WhatsApp must not be 'place for terrorists to hide'

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  • There must be "no place for terrorists to hide" and intelligence services must have access to encrypted messaging services, the home secretary has said.

    Khalid Masood killed four people in Westminster this week. It is understood his phone had connected to messaging app WhatsApp two minutes earlier.

    Amber Rudd said she would be meeting technology firms this week to ask them to "work with us".

    Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said authorities already had "huge powers".

    There had to be a balance between the "right to know" and "the right to privacy", he said.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39396578

    Well? Is checking on messages an invasion of people's privacy or a protection against terrorism? We can't have it both ways. We cannot limit our checks to 'suspects' if we can't check their communications to find out if they are suspects or not.

  • It's a problem that will cause the already overly surveyed public to become more so. A reason and an excuse to snoop.

    I think that terrorists will simply find a way around this, leaving the average citizen the victim of State inquisition.

  • It's a problem that will cause the already overly surveyed public to become more so. A reason and an excuse to snoop.

    I think that terrorists will simply find a way around this, leaving the average citizen the victim of State inquisition.

    I'm a bit ambivalent about this sort of thing. We had CCTV to cut crime, now it's being used by local councils to fine people for putting waste in the wrong recycling bin or putting their bins out on the wrong day. I believe that we are already the most watched nation in the world. I don't mind MI5 seeing the shopping list but I don't want some self righteous moron telling me I'm drinking too much wine because the government has allowed the NHS to see it as well.

  • Yes, this is the problem with surveillance in our age. It has helped to catch a lot of criminals but it has made a lot of people want to escape from it because it can be creepy.

    One of the most annoying aspects is this attempt to draw you into advertising all the time. Most news items or interest items on the bottom of news pages are there to get you to see the ads. I won't visit them any more even if some of them occasionally have an item of interest to me because I have to get rid of spyware and tracking cookies every time. And the pages take so long to load now because of all the winking, twinkling video ads that I just leave. Well I used to leave, now I don't bother to go in the first place. Which serves them right.

    The surveillance of the public to spot terrorists is a difficult one to criticise. Of course you don't want to be whacked by a lunatic in a killer car or blown to kingdom come at a marathon or rock concert or market place, etc, but at the same time you don't want them doing what you mentioned and starting to pick on your personal liberty.

  • It's a problem that will cause the already overly surveyed public to become more so. A reason and an excuse to snoop.

    I think that terrorists will simply find a way around this, leaving the average citizen the victim of State inquisition.

    It's called peer to peer encrypted. Applications such as bleep. There is no server, or imprint left on the net, no company to pursue as it's open source. The message is split into encrypted packets and randomly sent so it's almost impossible to get a copy of the complete message by eavesdropping. Comes from the people who gave us bittorrent.

  • Yes, I know the peer to peer fraternity well. They were also in the activist's camp when I was a busy bee in that context. It made them feel hugely important and dark and mysterious. It also hid a number of disturbed individuals who had strange things on the go. I wasn't into the peer to peer but I knew of those who were. They come in all flavours. Probably has a large paedo crowd too.

  • Well? Is checking on messages an invasion of people's privacy or a protection against terrorism? We can't have it both ways. We cannot limit our checks to 'suspects' if we can't check their communications to find out if they are suspects or not.

    It's the million dollar question, isn't it?

    Prior to Trump and despite the warnings from liberals, I would've been completed relaxed about the State checking whatever they need to check whether encrypted or not? Now, I am not so sure.

    The problem is that once Apple, Google, What's App etc give the governments a backdoor route into their encrypted codes, that's it. The governments will have blanket access despite reassuring everyone they would only use this access on a case-for-case basis. In time, all governments would acquire this access including those in Russia, China and North Korea.

    Could it be a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut here? The nut is dangerous, but there are bigger dangers out there.

  • It's called peer to peer encrypted. Applications such as bleep. There is no server, or imprint left on the net, no company to pursue as it's open source. The message is split into encrypted packets and randomly sent so it's almost impossible to get a copy of the complete message by eavesdropping. Comes from the people who gave us bittorrent.

    So, basically there's no way for governments to crack this even if the software companies gave them all the tools?

    Could it not be like Tor, which allegedly has been cracked now in that, as long as the governments have an entry point, they can track all the packets, so they could glue the message back together again at some point?

  • I'm relaxed about our spooks and anti-terrorism cops snooping. What seriously worries me is that so many other organisations such as DEFRA and local councils are to be able to do the same. It's totally disproportionalt and will be abused just like previous anti-terror laws.

  • ....yeah, Morgan mentioned the NHS.

    What if the NHS does become semi-privatised, or at least means tested far more than now?

    So, as Morgan said, what if you like to drink wine, but too much... Unlike the "self righteous" moron in the NHS "advising" you on your health, what if it were worse than that?

    So, the future NHS is means tested. The NHS has identified through checking your shopping habits that you drink too much wine. You fall ill. You turn up at hospital and they tell you they know of your drinking habits and refuse to treat you unless you change. (Oh, and in this future world cash is gone. So the only way to buy things is via a electronic method such as a debit card which can be tracked, just in case you think you can pop into the local shop to get more wine and not get noticed).

    Could it happen?

    I don't care about the council spying on me putting my bins out, I do. But I do care if they start to use things such as health information against me. I care about that a lot.

    But, perhaps this is a good thing? If you drink too much, you pay more for your treatment?

  • People also tend to get out the cell phone and video altercations on buses or in restaurants, etc and you have to be very careful you don't unwittingly become an overnight YouTube sensation.

  • People also tend to get out the cell phone and video altercations on buses or in restaurants, etc and you have to be very careful you don't unwittingly become an overnight YouTube sensation.

    It's amazing that. At one time if there was a an incident people would rush to help. Now they all stand around filming some poor sod laying dying from a heart attack on the pavement.

  • We've just had a furore in a little town not far from where I am. A man and a woman had a fight in a fast food restaurant and swore at each other and got all violent and hysterical because one of their children hit the other one's child in the restaurant playground. So, up comes the video of the whole sorry scene and it went viral.

  • It seems to me that El Gov is the author of it's own difficulties: In allowing far too many governmental organisations free snooping it is driving the common people and organisations to use ever stronger and secure methods of encryption and communication to over come said snooping.

  • I'm not worried about government., unless we go down the route I mentioned aboiut the NHS etc.

    I assume that everything I do on the net is recorded and stored somewhere. So, in case I was involved in a terrorist plot, the intelligence agencies can look through all my data and see what I've been up to.

  • From the Amazon echo thread:

    A little concerned about their wifi service. Their street mapping cars "accidentally" collected all our wifi data when all their cars came round. Now they have a wifi service...

    It's in direct communication with the local council so some pebble lensed Arthur Pewty type can listen in on your most private conversations. LOL.

    I know it's a old story now Heero, but do you reckon Google "accidentally" collected our wifi data?

    They're meant to be taking pictures of streets, that;s rather different to having equipment that can capture wifi info.

    But I am suspicious of companies, especially Google, which is why I wont use their browser. They have too much info on us already MORE than government.

  • I'm not worried about government., unless we go down the route I mentioned aboiut the NHS etc.

    I assume that everything I do on the net is recorded and stored somewhere. So, in case I was involved in a terrorist plot, the intelligence agencies can look through all my data and see what I've been up to.

    I think that at the moment only where you visit is stored. Not what you actually do there as to store all the traffic through an ISP would need horrendous amounts of storage. Mail is a different issue and I think it's all stored both sent and received for 6 months at the moment. Peer to Peer traffic (bittorrent, bleep etc) is not stored AFAIK as it isn't through a server as such and the packets are not sequential, you can see that happen during a torrent session, so trying to store a coherant file as such isn't really possibe. If you're using a VPN then the only address you'll get is that of the VPN server, not the final source/destination.

    There has been talk of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) but to do that on the fly to every packet flowing through an ISP would have such a phenominal overhead that the slowdown would be unacceptable.

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