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from the once-you-break-it,-it's-broken dept

Pretty much everyone who isnt a UK legislator backing the Online Safety Bill has come out against it. The proposal would give the UK government much more direct control of internet communications. Supposedly aimed at limiting the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the proposal would do the opposite of its moniker by making everyone less safe when interacting with others via internet services.

While proponents continue to offer up nonsensical defenses of a bill that would compromise encryption, if not actually outlaw it, people who actually know what theyre talking about have been pointing out the flawed logic of UK regulators, if not promising to exit the UK market entirely if the bill is passed.

As the bill heads for another round of votes, entities that actually want to ensure online safety continue to speak up against. The group of critics includes Apple, which knows from first hand experience the negative side effects created by demanding broken encryption and/or client-side scanning.

[I]n a statement Apple said: End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats.

It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk.

Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all.

Also speaking up (again), but probably not being heard (again), are encrypted communication services WhatsApp and Signal both of which have promised to stop offering their services in the UK if the Online Safety bill becomes law. Here are the statements given to the Evening Standard by WhatsApp, Element, and Signal:

If the Online Safety Bill does not amend the vague language that currently opens the door for mass surveillance and the nullification of end-to-end encryption, then it will not only create a significant vulnerability that will be exploited by hackers, hostile nation states, and those wishing to do harm, but effectively salt the earth for any tech development in London and the UK at large, Meredith Whittaker, president of not-for-profit secure messaging app Signal told The Standard.

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No-one, including WhatsApp, should have the power to read your personal messages, Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta told The Standard.

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Element chief executive and chief of technology Matthew Hodgson told The Standard, The Online Safety Bill is effectively giving the Government the remit to put a CCTV camera in everybodys bedrooms, and the way people use their WhatsApp today is pretty personal people use messaging apps more than they communicate with people in person.

The Evening Standard also takes time to note some hypocrisy contained in the bill. Whatever burdens are placed on encrypted services wont affect the legislators pushing this bill. Theyll still be free from snooping, even if none of their constituents are.

The Online Safety Bill concerns only online messages sent by UK citizens and residents, but not anything sent on messaging apps by law enforcement, the public sector, or emergency responders.

This is handy, given that The Standard understands that up to half of Government communications are still being sent over consumer apps like WhatsApp.

The UK government continues to insist despite all the evidence it has provided to the contrary that its not interested in breaking encryption, installing backdoors, or otherwise undermining users privacy and security. But its protestations are inept and absolutely not backed by any of the wording in the bill, which contains mandates that would absolutely do the things the bills defenders insist it wont.

Theres no better demonstration of this form of bullshit than Conservative MP Damian Collins attempting to talk his way out from under the bills wording while debating Signals Meredith Whittaker, who continually points out the assurances Collins offers arent actually in the bill.

The opposition to the bill has gone from cacophonous to deafening in recent days. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, a group of 68 security researchers have offered up their group opposition to the Online Safety Bill in a letter [PDF] that briefly, but incisively, points out the flaws in the legislation.

Heres that letters take on client-side scanning just one of several problematic mandates:

A popular deus ex machina is the idea to scan content on everybodys devices before it is encrypted in transit. This would amount to placing a mandatory, always-on automatic wiretap in every device to scan for prohibited content. This idea of a police officer in your pocket has the immediate technological problem that it must both be able to accurately detect and reveal the targeted content and not detect and reveal content that is not targeted, even assuming a precise agreement on what ought to be targeted.

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We note that in the event of the Online Safety Bill passing and an Ofcom order being issued, several international communication providers indicated that they will refuse to comply with such an order to compromise the security and privacy of their customers and would leave the UK market. This would leave UK residents in a vulnerable situation, having to adopt compromised and weak solutions for online interactions.

Thats actually the smaller (and shorter) of the two open letters issued in the past few days by security researchers. The second letter [PDF] contains seven pages of signatories from all over the world, as well as a more in-depth critique of the extremely flawed proposal.

The letter notes the issues scanning for CSAM using hashes already poses: namely, that hashes can be altered to avoid detection and that false positives still happen frequently. Now, take these existing problems, scale them to the nth degree, and throw some AI into the mix. This is whats awaiting UK residents if the bill passes with the client-side scanning/encryption-breaking mandates in place:

At the scale at which private communications are exchanged online, even scanning the messages exchanged in the EU on just one app provider would mean generating millions of errors every day. That means that when scanning billions of images, videos, texts and audio messages per day, the number of false positives will be in the hundreds of millions. It further seems likely that many of these false positives will themselves be deeply private, likely intimate, and entirely legal imagery sent between consenting adults.

This cannot be improved through innovation: false positives (content that is wrongly flagged as being unlawful material) are a statistical certainty when it comes to AI. False positives are also an inevitability when it comes to the use of detection technologies even for known CSAM material.

Not only will the government be able to sift through all of this, if anything gets flagged, it will also get to sift through all of these personal messages even when the AI is wrong about what it thought it had observed. Narrowly targeted scanning only in situations where some evidence already exists that CSAM is being distributed could limit the collateral damage, but nothing in the bill or in supporters statements indicate the government is interested in any process that doesnt give it the opportunity to collect it all.

Then theres the mission creep, which is always present when a government expands its surveillance powers.

Even if such a CSS system could be conceived, there is an extremely high risk that it will be abused. We expect that there will be substantial pressure on policymakers to extend the scope, first to detect terrorist recruitment, then other criminal activity, then dissident speech. For instance, it would be sufficient for less democratic governments to extend the database of hash values that typically correspond to known CSAM content (as explained above) with hash values of content critical of the regime. As the hash values give no information on the content itself, it would be impossible for outsiders to detect this abuse. The CSS infrastructure could then be used to report all users with this content immediately to these governments.

Even if the UK government would never do this (and no one believes it wouldnt), a Western nation with liberal values (as in enshrined human rights, etc.) passing this sort of law would embolden far less liberal nations to expand their domestic surveillance programs under the pretense of making the internet safer and/or detecting CSAM.

Whether or not all of this opposition will make a difference remains to be seen. So far, the steady stream of criticism and promises to exit the market havent managed to alter the bills mandates in any significant manner. Maybe the EUs recent abandonment of encryption-breaking mandates in its internet-targeting legislation following months of criticism will force UK lawmakers to rethink their demands. Then again, this is the same government that decided it didnt want to be part of any club that would accept it and Brexited its way into the wrong side of history.

Filed Under: client side scanning, csam, damian collins, encryption, meredith whittaker, online safety bill, ukCompanies: signal

See the article here:
Service Providers, Security Researchers Again Warn UK Against Mandating Compromised Encryption - Techdirt