Party Vibe

Any corporate app will be backdoored where the ads get in and if folk are using it for criminal stuff the feds will get the messages in the clear from the memory buffers of seized devices (how would people otherwise read them?). The independent research and any apps those chaps make probably is robust but what happens is the “cool kids” can’t be bothered with extra effort and end up still using it insecurely.

Long before the Snowden scandals a lot of Google and other traffic was already encrypted; other than the ad cookies which were the biggest sources of dataleaks (they cannot have too much encrypt or the ad networks servers would not be profitable).

It was only this year UK GCHQ finally admitted they kept on 3 Enigma machines to decode comms from “friendly” Scandinavian countries with long standing ties to Germany as they thought these countries and DE were becoming too socialist and the USA wanted to get corporate advantages over them – I was tipped off about this by several techie types in high school who said “why else would British Telecom invent a lot of stuff for computers; but let the Americans claim all the credit for them?”

The Danish clearly realised this which is why Regnecentralen was a way of diverting the defence budget for university and schools computers instead (they just accepted whatever they sent across the comms lines could be monitored and were more careful what they said)

such a “utopian” future still remains dependent on networks having the capacity to handle the overheads of encryption and users being sensible and managing expectations. One of the old boffins I mentioned in other posts had some input into what was an equivalent for analogue Police radios in the 1990s; it made scanner traffic sound like a annoyed goose and cracking it today is still not trivial.

It never got widely used in many areas as sending the keys meant the radio links had to be twice as strong and the money wasn’t there to upgrade them (they were already that bad they let in foreign telly sound and DTELS claimed the foreign telly was sent too strong when every other EU country used the same kit and coexisted with the same frequencies..)

Today cops have TETRA but you can now use very basic equipment to check if any British public service worker is in the vicinity using their radio. You can’t decrypt the info and it could be anyone from MI5 to the local park ranger; but if you are in a environment where any of these radio users are potentially hostile who they actually are becomes irrelevant.

GCHQ and the NSA (and the advertisers; who all share personnel) have most likely moved along from bulk data collection anyway; after all even if the wanted to simply check on everyone called Abdul or Ahmed making a phone call in Manchester they would have terabytes to go through. Even the ad networks want this sort of ethnic graded data to sell their stuff (google for instance keep subtly trying to work out “what kind of Asian I might be”) without letting on they are doing so.

I don’t the bigger data gatherers ever used it for tracking down drug users or political activists as there would be too much data taking too long to process. The one bit of truth was that they monitor multiples of 30/32 phone calls or prime target in real time as thats the easiest amount to grab off a phone system without incurring excessive collection costs.

The moment you transmit a signal you give away your position; encryption can never hide that bit; and once that signal goes across a network out of your control someone else can intercept it.

Real crimes, terrorist events and wars always create real evidence; bodies, firearms residue, explosives traces, victims. Old men are still being hauled out of their nursing homes for stuff they did in World War II, others (as you mentioned elsewhere) are being nicked for more recent crimes against vulnerable people; and this is in spite of very powerful people trying to protect the guilty.

if anything laws on encryption and more importantly access to comms (especially wireless) have been made less harsh; in my lifetime all GSM mobile frequencies were once NATO allocations; your laptop and tablet WIFI takes a bite out of civil and mil aviation radar frequencies which the air forces really didn’t want to give away; (I was surprised myself that cheap commercial devices would be trusted to use these bands correctly) a few years ago Ofcom and other EU Communications Ministries forbade using an encrypted two way radio but now several kinds are permitted. Its only the Americans who try to limit some encrypt software; whereas Germany encourages you to use it as a safety measure.

younger peopel especially do not need NSA/GCHQ or cops to destroy their own liberty; they are doing it already by using all these superficial chat apps; making snap judgments against each other on appearance, gender, race, beliefs and even music/arts subcultures; the cops/feds are most of the time only pickign up the pieces from this after things go tits up.

@Tryptameanie 574384 wrote:

Something you may remember GL were the ctrypto-wars, where in the 80s/90s the US placed a ban on export of strong encryption as a munition. Looks like a similar scheme is occurring again.
New privacy battle looms after moves by Apple, Google – Business Insider

I remember working for a system integrator where we got loads of Dell servers and had to declare we weren’t going to send them to China because of this law (90% of the computer was put together there :laugh_at:) and US designed IP phone still have the same warnings. We could still send the same kit to Hong Kong and if it or the data on it crossed the border everyone “turn brind eye and forget to put on specs” (including USA salesman) as “business is business”); although the Chinese usually had more sense anyway than to buy back their own computer at a 50% markup :laugh_at:

Chinese and German ones do not but you have to turn off encrypt on a DECT phone to get it to work with a repeater because of the overhead issues and intellectual property issues). The donut munchers always say this when new crypto tech arrives; TBH as there was a stage in the 90s where the civillian tech outstripped law enforcement capabilities I’m not surprised they are wary of new technologies.

What is worth reading are the comments on the Arstechnica article; especially the ones saying “how will FB make their money back if they can’t mine the data for advertising?”. This factor wasn’t as present 20-30 years ago.