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Bruce Schneier has written a short piece over at Lawfare in response to ongoing calls to weaken encryption. Unlike during the cold war there is no longer a distinction between consumer grade encryption and military encryption. This is because customized encryption is both more expensive and less secure, because it is unique, non-standard, and untested.
In his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity, Attorney General William Barr argued that companies should weaken encryption systems to gain access to consumer devices for criminal investigations. Barr repeated a common fallacy about a difference between military-grade encryption and consumer encryption: "After all, we are not talking about protecting the nation's nuclear launch codes. Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications."
The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials—heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else—worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.
Earlier on SN:
U.S. Attorney General William Barr Demands Backdoored Encryption (2019)
FBI: End-to-End Encryption Problem "Infects" Law Enforcement and Intelligence Community (2019)
The Crypto Warrior--Why Politicians Want a ‘Back Door’ into Your Devices—and Why it Will Never Work (2016)
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday September 01 2019, @02:36PM (7 children)
No. There were no exiting tribal borders. Only Ottoman administrative divisions and a whole lot of rebels and tribal conflicts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine#Egyptian_period [wikipedia.org]
More importantly, large scale Jewish immigration to Palestine predates the British:
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine#Restoration_of_Ottoman_control [wikipedia.org] )
The British's part in the establishment of Israel starts with the Sykes-Picot Agreement [wikipedia.org] and the Balfour Declaration [wikipedia.org] as the realization of Sykes-Picot. What it comes down to is that they didn't want the French there so they left the region to the Jews as a third neutral party.
If the Zionists weren't around and interested, the region would have been placed under international administration like how the Saar Basin [wikipedia.org] was handled in Treaty of Versailles and carved up for the neighboring Arab nations to take following WW2. And to this day, we would still hear about this or that war in the region but with more nostalgic headlines discussing the Holy Land and such.
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(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 02 2019, @12:39PM (6 children)
You are really super-quibbling with the point you are attempting to refuse.
She is absolutely correct, the british mandate pissed all over the existing borders. You just want to play games with what the word 'border' means, just like israel does to this very day.
If you cannot define your borders, maybe you aren't a nation? Or maybe your country is built on the principle of aggression, it's very existence means you will fight wars to get bigger until someone stops you?
The hypacrisy of your response is astounding, a true feat of faux-intellectual gymnastics.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday September 02 2019, @06:16PM (4 children)
What games? What borders? It was all part of the Ottoman empire. Same laws. Same papers. Just different tax brackets. You could take a train from Damascus to Medina that stopped at Haifa without passport checks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hejaz_railway [wikipedia.org]
The region was Ottoman. The people were Ottoman Arab Muslims, Christians and Jews. The term "Palestinian" wasn't national in nature since Muslims couldn't accept a concept of nationalism beyond the required pan-Arabic caliphate under the one and only sharia law (that's to be determined by killing anyone that disagrees on the interpenetration): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_nationalism [wikipedia.org] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_state [wikipedia.org]
It's not to say Palestinian nationalism isn't legitimate just because it's a response to Zionism. Zionism in itself is a response to the failure of Jews to assimilate in Europe. But you can't just make up some Palestinian nation, borders and identity that simply wasn't there at the time and blame the British and Zionist for conquering it. The Ottomans joined with Germans in WW1, lost and fallen apart. There was nothing there to conquer. It was up to the winner to decide what to do with it. They gave self-determination where they saw capacity for self-governance. And they saw it with the Zionist. Israel is still around so clearly they weren't wrong.
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(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 03 2019, @04:38AM (3 children)
"It was up to the winner"
Your argument eats itself, your saying the people who were actually living there didn't have a state with borders, so the UK made a state with borders for a set of people who hated them and thought they were sub humans, and these new borders are super official even though they have divided the entire world in violent conflict for the entire time?
Have you ever heard of the word arbitrary? Or a bootstrap argument? Even in your bizarre world where the british get to play 'legitimate' god and give land away, with the help of the backing of huge european banks and a mountain of arms shipments, the palestinian people have rights and can't be forced to live in apartheid or have *even more* land taken by continuation of fiat on an ongoing basis. This is how we can know that Israel does not care one bit about the chance for a negotiated settlement, and they know palestinians can never accept a jewish state in jerusalem, so they do exactly those things.
israel should define its borders if it wants to be a legitimate state, and if it wants to investigate iran for weapons, it needs to be honest about its own. Do you think such a state should have weapons of mass destruction? They just bombed four countries 'pre-emptively,' which is nuts.
What you describe as the creation of israel is the definition of illegitimate, some people from somewhere else arbirarily drew these lines because it was profitable for them to do so and in the process a racist state was born out of blatant aggression, setting a precedent which continues to destabilize the entire world. I'd say with the money they had access to, they could have just bought it, but for some reason they thought continual war would be less expensive. And some people simply only do business with people in distress, even if they are the ones who have to generate the distress.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by RamiK on Tuesday September 03 2019, @07:43PM (2 children)
No court sends troops. The only people who have a say about any border are those with the ability to guard or attack it. The local Arabs weren't organized. They were largely composed of farmers, a few urbanite and intellectuals and the odd land owner. They had no engineers to setup infrastructures. No resources to develop the land. And no allies willing to aid. Only friendly [wikipedia.org] neighbors eyeing the lands for themselves. The British mandate wasn't a colonial "lets civilize them" effort. It was about getting into the region, putting together a self sustaining government that wouldn't implode upon them leaving or be so weak as to be rendered a proxy to the French, and get out. They made a judgement call that history proved accurate as even now the Palestinian leadership is divided between at least two camps that are shooting at each other whenever they get the chance.
Sunni vs. Shia... Muslims vs. Christians... Jews vs. Muslims... To this day the region is sunk neck deep in tribal warfare with everyone hating and killing everyone. Death toll vs. refugees wise, so far the Zionists been the least bloodthirsty of the lot.
No they don't. At least, not the rights you have in mind. The "post" in post-conflict property restitution rights denotes the conflict must come to an end first. So if the Palestinian leadership "can never accept a jewish state in Jerusalem" and bring the conflict to an end, they will never have such rights in the same way children don't have the right to vote until they reach a certain age. And while Israel is under no obligation to concede to the Palestinian terms of surrender, the Palestinians are free to declare unilateral surrender just like so many European nations has done over the centuries. That's the intent of the law: To bring conflicts to a close and force the parties to sign honest peace treaties acknowledging each-other's existence. Which unfortunately, the Palestinians are not willing to do.
Why bother? What do they have to gain? Unless the conflict comes to an end, the annexations could never be contested in international courts since borders are an open question to be determined in peace settlements. Again, it's not some error in international laws. It's the intent: To force the losers to surrender and prevent a perpetual war cycle.
No it doesn't. Israel hasn't signed on any nonproliferation treaties. Iran did.
Should any?
It can't be only just four. Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen are an obvious six. Turkey and Saudi Arabia probably got a few Hizbullah and Hamas recruitment centers bombed too. Algeria, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Emirates should have had a few Mossad agents bombing apartments and assassinating terrorists over the years too? I'm sure they did the same in most if not all of Europe.
Anyhow, standard practice in and out of the region.
How so? The Zionists bought the lands fair and square under both Ottoman and British rule. The local Arab oligarchs didn't like losing status and control as demography shifted and land prices inflated while the local farmers left with the money not entering circulation so they riled up a civil war to kick out the Zionists. The British observed and determined the Zionists have a right for self-determination and a need for their own country and borders around the lands they've purchased legally. They also saw the other party doesn't have capacity for self government and would end up a proxy... See above.
Maybe it's the annexation you're not fine with? The world war winners decided Israel has a right to exist but the locals saw fit to attack despite it. Do you really think the British and French would side with them in matters of refugee rights and annexations after that kind of betrayal? Look, to this day, whenever someone comes attacking the legitimacy of Israel based on this or that UN resolution, every single first world member nation representative is reminded how the Arab world keeps betraying them by ignoring their rulings and arbitration while collaborating with the Soviets / Chinese. Matters of the law are mostly a question of procedure at those levels. What matters to them is that Israel is, generally, an ally when and where it matters. And rarely if ever, a violator of human rights when it comes to its own Arab population. So, just like back then, they look at the neighborhood and conclude the locals are better off under Zionist rule. So they'll pass some inane toothless resolution here and there. Maybe talk about a sanction to appease their Arab members and voters when they know the US will step in and veto it. But they'll never bother doing anything. They've learned their lesson.
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(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday September 04 2019, @12:43PM (1 child)
"The only people who have a say about any border are those with the ability to guard or attack it. The local Arabs weren't organized."
As an answer to my question, this is flat out saying 'I admit israel is evil and a land created from outright theft, and is according to me an exception to all moral laws and this is why I think I am allowed to rewrite history to suit my delusions, financial concerns and religious fantasies."
If your response was any less morally idiotic, or conversely, showed any moral sense whatsoever, I would read the rest of it, but your first sentence was so awful, I don't have the time to read any more tripe today.
Still waiting for an israeli argument that isn't outright propaganda, I'm not going to hold my breath.
Rethink your life, rethink thinking even, because you are not doing it.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday September 04 2019, @02:32PM
How did you come up with that conclusion? Property rights over land aren't perpetual nor universal. The moral justification for society to secure them is to provide "incentives for investment in land and sustainable resource management" [worldbank.org]. The locals failed both while the Zionists just kept investing more and more.
The legal aspect doesn't hold up either. When the Ottoman empire collapsed, the party doing the leasing collapsed and the locals lost the rights to the lands. The British intervened and ratified the old contracts under their own laws and the newly emerged international laws. But that meant accepting their decisions, rules and laws while paying them taxes. The alternative is putting together a government, army and police via taxes and guaranteeing the rights yourself by protecting the borders and such. But they didn't do it. They couldn't. Their society was too poor. The vast majority of people were farmers that could barely afford the utility bills for the few acres under their names much less their development and protection. The rich didn't feel like paying for it too so they sold out to the Zionist, packed their bags, and migrated to find a better life elsewhere.
So, when a tenant can't afford the rent or paying for utilities, you kick them out. Doubly so when there's another person willing to buy the whole place and renovate it top to bottom.
This is why the Bedouins and Druze joined up with the Zionists against the other Arabs. Unlike the other locals, they weren't delusional and entitled. They understood lands aren't some god given right. Property isn't what you own. It's what you deprive from others. It's inherently immoral to own anything and the only means to justify it is with a commitment to life through its development and the willingness to shed blood to protect it. For the former, the Zionists just kept investing nonstop. For the latter, they saw the Zionists didn't run away while the locals did and that sealed the deal.
Throw in hospitality and that's all the moral and legal justifications anyone could have to hold property.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @11:16PM
this will blow your mind:
http://mileswmathis.com/iran.pdf [mileswmathis.com]