[izacus]

These kind of scenarios can happen with workers in government offices, archives and medical institutions as well. And yet the paper documents are not E2E encrypted.

Maybe... just maybe... technology is not really what should be the core issue here? But we should perhaps look at our policies and legislation? Adding proper liability there will make technology come by itself. The magic of free market doesn't seem to be working here.

[hinkley]

Any problem is easy if you oversimplify it.

The cultural conceit of 'disruptors' is that society has made everything complicated and therefore society is 'ripe for disruption' which if you read between the lines means 'stupid'. Lack of respect means lack of care. Lack of care leads to injury (theirs, and/or ours).

You are right. It's not the tech. It's the arrogance.

From my knothole, legislation comes for things that aren't policing themselves adequately. I think what we are discovering is that there are a lot of domains where the old guard were self-policing to a degree, and the newcomers have absolutely no reverence for anything.

I expect it won't be long before you'll see industries taking a hard look at their internal culture, and then engaging in regulatory capture to keep out the disruptors.

[coralreef]

The easiest way to keep someone out is to lock the door.

You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.

[TeMPOraL]

That's absolutely not true. Most doors are trivial to pick and as easy to break down.

The main, and usually only, real reason for the lock on the door is to serve as a physical symbol which establishes a particular legal status of the property behind the doors, with associated consequences for unlawful entry. The legal apparatus - penalties, punishments - is what deters crime. Lock is an XML tag made of matter.

(The additional, secondary role of a lock is being a trivial inconvenience. Not enough to deter a thief determined to rob your place, but enough for a thief determined to rob a place to skip yours and pick a different one.)

[michaelmrose]

Forget the analogies having to explicitly misuse the system to violate customers privacy creates a strong disincentive.

All accesses to customers data should require multiple people not by policy but by mandatory access controls.

The fact that employees could hack their employer is true and not meaningful.

The number willing to commit felonies is less than the number willing to risk termination.

[hinkley]

I feel like I asked this before and then didn't bookmark the answers.

What systems are out there for requiring consensus for access? I know about K of N protocols for hardware cryptography, but I'm fuzzy on such systems for, say, admin functionality or data retrieval. Are they all in-house at this point?

I've found over and over again in my work that it's much easier to spout rhetoric about process change when I have provided tools to facilitate those changes. Maybe it's time for us to collaborate on some tooling in this space.

[nicoburns]

I can't remember which company it was, but I once read an article about a company who implemented their own version of `sudo`. Their version required another developer to approve your session before granting root privileges, and then allowed them to watch everything you did.

[TeMPOraL]

I was addressing the lock analogy itself, but going back to the original topic, I believe this line of thinking still applies to an extent. Setting up hoops one has to jump through to do something nefarious is as much about the difficulty of jumping as it is about the very act of jumping. If you have to work around some security features to access customer data, you can't defend yourself by saying you've accessed it "somehow" or by accident.

[derefr]

Protecting property is not the only use-case for locks.

There are also locks on e.g. cell doors in prisons. Those are pretty essential to the function of the cell, and tend to survive anything prisoners might try to do to them.

There are also locks (specifically, interlocks) on e.g. dam spillways, or on the airlocks on submarines. (For these, the "key" is a button somewhere else that's not necessarily itself secured, but it is still very crucial that they keep things out when that button has not been pushed.) They hold up pretty well—even against malicious infiltrators—mostly because they fail closed and have no UI components mechanically linked to the locking mechanism.

[rascul]

I've never had a window or door broken, but if I left my door unlocked, everything would be stolen. I've had stuff stolen that was outside, even had people try the locked door while I was inside. It doesn't seem to matter that my house is actually pretty easy to break into, as long as I lock the doors. So I would agree that the easiest way to keep people out of my house is to lock the door.

[stevenicr]

I must disagree, although I find what you are saying an important part of the defenses, and likely a larger issue in certain parts of the country and certain neighborhoods..

I think the gp is not 'absolutely not true'.. I have a fair amount of hobby interest experience dealing with petty thieves / criminals for the past couple decades; studying them locally and through polls and news articles... stories about locked up thieves admitting they will generally skip houses that have big dogs and security systems for example.

Certainly there are certain types of people to take into consideration from what you are mentioning, and petty criminals vary from locale to locale in significant ways sometimes. From what I understand places like frisco often have car hoppers busting out windows of cars on a regular basis, however in my area they generally only check for doors to be locked or unlocked when choosing to rummage through a car. A portion of the criminals around here will make an exception and bust a window if they see a purse or briefcase, but generally move on to the next without making too much noise, for example.

In most neighborhoods seeing someone crouched down playing with a door lock would attract attention and likely calls to the police. Kicking in a door would also create an amount of noise that brings attention the average criminal does not want to deal with.

Sure if a delivery person has seen you have a box of gold and sapphires next to the door (or notice your vintage guitar collection hanging on the walls while trick or treating) - they may target you with a door kick / other means of juice that is worth the squeeze..

but most of the thieves in my area will skip the locked houses and move to the next softer target. (often ringing the doorbell to see if anyone is home first)

I don't think most petty thieves are willing to learn lock-picking, even though it's easier to learn today than it was 20 years ago.. The added time it takes is not really worth it. (for most in most situations)

It's easier to find a neighbor that has a window air conditioner that can be pushed in with ease (at least around here, this technique in Minnesota may not be used as often)

The only place I can think of in regards to "establishes a particular legal status of the property behind the doors, with associated consequences for unlawful entry." would be Kennesaw, Ga - every person who lives there has a gun - there, the legal status of kicking in a locked door and it's associated consequences are proportionally different than most apartments in NY.

Some of the street thugs know that robbing with tools (that can be labeled burglary tools) carries an extra charge, just like robbing with a loaded gun is different time for the crime of stealing using threat of other force..

I do agree that certain situations / threats make "The additional, secondary role of a lock is being a trivial inconvenience. Not enough to deter a thief determined to rob your place, but enough for a thief determined to rob a place to skip yours and pick a different one." true - but that does not make the above statement absolutely not true.

I think you are both right.

[TeMPOraL]

You're right that I shouldn't have said "absolutely not true", but I stand by my general message. Regular locks are inconveniences for thieves, not deal breakers.

> In most neighborhoods seeing someone crouched down playing with a door lock would attract attention and likely calls to the police.

Not if that someone is wearing a hi-vis safety vest (perhaps with "Cory & Trevor Locksmith Company" or something similar written on it).

My point is that the effectiveness of locks primarily comes from laws and economics, not from their physical properties.

[LeifCarrotson]

Follow-ups to your comment have responded to your analogy with discussions of lock-picks, firefighter exceptions, and safes vs doors.

The point I think you were trying to make is that it's mathematically possible to create a cryptographic lock that's inviolable. This is a different way of thinking.

I agree strongly - it's one thing to have a process or rule on what to do, and another to build a system that forces the processes and rules to be followed.

(I say inviolable, but I'm aware you can typically defeat a cryptographic lock by taking a crowbar to the physical locks watched by your Ring doorbell and subsequently using the crowbar on the person whose mind holds the key to said lock...but that's not the lock's fault.)

[lmilcin]

Actually, the best way to keep people out is to convince them it is not worth it to try to get in.

[jethro_tell]

I agree, but I would use the safe analogy instead of door, because locks only keep honest people honest, just like rules.

[shadowgovt]

Locked doors can kill if a fire breaks out in your house.

[ryukafalz]

Typically, at least in the US, a locked door can be opened from the inside without a key for that reason.

[shadowgovt]

So while that is true (and not to go too far off into the weeds on an analogy), in an emergency, people are trying to follow procedure under pressure and the odds of error in operation of an interface increase. You want the interface that is used in an emergency situation to either be well practiced or absolutely as intuitive as possible.

To destructure the analogy and give a concrete example, if I'm dying of allergic shock I don't want my doctor unable to access my medical history because somebody in the process can't remember how to "break glass" on the encryption on my medical records, even if there's a procedure to do so. I want my records in plain text format and as readable as possible.

[justanotherc]

Your concrete example would never happen the real world. If you were in anaphylactic shock, no doctor is going to go off looking for your medical records first, even if they were sitting on the table next to him. He's just going to stick you with epinephrine and then MAYBE look at your medical records later.

All that said, I get your point, but I'm not sure how it applies to this discussion anyway.

[shadowgovt]

My point is there's a tradeoff between prevention and penalty. Sometimes, the best option isn't a locked door; it's a clear sign saying "trespassers will be prosecuted" and a security camera (i.e. auditable access, not preventative access denial). That way, people can get in if they need to to do something critical, and one can resolve the question of trespass later.

[ryukafalz]

True, but:

- If you normally keep the door locked, unlocking it with the thumb turn is what you do every time anyway

- In cases where there are many people expected to use doors that they're unfamiliar with, it's typically even simpler to exit (panic bar on business fire exits, automatically-unlocking deadbolt on hotel doors, etc)

[rebuilder]

If you keep the door locked at all times, unlocking it should be pretty routine.

[deogeo]

I'm a strong proponent of both approaches. If surveillance infrastructure is in place, and all you have protecting you is law, it only takes one small change, or one warrant, to lose all your privacy (and you won't even find out about it). On the other hand, if the law forbids privacy, technological solutions won't withstand for very long, especially when you can be compelled to hand over your passwords or face jail.

[thatsenough]

This brought back memories of doing data entry for an insurance company as a teenager. I spent eight hours a day transcribing people's names, addresses, SSNs, and medical ailments, including all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases.

It's weird, now that I think about it. I was just some kid they hired as a temp. We've never really known who's looking at our private data.

[just_myles]

I agree, there should be a legislative intervention here. These devices come out semi-regularly with no regard to security.