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LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorshipLCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorshipPosted Jan 26, 2012 15:31 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)Parent article: LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship
> Many (or most) countries allow for "lawful" interception of some communications by governments without a warrant. Traffic data for phone calls or text messaging, for example, falls under this umbrella. It's said not to be "content" that requires a warrant to access, but it still tells a story about a person and will be abused by governments. We need to make it harder for governments to get at this data.
The problems of government surveillance of private communication are pretty clear. I wonder though whether or to what extent LWN readers think that technological surveillance for purposes of law enforcement can be acceptable?
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LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 15:37 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
I was going to post on this too, from a different angle. When do you stop pursuing the chain of products? A package clearly designed for spying and censoring may be easy to target, but think of Squid as mentioned -- do you target the authors for making it easy to abuse? Do you only target programs used 90% of the time for evil ends? 50%? 10%? If you decide on 90%, what about the individual components? What if someone has a system only used 10% of the time for spying, but parts can be used 90% of the time for spying?
It's the same as people who distribute software with licenses forbidding it being used for military purposes. The US Coast Guard rescues boaters and swimmers, but it also intercepts drug and people smugglers, and all is done with military tech. Police forces uses military equipment, not only for drug raids, but to rescue kidnap hostages.
The world can't be divided up like that.
LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 18:44 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]
> Do you only target programs used 90% of the time for evil ends?
I think it's not the USE you need pay attention to so much as the INTENT of the authors... If they write a tool clearly DESIGNED for evil and market it as such, then I have no problem going after them... We go after people who write viruses and botnets, don't we? But, we don't, and we shouldn't, go after people who write general purpose tools with no ill intent, which just happen to end up being used for evil... Things like tor and freenet quite likely end up used more often for illegal (and often downright evil) purposes than they are for good, but that doesn't mean they were intended for such use or marketed for such use... Now, if they were instead called "Lawbreaker" and "ChildPornNet", and their blurbs talked about how great they were for hiding your illegal activities and protect you from getting caught, THEN I'd say go after them...
Of course, that may lead to authors keeping things at a nudge-nudge, wink-wink level of promoting, but not really, illegal uses of the tool... And, I'm just fine with that... To be honest, stuff like nmap, nessus, metasploit, etc. kind of fall into this category... Yes, they all have perfectly legit uses, but I think the authors know quite well they're not always being used by the good guys, and I'm not sure they really mind that much... But, I think they're great tools, and wouldn't want to see them ever go away... However, if they were more open in marketing them as "illegal hacking tools" instead of "authorized pen-testing tools", I'd have more of a problem with them... *shrug*
LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 18:58 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
Intent is impractical. How do you differentiate medicinal alcohol, religious alcohol, and recreational alcohol? How do you differentiate baby monitors and spycams? How do you differentiate debugging tools, routers, firewalls, and censorship / spying?
The world is too full of bureaucrats quibbling over these kinds of details as it is. Look at the recent US Supreme Court quibble over police attaching a GPS tracker to a car and monitoring to for 4 weeks. The standard ought to be that if I can't do it to the police, they can't do it to me without a warrant. Instead, the judges quibble over whether the car was parked on the street, in a driveway, in the garage, what the difference is between brief and long term and whether that even matters, and whether the attachment itself is a search or seizure or both or neither.
That kind of quibbling is fine for lawyers arguing theoreticals, but it's a losing proposition for real world practicality.
LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 19:45 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]
> Intent is impractical. How do you differentiate medicinal alcohol,
> religious alcohol, and recreational alcohol? How do you differentiate baby > monitors and spycams? How do you differentiate debugging tools, routers, > firewalls, and censorship / spying?
Well, you can start with how their marketed... In the alcohol example, are the sellers saying, "Use this to treat your wounds", or "Use this on the sabbath to celebrate the lord", or "Use this to get drunk off your ass! Woohoo!"? It's pretty simple, really... (Not that I think this is at all a good example, since I find none of those 3 uses objectionable, and none of them should ever be illegal...)
If someone says, "Buy this security camera to protect your property", or "Buy this camera to monitor your baby", that's one thing... However, if they say, "Buy this camera to illegally spy on women in the bathroom! It's specially designed to be hidden from view, so your victims will never notice it!", that's very different, and their intent is quite clear...
I'm not saying we even try to go after the vague cases... There need not be any debating over intent... If they're not directly and actively marketing it for nefarious uses, then leave them alone... But, if they ARE, why not go after them?
LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 20:42 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
what if the marketing just says "100 proof alcohol'?
and marketed by who? by the creator to the wholesaler, from the wholesaler to the retail store? or from the store to the consumer?
what if the same product is marketed in multiple ways?
if you just go by marketing, then just about all cars would be banned as the advertisements show them driving at illegal speeds (or does fine print in the advertisement satisfy you, and what does that do to your 'marketing test'?
LCA: Jacob Appelbaum on surveillance and censorship Posted Jan 26, 2012 21:14 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]
> what if the marketing just says "100 proof alcohol'?
Then, it's the equivalent of marketing something as a generic tool with no specific marketed use, which if perfectly fine... (Again, I still really hate this example, because it's sort of implying there's any "wrong" use of alcohol, which I strongly disagree with...)
> what if the same product is marketed in multiple ways?
Then, how about you go after the ones specifically encouraging the illegal uses and marketing it for those specific uses? If someone repackaged "metasploit" say, as "ScriptKiddiesHelper", and actively marketed it to script kiddies for the express use of illegally cracking into hosts, I'd have no problem with them being stopped or even arrested, since they're actively promoting illegal behavior... That doesn't mean they should go after metasploit itself, however!
Remember, the example that started all this from the article was about a company that was specifically marketing a device to repressive governments that allows them to spy on their citizens and place malware on their machines... I don't think there's anything wrong with going after them... They are obviously soulless scum... But, that doesn't mean whatever software they're using underneath for this nefarious use should be gotten rid of... For instance, it says they're at least using Linux; but, Linux itself isn't marketed for such use...
> if you just go by marketing, then just about all cars would be banned as
I do think such commercials are pretty stupid, really... But, I don't know if you can say they're really marketting the cars for illegal use, either... Even without the fine-print disclaimers, excessive speed isn't necessarily always illegal... On the Autobahn, on a race track, on a private road, you can go any speed you like... Not to mention, most people see speeding as one of those 'minor' semi-crimes, like jaywalking, which everyone does and no one really cares about... It's not seen as "evil" or immoral, really...
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