A further reason why May’s plan is stupid is that it wouldn’t even allow the authorities to read messages sent using simple text encryption techniques. If one had a series of truly random numbers (which is an easily created item) and used one-time pads, one could write an message composed of strings of numbers in hotmail and GCHQ couldn’t crack it if you CC’d them. This is how spies transmitted secret messages for decades in spite of the fact the enemy intercepted every transmission. So unless May is going to ban pads of paper and pencils there is no way she and her spooks can read everything, even if they had the resources to recognise such messages when they were sent.
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The scary thing is, she probably doesn’t even understand that it is tyranny. (Not to say that she’d be against it if she did understand it.)
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Theresa May has always been at war with Eastasia
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Good thing those kleptocrats from Brussels won’t be interfering with their pesky human rights and privacy Blabla for much longer … Make Britain safe again.
At least Ingsoc kept to the same “war” for a while.
Big Sister May can’t make up her mind whether we are at war with Eurasia or Eastasia. It seems to change every day.
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Irrefutable arguments. Can’t believe we’re even having to make them again. Almost 25 years fighting this nonsense. (Clipper Chip anyone?) Tried to boil it down to one, simple reason why the May solution is dumb as fuck in this dark little satirical ditty the other week. https://soundcloud.com/jimjar/message-to-may
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(( THX-Clipper ))
The Government is listening…
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She’s not doing it because she thinks it will work. She’s doing it to distract from the fact that she stripped the police force of budgets and 20,000 frontline officers while she was home secretary. And now she has to fight an election on Thursday against a candidate who is quite accurately calling this out.
As always with politicians, it’s not what’s right/feasible/effective that matters, it’s what works for them in the short term.
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Meanwhile she is apparently trying to suppress reports about financing of extremists by her Saudi friends.
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I’m sure that the Government will spend a few billion on Cyber Security Theatre, declare themselves the winners, fuck things up for normal folk, and big business will continue as before; though, probably with easier access to our personal detail.
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Use cable zip ties
I have a bag of colored cable ties which I use in that way. In most cases where the cable tie has been opened, it is intact, but only attached to one of the two loops it goes through. From that I conclude that luggage inspectors are prepared to non-destructively open cable ties (its not hard to do) and could put it back through both loops if they wanted to.
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Maybe Brexit will see to that?
FTR, when I picked up some buns yesterday morning at a bakery, the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" had a front page headline reading “Bye bye London”. The piece below was about Frankfurt having high hopes to replace London as ‘capital of finances’.
I didn’t know about the murders in London at that moment. Checked the news just minutes afterwards. Obviously, the thing went into print before the news arrived, or even before the shit hit the fan. Nevertheless, someone in Frankfurt clearly will regret this, badly.
Edit:
I didn’t quote the headline correctly. Still.
you forget how these things work.
companies and people with money will have “fast pass” and whatever else they need to be accommodated successfully. this makes sense. they are not the problem. it’s the little people, and their hating of freedom that causes the problems.
you, and i, and everyone we know will be affected*. no financial service will be. that’s freedom.
( rest assured. white people will be discomforted. poc will be thrown in jail. this too is freedom*. )
(** i am pessimistic today. )
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Maybe less than you think. France 
had laws against encryption and tried to keep them up at the beginning of the Internet in the late 90s. For example, there was a special version of Netscape for France with a shortened encryption key. It is the French banks you managed to convince the government that they should stop. I expect the U.K. banks to be as impressed by non working encryption as the French banks.
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hmm, Enigma machine app…send a text message with the settings to someone, write the message in the app, send…
might work.
It’s not just the plans to weaken encryption or enforce some kind of mandatory private key escrow that are deeply troubling about their plans. It’s the regulation of everything you can read or post that I find the more scary. That someday they may veto what news sources you’ll be allowed to access.
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[quote=“scottaclifford, post:21, topic:102131”]
If one had a series of truly random numbers (which is an easily created item)
[/quote]Not so easily. That’s one of the main reasons one-time pads aren’t vastly used. The other being that it’s a symmetric key system, which means that the key must be shared somehow between all the agents involved. But yeah, properly implemented, it’s airtight.[quote=“cameronh1403, post:36, topic:102131”]
Enigma machine[/quote]Enigma was far from being as secure as one-time pads, or even pretty much every serious encryption in use nowadays. Its security was based on the secrecy of the encryption/decryption method, which is an obsolete idea.
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The author states: “Theresa May says there should be no means of communication which we cannot read” = no she didn’t. David Cameron said that. Nor has she said she wants to ban cryptography. All’s she’s said, at this point, in response to the attacks, is that there should be no safe space and that internet service providers need to take some responsibility. It’s pretty vague. it’s not an attack on cryptography.
I’m aware the same party’s government HAS said some things about backdoors in the past but right now May is not saying what the author is claiming.
True that. Thanks to all of the publicity about it, people know how it works.
Guess it’s time to invent a new code…
