End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box
End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box
Internet Society's Robin Wilton tells us the war on privacy won't be won by the plod
If e2ee is what is really keeping you from catching child abusers, then your department is INCOMPETENT and LAZY. Sorry, but all this does is tell me that you are a piece of shit human being(s) that thinks they have to have god-like controls to do your job of jailing actual criminals. or else it's just an excuse to control everything (it is), in which case you are just evil
Fuck these nosey oligarchs
Yeah, well, they couldn’t “shut it down” before E2E encryption, either, so, obviously, the problem isn’t necessarily the encryption, but that the cops suck at their jobs.
“We couldn’t really catch them before, but now we can’t real their text messages! Merde!”
Stop blaming encryption, and do a better job.
It's not as if encryption would stop them being able to infiltrate and observe criminal gangs, and generally catch the bad guys. There are all kinds of other tools they can use without having instant push-button access to all communications data.
Encryption doesn't stop them spying on you. It stops them spying on everyone in the world simultaneously all the time with no effort.
Some reporter(s?) in Germany found that all the forums for CSA actually host their material in the clearnet, i.e. on Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. (since TOR speeds are shit and those people don't watch SD videos anymore).
The police could have demanded data from the uploading accounts and that the material was taken offline. They refused to do so, in order to "catch more criminals" or something like that.
So, their "think of the children" is exactly as in the spirit of Helen Lovejoy as it seems.
Sauce: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/panorama/kinderpornografie-loeschung-101.html
They also openly use youtube for distributing passwords and pastebin links to such content. I have seen multiple channels from a specific country (starts with I) that does this, sometimes going so far as to flash a single letter of the password at a time throughout innocent-looking childrens videos, with the encrypted pastebin link on the last video that requires the full password to unlock. Some others on a site I will not name have been trying to report these channels for several days (they have actually been operating for years with millions of views) but youtube isn't doing anything. Only company who has done anything was mediafire for removing some actual content.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That's what Robin Wilton, director of internet trust at the Internet Society, told us when we spoke recently about the state of E2EE in light of Europol becoming the latest international law enforcement group to urge regulators and tech giants to ditch the practice.
Law enforcement argues this leaves them unable to shut down serious crime – from human trafficking and drug smuggling, to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) production – because investigators can't intercept and pore over people's communications.
"If you look back to about 2015 and look at the proliferation of available end-to-end encrypted messaging services and apps since then … somehow the number of arrests for illegal images [should] have dropped off the cliff," Wilton said.
In other words, the cops haven't shown that encryption has impeded crime solving.
The claims made by Europol were "a lot of statements and assertions, but pretty thin on evidence," Wilton said.
"Think of the number of connected things that we're surrounded by now," Wilton told us, adding that widespread use of E2EE is a necessity in the modern world.
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Next stop: plausibly deniable end to end encryption.
There are an incredible number of OPSEC mistakes E2EE using criminals make. It is largely about incompetence, and in some cases maliciousness as well for the elites who love this stuff. And they exist a lot among reactionary leftists, "freedom" libertarians, liberal/centrists and right wing elites.