Facebook Should say Fuck Off to New US DOJ and FVEY Crypto Demands

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Oct 3 17:35:16 PDT 2019


https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/bill-barr-facebook-letter-halt-encryption
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149744

Officials Will Ask Zuckerberg To Halt Plans For End-To-End Encryption
Across Facebook's Apps...
"We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its
plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging
services..."
the letter is set to be released alongside the announcement of a new
data-sharing agreement between law enforcement in the US and the UK...

Signed by Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, acting US Homeland
Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Australian Minister for Home
Affairs Peter Dutton, the letter raises concerns that Facebook’s plan
to build end-to-end encryption into its messaging apps will prevent
law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity conducted
through Facebook, including the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse
(FHOTI) *plus* today's hot Fifth Rider... "election meddling".

"Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude
any form of access to content.
The letter calls on Facebook to desig its encryption by enabling law
enforcement to gain access in a manageable format and by consulting
with governments ahead of time to ensure the changes will allow this
access."


Backdoored and bent over... how world's Govts want to keep you.


https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings

"I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we end up having similar
engagements like this on other socially important things that we’re
trying to move, like our big push to get towards more encryption
across our messaging apps,"
"That will, over time, be very sensitive when we get closer to rolling it out."
"Law enforcement, obviously, is not going to be psyched about that,"
he added. "But we think it’s the right thing to protect people’s
privacy more, so we’ll go defend that when the time is right."





4 October 2019


Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

OPEN LETTER: FACEBOOK’S “PRIVACY FIRST” PROPOSALS

We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan
to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services
without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without
including a means for lawful access to the content of communications
to protect our citizens.

In your post of 6 March 2019, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social
Networking,” you acknowledged that “there are real safety concerns to
address before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all our
messaging services.” You stated that “we have a responsibility to work
with law enforcement and to help prevent” the use of Facebook for
things like child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and extortion. We
welcome this commitment to consultation. As you know, our governments
have engaged with Facebook on this issue, and some of us have written
to you to express our views. Unfortunately, Facebook has not committed
to address our serious concerns about the impact its proposals could
have on protecting our most vulnerable citizens.

We support strong encryption, which is used by billions of people
every day for services such as banking, commerce, and communications.
We also respect promises made by technology companies to protect
users’ data. Law abiding citizens have a legitimate expectation that
their privacy will be protected. However, as your March blog post
recognized, we must ensure that technology companies protect their
users and others affected by their users’ online activities. Security
enhancements to the virtual world should not make us more vulnerable
in the physical world. We must find a way to balance the need to
secure data with public safety and the need for law enforcement to
access the information they need to safeguard the public, investigate
crimes, and prevent future criminal activity. Not doing so hinders our
law enforcement agencies’ ability to stop criminals and abusers in
their tracks.

Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any
form of access to content, even for preventing or investigating the
most serious crimes. This puts our citizens and societies at risk by
severely eroding a company’s ability to detect and respond to illegal
content and activity, such as child sexual exploitation and abuse,
terrorism, and foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine democratic
values and institutions, preventing the prosecution of offenders and
safeguarding of victims. It also impedes law enforcement’s ability to
investigate these and other serious crimes. Risks to public safety
from Facebook’s proposals are exacerbated in the context of a single
platform that would combine inaccessible messaging services with open
profiles, providing unique routes for prospective offenders to
identify and groom our children.

Facebook currently undertakes significant work to identify and tackle
the most serious illegal content and activity by enforcing your
community standards. 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. Your
transparency reports show that Facebook also acted against 26 million
pieces of terrorist content between October 2017 and March 2019. More
than 99% of the content Facebook takes action against – both for child
sexual exploitation and terrorism – is identified by your safety
systems, rather than by reports from users.

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.

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.

Equally important to Facebook’s own work to act against illegal
activity, law enforcement rely on obtaining the content of
communications, under appropriate legal authorisation, to save lives,
enable criminals to be brought to justice, and exonerate the innocent.

We therefore call on Facebook and other companies to take the following steps:

· Embed the safety of the public in system designs, thereby enabling
you to continue to act against illegal content effectively with no
reduction to safety, and facilitating the prosecution of offenders and
safeguarding of victims;
· Enable law enforcement to obtain lawful access to content in a
readable and usable format;

· Engage in consultation with governments to facilitate this in a way
that is substantive and genuinely influences your design decisions;
and

· Not implement the proposed changes until you can ensure that the
systems you would apply to maintain the safety of your users are fully
tested and operational.

We are committed to working with you to focus on reasonable proposals
that will allow Facebook and our governments to protect your users and
the public, while protecting their privacy. Our technical experts are
confident that we can do so while defending cyber security and
supporting technological innovation. We will take an open and balanced
approach in line with the joint statement of principles signed by the
governments of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada in
August 2018[1] and the subsequent communique agreed in July this
year[2].

As you have recognised, it is critical to get this right for the
future of the internet. Children’s safety and law enforcement’s
ability to bring criminals to justice must not be the ultimate cost of
Facebook taking forward these proposals.


Yours sincerely,


Rt Hon Priti Patel MP
United Kingdom Secretary of State for the Home Department

William P. Barr
United States Attorney General

Kevin K. McAleenan
United States Secretary of Homeland Security (Acting)

Hon Peter Dutton MP
Australian Minister for Home Affairs


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