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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   18829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions. Law enforcement/government can just subpoena your bank to get your bank transactions.

this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials

Also BZZZZT. As I said, the only people that ever access this key are a small number of approved Facebook insiders. Law enforcement/government make requests (with warrants) to Facebook, but they never even touch the handle to the door of the vault that contains the computer with the HSM with the key.

But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This is why I had said:

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions.

Oh, my mistake then - I was under the impression that we were talking about a more general system where all encrypted communications require a law-enforcement decryption key, with Facebook being given as a specific example. If you just want to boil it down to a single company then this discussion is an uninteresting and pointless aside to the broader discussion about banning all encryption without law enforcement decryption keys.

Yeah, I don't think this conversation was ever about entirely banning all encryption. Just about major companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, who the OP was claiming have better security than you anyway. A more general encryption policy discussion would have to encompass the more varied details of smaller organizations, their capability to do security in the first place, and the respective values of the information that goes across their wires. Plus obvious economic questions like regulatory entrenchment and such.

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