encryption Archives

Unsafe

The riskiest system is the one you *think* you can trust. Say it in encryption: the least secure encryption is encryption that has unknown flaws. Because, in the belief that your communication or data is protected, you feel it’s safe to indulge in what in other contexts would be obviously risky behavior. Think of it like an unseen hole in a condom.

This has always been the most dangerous aspect of the UK government’s insistence that its technical capability notices remain secret. Whoever alerted the Washington Post to the notice Apple received a month ago commanding it to weaken its Advanced Data Protection performed an important public service. Now, Carly Page reports at TechCrunch based on a blog posting by security expert Alec Muffett, the UK government is recognizing that principle by quietly removing from its web pages advice to use that same encryption that was directed at people whose communications are at high risk – such as barristers and other legal professionals. Apple has since withdrawn ADP in the UK.

More important long-term, at the Financial Times, Tim Bradshaw and Lucy Fisher report that Apple has appealed the government’s order to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. This will be, as the FT notes, the first time government powers under the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) to compel the weakening of security features will be tested in court. A ruling that the order was unlawful could be an important milestone in the seemingly interminable fight over encryption.

***

I’ve long had the habit of doing minor corrections on Wikipedia – fixing typos, improving syntax – as I find them in the ordinary course of research. But recently I have had occasion to create a couple of new pages, with the gratefully-received assistance of a highly experienced Wikipedian. At one time, I’m sure this was a matter of typing a little text, garlanding it with a few bits of code, and garnishing it with the odd reference, but standards have been rising all along, and now if you want your newly-created page to stay up it needs a cited reference for every statement of fact and a minimum of one per sentence. My modest pages had ten to 20 references, some servicing multiple items. Embedding the page matters, too, so you need to link mentions to all those pages. Even then, some review editor may come along and delete the page if they think the subject is not notable enough or violates someone’s copyright. You can appeal, of course…and fix whatever they’ve said the problem is.

It should be easier!

All of this detailed work is done by volunteers, who discuss the decisions they make in full view on the talk page associated with every content page. Studying the more detailed talk pages is a great way to understand how the encyclopedia, and knowledge in general, is curated.

Granted, Wikipedia is not perfect. Its policy on primary sources can be frustrating, and errors in cited secondary sources can be difficult to correct. The culture can be hostile if you misstep. Its coverage is uneven, But, as Margaret Talbot reports at the New Yorker and Amy Bruckman writes in her 2022 book, Should You Believe Wikipedia?, all those issues are fully documented.

Early on, Wikipedia was often the butt of complaints from people angry that this free encyclopedia made by *amateurs* threatened the sustainability of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which has survived though much changed). Today, it’s under attack by Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation, as Lila Shroff writes at The Atlantic. The biggest danger isn’t to Wikipedia’s funding; there’s no offer anyone can make that would lead to a sale. The bigger vulnerability is the safety of individual editors. Scold they may, but as a collective they do important work to ensure that facts continue to matter.

***

Firefox users are manifesting more and more unhappiness about the direction Mozilla is taking with Firefox. The open source browser’s historic importance is outsized compared to its worldwide market share, which as of February 2025 is 2.63%, according to Statcounter. A long tail of other browsers are based on it, such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, and the privacy-protecting Tor.

The latest complaint, as Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn write at The Register is that Mozilla has removed its commitment not to sell user data from Firefox’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. Mozilla responded that the company doesn’t sell user data “in the way that most people think about ‘selling data'” but needed to change the language because of jurisdictional variations in what the word “sell” means. Still, the promise is gone.

This follows Mozilla’s September 2024 decision, reported by Richard Speed at The Register, to turn on by default a “privacy-preserving feature” to track users that led the NGO noyb to file a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority. And a month ago, Mark Hachman reported at PC World that Mozilla is building access to third-party generative AI chatbots into Firefox, and there are reports that it’s adding “AI-powered tab grouping.

All of these are basically unwelcome, and of all organizations Mozilla should have been able to foresee that. Go away, AI.

***

Molly White is expertly covering the Trump administration’s proposed “US Crypto Reserve”. Remains only to add Rachel Maddow, who compared it to having a strategic reserve of Beanie Babies.

Illustrations:: Beanie baby pelican.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Isolate

Yesterday, the Global Encryption Coalition published a joint letter calling on the UK to rescind its demand that Apple undermine (“backdoor”) the end-to-end encryption on its services. The Internet Society is taking signatures until February 20.

The background: on February 7, Joseph Menn reported at the Washington Post (followed by Dominic Preston at The Verge) that in January the office of the Home Secretary sent Apple a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act (2018) ordering it to provide access to content that anyone anywhere in the world has uploaded to iCloud and encrypted with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection.

Technical capability notices are supposed to be secret. It’s a criminal offense to reveal that you’ve been sent one. Apple can’t even tell users that their data may be compromised. (This kind of thing is why people publish warrant canaries.) Menn notes that even if Apple withdraws ADP in the UK, British authorities will still demand access to encrypted data everywhere *else*. So it appears that if the Home Office doesn’t back down and Apple is unwilling to cripple its encryption, the company will either have to withdraw ADP across the world or exit the UK market entirely. At his Odds and Ends of History blog, James O’Malley calls the Uk’s demand stupid, counter-productive, and unworkable. At TechRadar, Chiara Castro asks who’s next, and quotes Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo: “unprecedented for a government in any democracy”.

When the UK first began demanding extraterritorial jurisdiction for its interception rules, most people wondered how the country thought it would be able to impose it. That was 11 years ago; it was one of the new powers codified in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (2014) and kept in its replacement, the IPA in 2016.

Governments haven’t changed – they’ve been trying to undermine strong encryption in the hands of the masses since 1991, when Phil Zinmmermann launched PGP – but the technology has, as Graham Smith recounted at Ars Technica in 2017. Smartphones are everywhere. People store their whole lives on them for everything and giant technology companies encrypt both the device itself and the cloud backups. Government demands have changed to reflect that, from focusing on the individual with key escrow and key lengths to focusing on the technology provider with client-side scanning, encrypted messaging (see also the EU) and now cloud storage.

At one time, a government could install a secret wiretap by making a deal with a legacy telco. The Internet’s proliferation of communications providers changed that for a while. During the resulting panic the US passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (1994), which requires Internet service providers and telecommunications companies to install wiretap-ready equipment – originally for telephone calls, later broadband and VOIP traffic as well.

This is where the UK government’s refusal to learn from others’ mistakes is staggering. Just four months ago, the US discovered Salt Typhoon, a giant Chinese hack into its core telecommunications networks that was specifically facilitated by…by…CALEA. To repeat: there is no such thing as a magic hole that only “good guys” can use. If you undermine everyone’s privacy and security to facilitate law enforcement, you will get an insecure world where everyone is vulnerable. The hack has led US authorities to promote encrypted messaging.

Joseph Cox’s recent book, Dark Wire touches on this. It’s a worked example of what law enforcement internationally can do if given open access to all messages criminals send across a network when they think they are operating in complete safety. Yes, the results were impressive: hundreds of arrests, dozens of tons of drugs seized, masses if firearms impounded. But, Cox writes, all that success was merely a rounding error in global drug trade. Universal loss of privacy and security versus a rounding error: it’s the definition of “disproportionate”.

It remains to be seen what Apple decides to do and whether we can trust what the company tells us. At his blog, Alec Muffett is collecting ongoing coverage of events. The Future of Privacy Forum celebrated Safer Internet Day, February 11, with an infographic showing how encryption protects children and teens.

But set aside for a moment all the usual arguments about encryption, which really haven’t changed in over 30 years because mathematical reality hasn’t.

In the wider context, Britain risks making itself a technological backwater. First, there’s the backdoored encryption demand, which threatens every encrypted service. Second, there’s the impact of the onrushing Online Safety Act, which comes into force in March. Ofcom, the regulator charged with enforcing it, is issuing thousands of pages of guidance that make it plain that only large platforms will have the resources to comply. Small sites, whether businesses, volunteer-run Fediverse instances, blogs, established communities, or web boards, will struggle even if Ofcom starts to do a better job of helping them understand their legal obligations. Many will likely either shut down or exit the UK, leaving the British Internet poorer and more isolated as a result. Ofcom seems to see this as success.

It’s not hard to predict the outcome if these laws converge in the worst possible timeline: a second Brexit, this one online.

Illustrations: T-shirt (gift from Jen Persson).

Review: Dark Wire

Dark Wire
by Joseph Cox
PublicAffairs (Hachette Group)
ISBNs: 9781541702691 (hardcover), 9781541702714 (ebook)

One of the basic principles that emerged as soon as encryption software became available to ordinary individuals on home computers was this: everyone should encrypt their email so the people who really need the protection don’t stick out as targets. Also at that same time, the authorities were constantly warning that if encryption weren’t controlled by key escrow, an implanted back door, or restrictions on its strength, it would help hide the activities of drug traffickers, organized crime, pedophiles, and terrorists. This same argument continues today.

Today, billions of people have access to encrypted messaging via WhatsApp, Signal, and other services. Governments still hate it, but they *use* it; the UK government is all over WhatsApp, as multiple public inquiries have shown.

In Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, Joseph Cox, one of the four founders of 404 Media, takes us on a trip through law enforcement’s adventures in encryption, as police try to identify and track down serious criminals making and distributing illegal drugs by the ton.

The story begins with PhantomSecure, a scheme that stripped down Blackberry devices and installed PGP to encrypt emails and systems to ensure the devices could exchange emails only with other Phantom Secure devices. The service became popular among all sorts of celebrities, politicians, and other non-criminals who value privacy – but not *only* them. All perfectly legal.

One of my favorite moments comes early,when a criminal debating whether to trust a new contact decides he can because he has one of these secure Blackberries. The criminal trusted the supply chain; surely no one would have sold him one of these things without thoroughly checking that he wasn’t a cop. Spoiler alert: he was a cop. That sale helped said cop and his colleagues in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands infiltrate the network, arrest a bunch of criminals, and shut it down – eventually, after setbacks, and with the non-US forces frustrated and amazed by US Constitutional law limiting what agents were allowed to look at.

PhantomSecure’s closure made a hole in the market while security-conscious criminals scrambled to find alternatives. It was rapidly filled by competitors working with modified phones: Encrochat and Sky ECC. As users migrated to these services and law enforcement worked to infiltrate and shut them down as well, former PhantomSecure salesman “Afgoo” had a bright idea, which he offered to the FBI: why not build their own encrypted app and take over the market?

The result was Anom, From the sounds of it, some of its features were quite cool. For example, the app itself hid behind an innocent-looking calculator, which acted as a password gateway. Type in the right code, and the messaging app appeared. The thing sold itself.

Of course, the FBI insisted on some modifications. Behind the scenes, Anom devices sent copies of every message to the FBI’s servers. Eventually, the floods of data the agencies harvested this way led to 500 arrests on one day alone, and the seizure of hundreds of firearms and dozens of tons of illegal drugs and precursor chemicals.

Some of the techniques the criminals use are fascinating in their own right. One method of in-person authentication involved using the unique serial number on a bank note, sending it in advance; the mule delivering the money would simply have to show they had the bank note, a physical one-time pad. Banks themselves were rarely used. Instead, cash would be stored in safe houses in various countries and the money would never have to cross borders. So: no records, no transfers to monitor. All of this spilled open for law enforcement because of Anom.

And yet. Cox waits until the end to voice reservations. All those seizures and arrests barely made a dent in the world’s drug trade – a “rounding error”, Cox calls it.

Return of the Four Horsemen

The themes at this week’s Scrambling for Safety, hosted by the Foundation for Information Policy Research, are topical but not new since the original 1997 event: chat control; the online safety act; and AI in government decision making.

The EU proposal chat control would require platforms served with a detection order to scan people’s phones for both new and previously known child sexual abuse material – client-side scanning. Robin Wilton prefers to call this “preemptive monitoring” to clarify that it’s an attack.

Yet it’s not fit even for its stated purpose, as Claudia Peersman showed, based on research conducted at REPHRAIN. They set out to develop a human-centric evaluation framework for the AI tools needed at the scale chat control would require. Their main conclusion: AI tools are not ready to be deployed on end-to-end-encrypted private communications. This was also Ross Anderson‘s argument in his 2022 paper on chat control (PDF) showing why it won’t meet the stated goals. Peersman also noted an important oversight: none of the stakeholder groups consulted in developing these tools include the children they’re supposed to protect.

This led Jen Persson to ask: “What are we doing to young people?” Children may not understand encryption, she said, but they do know what privacy means to them, as numerous researchers have found. If violating children’s right to privacy by dismantling encryption means ignoring the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, “What world are we leaving for them? How do we deal with a lack of privacy in trusted relationships?”

All this led Wilton to comment that if the technology doesn’t work, that’s hard evidence that it is neither “necessary” nor “proportionate”, as human rights law demands. Yet, Persson pointed out, legislators keep passing laws that technologists insist are unworkable. Studies in both France and Australia have found that there is no viable privacy-preserving age verification technology – but the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) still requires it.

In both examples – and in introducing AI into government decision making – a key element is false positives, which swamp human adjudicators in any large-scale automated system. In outlining the practicality of the Online Safety Act, Graham Smith cited the recent case of Marieha Hussein, who carried a placard at a pro-Palestinian protest that depicted former prime minister Rishi Sunak and former home secretary Suella Braverman as coconuts. After two days of evidence, the judge concluded the placard was (allowed) political satire rather than (criminal) racial abuse. What automated system can understand that the same image means different things in different contexts? What human moderator has two days? Platforms will simply remove content that would never have led to a conviction in court.

Or, asked Monica Horten suggested, how does a platform identify the new offense of coercive control?

Lisa Sugiura, who campaigns to end violence against women and girls, had already noted that the same apps parents install so they can monitor their children (and are reluctant to give up later) are openly advertised with slogans like “Use this to check up on your cheating wife”. (See also Cindy Southworth, 2010, on stalker apps.) The dots connect into reports Persson heard at last week’s Safer Internet Forum that young women find it hard to refuse when potential partners want parental-style monitoring rights and then find it even harder to extricate themselves from abusive situations.

Design teams don’t count the cost of this sort of collateral damage, just as their companies have little liability for the human cost of false positives, and the narrow lens of child safety also ignores these wider costs. Yet they can be staggering: the 1990s US law requiring ISPs to facilitate wiretapping, CALEA, created the vulnerability that enabled widescale Chinese spying in 2024.

Wilton called laws that essentially treat all of us as suspects “a rule to make good people behave well, instead of preventing bad people from behaving badly”. Big organized crime cases like the Silk Road, Encrochat, and Sky ECC, relied on infiltration, not breaking encryption. Once upon a time, veterans know, there were four horsemen always cited by proponents of such laws: organized crime, drug dealers, terorrists, and child abusers. We hear little about the first three these days.

All of this will take new forms as the new government adopts AI in decision making with the same old hopes: increased efficiency, lowered costs. Government is not learning from the previous waves of technoutopianism, which brought us things like the Post Office Horizon scandal, said Gavin Freeguard. Under data protection law we were “data subjects”; now we are becoming “decision subjects” whose voices are not being heard.

There is some hope: Swee Leng Harris sees improvements in the reissued data bill, though she stresses that it’s important to remind people that the “cloud” is really material data centers that consume energy (and use water) at staggering rates (see also Kate Crawford’s book, Atlas of AI). It’s no help that UK ministers and civil servants move on to other jobs at pace, ensuring there is no accountability. As Sam Smith said, computers have made it possible to do things faster – but also to go wrong faster at a much larger scale.

Illustrations: Time magazine’s 1995 “Cyberporn” cover, the first children and online pornography scare, based on a fraudulent study.

The safe place

For a long time, fear that technical decisions – new domain names ($), cooption of open standards or software, laws mandating data localization – would splinter the Internet. “Balkanize” was heard a lot.

A panel at the UK Internet Governance Forum a couple of weeks ago focused on this exact topic, and was mostly self-congratulatory. Which is when it occurred to me that the Internet may not *be* fragmented, but it *feels* fragmented. Almost every day I encounter some site I can’t reach: email goes into someone’s spam folder, the site or its content is off-limits because it’s been geofenced to conform with copyright or data protection laws, or the site mysteriously doesn’t load, with no explanation. The most likely explanation for the latter is censorship built into the Internet feed by the ISP or the establishment whose connection I’m using, but they don’t actually *say* that.

The ongoing attrition at Twitter is exacerbating this feeling, as the users I’ve followed for years continue to migrate elsewhere. At the moment, it takes accounts on several other services to keep track of everyone: definite fragmentation.

Here in the UK, this sense of fragmentation may be about to get a lot worse, as the long-heralded Online Safety bill – written and expanded until it’s become a “Frankenstein bill”, as Mark Scott and Annabelle Dickson report at Politico – hurtles toward passage. This week saw fruitless debates on amendments in the House of Lords, and it will presumably be back in the Commons shortly thereafter, where it could be passed into law by this fall.

A number of companies have warned that the bill, particularly if it passes with its provisions undermining end-to-end encryption intact, will drive them out of the country. I’m not sure British politicians are taking them seriously; so often such threats are idle. But in this case, I think they’re real, not least because post-Brexit Britain carries so much less global and commercial weight, a reality some politicians are in denial about. WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple have all said openly that they will not compromise the privacy of their masses of users elsewhere to suit the UK. Wikipedia has warned that including it in the requirement to age-verify its users will force it to withdraw rather than violate its principles about collecting as little information about users as possible. The irony is that the UK government itself runs on WhatsApp.

Wikipedia, Ian McRae, the director of market intelligence for prospective online safety regulator Ofcom, showed in a presentation at UKIGF, would be just one of the estimated 150,000 sites within the scope of the bill. Ofcom is ramping up to deal with the workload, an effort the agency expects to cost £169 million between now and 2025.

In a legal opinion commissioned by the Open Rights Group, barristers at Matrix Chambers find that clause 9(2) of the bill is unlawful. This, as Thomas Macaulay explains at The Next Web, is the clause that requires platforms to proactively remove illegal or “harmful” user-generated content. In fact: prior restraint. As ORG goes on to say, there is no requirement to tell users why their content has been blocked.

Until now, the impact of most badly-formulated British legislative proposals has been sort of abstract. Data retention, for example: you know that pervasive mass surveillance is a bad thing, but most of us don’t really expect to feel the impact personally. This is different. Some of my non-UK friends will only use Signal to communicate, and I doubt a day goes by that I don’t look something up on Wikipedia. I could use a VPN for that, but if the only way to use Signal is to have a non-UK phone? I can feel those losses already.

And if people think they dislike those ubiquitous cookie banners and consent clickthroughs, wait until they have to age-verify all over the place. Worst case: this bill will be an act of self-harm that one day will be as inexplicable to future generations as Brexit.

The UK is not the only one pursuing this path. Age verification in particular is catching on. The US states of Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, and Utah have all passed legislation requiring it; Pornhub now blocks users in Mississippi and Virginia. The likelihood is that many more countries will try to copy some or all of its provisions, just as Australia’s law requiring the big social media platforms to negotiate with news publishers is spawning copies in Canada and California.

This is where the real threat of the “splinternet” lies. Think of requiring 150,000 websites to implement age verification and proactively police content. Many of those sites, as the law firm Mischon de Reya writes may not even be based in the UK.

This means that any site located outside the UK – and perhaps even some that are based here – will be asking, “Is it worth it?” For a lot of them, it won’t be. Which means that however much the Internet retains its integrity, the British user experience will be the Internet as a sea of holes.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot in a Putney garden (by Simon Bisson; used by permission).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.