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Comment by rogers18445 | Hacker News Reader

These things are typically bureaucratic security theater. Terrorists can sideload. The decision makers just care to be seen doing something, whether it's useful or not is not their problem.

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You severely underestimate the people in power, and the people who stand behind them.

Such bans are deliberate attacks targeting (parts of) the general population. Terrorists have nothing to do with this.

"Hahaha those stupid bureaucrats, they have no idea what they are doing" is a popular meme, but it couldn't be further from the truth. They do know what they are doing, and it's working. If you believe it isn't, that's only because you misunderstand what the real goal is.

Absolutely. I know from personal experience that much of what remains of independent journalism in India, as well as some NGO work (long under government scrutiny) is conducted through Signal and Element.

Well they've caught bad people using Signal too:

https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/dangerous-...

Besides Pegasus and such and the interception issues with SMS, might be as well due to HUMINT and the weaknesses in verifying fingerprints.

Probably it would be best for people in some of these countries to do their work offline.

Perhaps I should add that I do not wish to undermine the terrorism situation in India, which is very much real. Regardless, there is a paradox because at the same time the associated terrorism laws and hacking operations have been misused to target opposition, journalists, scientists, activists, and many others.

>Terrorists can sideload

many don't because terrorists in reality don't tend to be very smart. And if they do, its not that difficult to trick them and compromise that channel aswell (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/08/fbi-app-arre...)

The amount of people who get caught on insecure communication, including some famous tech CEOs, is staggering. Most people, criminal or not, are completely security/tech illiterate. Changing the default has a huge impact. Webs in these investigations tend to be wide so it's not just about literal criminals, if one suspect leaks info to anyone that may be enough for authorities to catch on, it's a statistical game basically and the harder you make it to not mess up the higher your chance to catch someone.

Gentle reminder that the US intelligence leaker was caught because he distributed the material on a gaming discord on an account with user info that was one Google search away from his father's instagram and steam profile. And that guy was US National Guard tech support staff.

I disagree. This may or may not be effective, but it's not theatre.

Criminals, terrorists, dissidents, politicians, even intelligence people sometimes... they're users. Just because they can sideload, or otherwise use more sophisticated methods doesn't mean they will. The margins are wide.

Imo, same thing is happening in India as is happening in most places with an active security-intelligence service. They receive valuable intelligence from PMs. Then they fret about potentially losing access or want to increase access.

If you read HN/Reddit/Twitter, you'd get the impression that all this stuff is fake. It's not. Intelligence agencies in 2023 are all about these sources, and jelously guard them. Once they have a source, they're not giving it up willingly.

Certainly a ban like that, if it can be made at least somewhat effective, will prevent a lot of uses of encrypted messaging by less sophisticated users. I'm afraid it's not going to be effective against the stated targets, the well-prepared terrorists sponsored by a neighboring state. Those will be trained to sideload, or whatever else it takes.

Even "somewhat effective" is better than no ban. Given the state of terrorism in some parts, this is a crucial tool. For example in the aftermath recent terrorist bombing in Pulwama, clamping down on Internet had helped.

Let's not forget people died there.

Exactly as you said. Besides, much of things cannot be sideloaded because otherwise recruitment for a cause becomes impossible.

When this stuff started happening in Russia qlmost a decade ago, everybody was joking about bureaucrats instead of taking measures. Fast forward a few years, Internet access is not unlike cheese with holes in it, and a great number of people had to invest in VPN access.

The idea of mass surveillance is never to counter the terrorists. It is to control the masses and have a dossier on everyone.

Terrorists aren't the real target of bans like this. Journalists, dissidents, and opposition figures are.

Disagree - this is unsubstantiated and worthy of an Elon Musk style of how he stripped that BBC reporter down. If they were the targets, Journalists, dissidents would have completely dissappeared over time. They are active and vociferous.

They do deep packet inspection on the telco end and drop packets to the blocked servers. Sure there might a way to circumvent, especially if there’s a p2p app, but even those packets may be detected and dropped.

What if they also get blocked on a DNS level, just like how they did those porn sites?

You can actually use VPN. But what if the vpn services also get blocked?

While achieving 100% of a blockage is not possible but achieving even a 30% is great.

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