DOJ Boss Joins UK, Australian Gov't To Ask Facebook To Ditch Its End-To-End Encryption Plan

[ancianita]

Government back doors have always begun with "think of the children!" or "Evil porn!"

While I am the first to respect the work of the FBI, this situation shows a repeat of Big Players' history of privacy overreach with us tech consumers, only one of which is the "back door" to our privacy.

That same back door is the entry point for lots of criminal activity -- as we've seen since the last election, not from just scammers or spammers, but whole bot and hacker farms from other governments. Sure, big data of the U.S. has been hit, but so have the rest of us, whether it's voter rolls or our credit rating data. Yet, when it comes to children, Facebook's done most of the heavy lifting in enforcement.

Here is Techdirt's outraged take on Barr speaking for the U.S and allies.

from the letter, as first published by BuzzFeed.


TD: Now, multiple governments feel they can't solve crimes without on-demand access to people's communications -- something they have never had in the history of crime-solving and communications. But here we are, listening to Barr and his buddies make a pitch for encryption backdoors while standing on the backs of child porn victims.

Barr makes this pitch while acknowledging that Facebook probably does far more than all US and UK law enforcement agencies combined to combat child porn.

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg...

... Facebook currently undertakes significant work to identify and tackle the most serious illegal content and activity ... In 2018, Facebook made 16.8 million reports to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) – more than 90% of the 18.4 million total reports that year. As well as child abuse imagery, these referrals include more than 8,000 reports related to attempts by offenders to meet children online and groom or entice them into sharing indecent imagery or meeting in real life. The UK National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that, last year, NCMEC reporting from Facebook will have resulted in more than 2,500 arrests by UK law enforcement and almost 3,000 children safeguarded in the UK.

And yet, Barr wants to complain. Barr and his UK/Aussie counterparts want to claim this isn't enough. What's really needed is insecure communications on a platform used by billions. And to make this claim, Barr again points to something Facebook does as evidence that Facebook isn't doing enough.

While these statistics are remarkable, mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children. To take one example, Facebook sent a priority report to NCMEC, having identified a child who had sent self-produced child sexual abuse material to an adult male. Facebook located multiple chats between the two that indicated historical and ongoing sexual abuse. When investigators were able to locate and interview the child, she reported that the adult had sexually abused her hundreds of times over the course of four years, starting when she was 11. He also regularly demanded that she send him sexually explicit imagery of herself. The offender, who had held a position of trust with the child, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Without the information from Facebook, abuse of this girl might be continuing to this day.

Here's what Barr thinks will happen if Facebook deploys end-to-end encryption. Facebook will no longer be able to "read" messages sent between users, which will result in an increase in abused children that authorities will be powerless to help.

Our understanding is that much of this activity, which is critical to protecting children and fighting terrorism, will no longer be possible if Facebook implements its proposals as planned. NCMEC estimates that 70% of Facebook’s reporting – 12 million reports globally – would be lost. This would significantly increase the risk of child sexual exploitation or other serious harms. You have said yourself that “we face an inherent tradeoff because we will never find all of the potential harm we do today when our security systems can see the messages themselves”. While this tradeoff has not been quantified, we are very concerned that the right balance is not being struck, which would make your platform an unsafe space, including for children.

"For children." That's the leverage. Barr wants Facebook to abandon its encryption plans to save children. Sure, that's admirable, if you're willing to overlook the considerable downside of creating a backdoor for governments or simply removing the encryption offer altogether.

Facebook's encryption plans offer a whole new layer of security for lawful users -- some of which are targeted by authoritarian/corrupt governments. Many governments around the world pose as much of a threat to their citizens as criminals do. And a great many people believe their communications should be private, which means not being read/scanned by Facebook, much less any government that happens to stroll by waving some paperwork.

All Barr wants is for Facebook to abandon its encryption plans ... He wants every government in the world to be able to access the content of users' messages.

He may only be aligned with three-fifths of the Five Eyes in this letter, but ensuring US/UK/Australian "lawful access" means giving every other two-bit dictatorship the same level of access to users' communications.

This isn't standard government bullshit. This is heinous, dangerous bullshit. This is a conglomerate of Western governments, on the eve of the deployment of a mysterious "data-sharing" agreement, portraying the implementation of encryption for communications as aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of children.

This is a not-very-subtle smearing of every tech company that deploys encryption to protect its users from criminals and governments that behave like criminals. This is the abuse of the phrase "lawful access" to portray the possession of a warrant as a golden ticket to everything law enforcement wishes to obtain.

To be historically clear, a warrant has NEVER guaranteed access to communications. It has only allowed law enforcement to search for them. The implementation of encryption doesn't change this equation.

But Barr and others keep pushing this in hopes of persuading the public -- and the tech companies they patronize -- that secret communications are something new and far more dangerous than anything law enforcement has ever encountered prior to the rise of social media and smartphones.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191003/20514643121/doj-boss-joins-uk-australian-govt-asking-facebook-to-ditch-end-to-end-encryption-plan.shtml?fbclid=IwAR06PBYM9ygTqqk6sx5b9UPk8Q5e4vRiR5coqc8l_GkkVipTypby3bvxsEk

[ancianita]

1. The best thing Zuckerberg's done for the next election, as I see it.

No new bot farms. No foreign fake accounts. Now the domestic ones, on the other hand...