Reports have recently emerged that malware from the China-affiliated Salt Typhoon group has been found exploiting CALEA (Commercial Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) backdooring systems within U.S. telecom networks as a means to surveil, for China, customers across America. These customers included U.S. Government officials, so it would seem probable that some of them may have, earlier in their careers, been the very people who demanded the CALEA backdooring systems be installed in the first place. The Chinese access to the system was maintained for months or more. This is therefore a good time to remind readers of the dangers of governments seeking emergency powers with which to access private information and systems. Even if, bizarrely, someone were to trust today’s state officials in whichever country they are in, are they willing to trust every other government in the world and every well resourced band of independent cyber-criminals too? Because when one allows a backdoor for one government to be embedded somewhere, he is also allowing in all the other bad actors too.
The Bill Clinton Administration, which also wanted to compromise all computer hardware via a clipper chip scheme, passed CALEA in 1994. This mandated telecom companies to have interfaces within their systems to let backdoor capabilities be easily attached at a later point. With these interfaces in place the U.S. Government could be sure of an easy time when it came to the telecom companies with a specific demand, notionally court-approved, to snoop on somebody’s private communications. Mostly this form of backdoor is able to collect metadata, as encrypted internet traffic’s contents are immune to spying performed at this level of the network stack, but it can also spy on the content within conventional telephone calls and standard SMS messages if activated to do so. As U.S. companies built this into many telecom backend hardware products, they also ended up sold abroad in a mode which was initially inactive but for which activation was still technically possible. This lead to a number of scandals. Security expert Bruce Schnier has described the recent reports as “one more example of a backdoor access mechanism being targeted by the ‘wrong’ eavesdroppers“.
Backdoors can of course be argued against on far wider grounds than just the obvious hazards they present when opened by a country other than the one who installed them. In rare moments of sanity both the UN, in the form of its Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, and the European Court of Human Rights have recognised the importance of encryption-enabled privacy, without backdoors, describing it as, in effect, a human right on account of it providing a means to give people the confidence to speak freely. Whilst it is right to criticise many human rights lawyers, who seem to be interested primarily in maximising the range of things which the legal system pries into, thereby maximising their opportunities to take cases, the concept of actual real human rights when applied to the individual freedoms of everyone in this manner still holds worth. But no longer must those of us who care about our privacy use moral arguments as our only strand by which to oppose intrusion. Nor can surveillance apologists, any more, try to avoid criticisms on technical grounds by insisting that other parties getting control of a backdoor ‘could never happen’. This news unquestionably demonstrates that backdoors are not just a human rights violation, but are now proven to be a means to let foreign adversaries easily attack your own nation’s infrastructure.
Now would be a very good time for J.D. Vance to capitalise on his earlier warnings of the dangers of backdoors. Citing this latest development he should be able to easily fend off any bureaucrats seeking to persuade him to change his tune to their benefit.
Perhaps this news will also cause Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, to reevaluate the ridiculous assertions which he made earlier this year that: “Privacy and exceptional lawful access can coexist if absolutist positions are avoided. World-class encryption experts are confident of this.” To misquote Yes Minister, can he name even three of those supposed experts? If he can then have any of them actually written any code, or analysed any algorithms for themselves, in the last 10 years? Have any of them recently said a little prayer to the god of null pointer dereferencing whilst clicking to compile code for the 50th time? Or are they managerial yes-men in the mould of Whitty, Vallance or Fauci? Mr. McCallum is clearly not a fool: he has shown himself to be level-headed when warning of the dangers of cosying up to the Chinese Communist Party and the dangers of depending on Russian gas supplies. In the light of this news might he recognise just how incorrect his “exceptional lawful access” statement was, and that introducing deliberate vulnerabilities of any kind into any system serves not only to cosy up to the Communist party, but indeed roll out the red carpet for it.
Lastly, if Donald Trump should, hopefully, pardon both Snowden and Assange, then he’d do well to hire them as advisers in the wake of this news. He’d do well to hire them even if they’d only be willing to work remotely from somewhere that the U.S. intelligence apparatus can’t so easily menace them. They’ve both been warning of this kind of thing for over a decade. With Trump now coming into power as an anti-establishment politician, who has for his upcoming presidency carefully chosen a Cabinet of people not allied to what can be termed the deep state, there is a much better chance that he will finally end the era of mass surveillance than could have been hoped for under a Democrat party which had repeatedly renewed NSA powers. Furthermore, as Trump seems rather keen on Bitcoin, he has all the more reasons to make sure the integrity of cryptography and of telecom and internet infrastructure remains sound. Despite limitations, such as extreme fluctuations relative to other currencies, which presently make Bitcoin impractical for typical transactions, what is good for decentralised cryptocurrencies tends to have side effects good for freedom as a whole. Here is a scenario where civil liberties and actual national security, the security of individuals and small-to-medium businesses within a nation rather than the job security of intelligence agency busybodies, are in fact aligned, and together they say no to backdooring.
As Michael Shellenberger said: “The idea that we must censor speech to protect democracy ranks with other Orwellian ideas like ‘War is peace’ and ‘Slavery is freedom’.” The argument for backdoors as a means to protect national interests has now been thoroughly exposed to be just as absurd. The time has come for governments across the West to decide what is more important: protecting Sir Humphrey Appleby of the deep state from the sack, or protecting entire countries from autocracies abroad. Governments making that decision should also bear in mind that working unbackdoored cryptographic algorithms are already in the public domain and it will always be possible for private messages to be exchanged which governments cannot read. It will always be possible also for messages to be exchanged anonymously, that is to say without metadata which governments can use to map out who is contacting whom and which the CALEA backdoors are particularly focused on collecting. The decision governments must take is therefore between a world in which they make the infrastructure of our nations vulnerable, yet still can’t actually spy on all the people they wish to, and a world in which they abandon petty snooping and focus on keeping infrastructure working (and apolitical) for the people who elected them.
Dr. R P completed a robotics PhD during the global over-reaction to Covid. He spends his time with one eye on an oscilloscope, one hand on a soldering iron and one ear waiting for the latest bad news.
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I’m not sure I agree with the ‘deferment’ explanation given above.
Students who defer a year have known grades (and other qualities) and will thus already have an accepted place at their chosen institution.
Ie, if a course has 100 students per year and 14 deferred from last year, the institution knows that it will only have 86 places available for this year’s candidates, and it won’t act as though it had 100 places re this year’s offers.
If there are more students that have to go through clearing it can only be because they didn’t meet the grades expected of them.
Sure, this could simply be because of the ‘grade disinflation’ that we’ve seen this year (although it still hasn’t normalised to the pre 2020 levels), but the intention to go through this disinflation process was well telegraphed by the government and exam bodies and I can’t imagine that the HE establishments based their offers on the relative %age grades seen in 2021.
I suggest that the problem is actually that this year’s candidates didn’t sit any GCSEs, but university places were offered with some consideration of the GCSE grades that were gained based on teacher assessment (ie, the teachers guessed). Thus the problem has resulted from a fair number of children having much higher GCSE results than they’d deserved (even taking into account the crazy grade inflation that occurred during 2020), and then getting worse A-levels than their GCSE results might have suggested.
I imagine that there will also be a similar number of pupils who in the end gained far better A-level results than their GSCE results suggested, only because they were ‘the quiet workers’ who the teachers didn’t even realise were capable. We, of course, won’t see the impact of this because the individuals concerned will have simply been happy that they got their first choice.
I’d like there to be an assessment of how much harm this stupid process (‘Guess the result’) caused these young adults, but like everything else related to our mad Covid response it’ll get shoved into the weeds and those whose lives will have been affected will never get any acknowledgement that it occurred.
Elephant in the room is that universities no longer even have a moral duty to preferentially consider domestic students. If a British undergraduate can only be charged a maximum of £9250 per year in tuition fees but their wealthy overseas classmates can be charged £24,000 for EXACTLY the same service, a self respecting, bottom line chasing vice-chancellor would be a fool not to prioritise overseas students.
For example, Imperial currently recruit 61% of their students from overseas.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-nationality/
Why, when many bright UK students are left without university places?
Not only tuition fees, but overseas students will pay higher accommodation fees as they tend not to return home in the holidays and they will also be more likely to rent the more luxurious penthouse rooms.
“Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Munger
This is also relevant to today’s other education story, about how medical school places are back down to 7,500 a year.
The excuse given, as it always is, is that they can’t simply magic up medical school places — but of course they can — all they have to do is stop overseas medical students studying in the UK. Sure, the medical schools would complain (they make lots of lovely £££s from them), but our nation’s requirements are more important. Anyway, if we said that the medical schools had to meet the home demand before they could start training others then I’m sure they’d suddenly find that it was possible all along to increase training places.
The other excuse given is ‘but it is expensive’ — sure but:
I was really shocked recently when an article in these pages told me that the number of doctors in the NHS had gone from 85,000 30 years ago to 250,000 now. The narrative is always that we need more and need them faster, but it would appear that the problem is how we get the existing doctors to apply themselves to their worklist better.
I have felt for a long time now that the National Health Service had become the National Wellness Service, pandering to all our hypochondria’s and minor ailments and wishes. Certainly the range of treatments and who they are applicable for has mushroomed over time. I’d be interested to see how the average patient visits to the NHS have changed over the last 30 years. Are we just trying to use it more and more.?
Wouldn’t it be really weird if it turned out there was plenty of trained people and funding for them to provide us with a decent health service, but the whole thing was fucked up by legions of non-jobs and unrequired levels of managers getting in the way just to justify their expensive existences..?
The number of medics working part time might partly explain the change in doctor numbers.
The nation’s requirements stopped being a concern of the universities a long time ago.
Recruiting students from overseas could also increase the number of ethnic minority students at a university which will be a huge advantage in the eyes of some vice-chancellors.
Those £400K+ Vice Chancellor salaries have got to be funded somehow
Exactly what I was thinking when I read this article
Trust me, your gov’ts could care less about you. The covid virus is a bioweapon released to do one thing…..depopulate. Very effective so far, more deaths to come. Excess mortality in all countries heavily vaxxed in addition to declining bitprth rates.
Where the hell is Whitty et al and Ferguson – the designers of this awful outcome. Probably collecting their undeserved gongs from the Palace. And as for the Gormless Johnson, don’t get me started.