blocked by default and only AI monitored channels from official services can be accepted. Short messages can be hidden with crypto tricks but that is a very limited freedom for very few people.
Congrats, you now blocked people from sharing urls, setting their delivery address on areas where code has numbers, or prevented people from communicating in a different languages or using slangs since it’s impossible to keep track of all of that. Also are you blocking images too? Otherwise you can put text in the image in several different ways.
I also mentioned my home server, but in case you didn’t knew you can encrypt files on a VPS, sure there are attacks to access the contents when they’re being decrypted by the VPS, but there are lots of ways to have the server send the content encrypted and only decrypt it locally.
How would AI know the difference between “hey check this video <link to video>” and “hey check this video <link to video whose url has an encoded message>”? Or even “see you at the party tomorrow” and “see you at the party tomorrow” (i.e. the secret meeting will be tomorrow). Cryptography is so much more than just making your messages look like random characters, hell, using AI it’s very possible to have it write a text that uses all of the random letters on a gpg encrypted message in a specific way that others can decrypt, but since hose are still random characters it’s impossible to know there’s a message there.
I’d not use them?
How exactly would you get that implemented?
At each router, store the allowed subnets of acceptable servers and dop any other connection. So P2P is blocked by default. But if a connection is needed, the messenger services get an API to unlock routes for channels that they control.
I think you are vastly overestimating what anyone can do.
All telecom providers can be required by law to implement it and Cisco and the other router suppliers can add that feature to their operating systems, if they not already have for countries like China.
The free internet can become a sandbox in a matter of weeks, maybe even days or hours.
The illusion of freedom is too valuable to be destroyed unnecessarily. But if people start to do serious protests I would expect the internet to go down like in Türkiye.