It's worth realizing that, before computerized central offices, telephone wiretapping required running physical wires. Back when Rudi Giuliani was prosecuting organized time, not only did physical wires have to be run, the cops were billed for them as expensive private lines. His task force was spending about a million dollars a year with New York Telephone on wiretapping.
In one case, law enforcement didn't pay their bill, resulting in the person being wiretapped having the wiretap connection show up on their bill, blowing the case.<p>That resulted in the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, which mandated that central offices offer remote wiretapping. Capacity up to 1% of lines is required.<p>Back in the electromechanical era, the only call data that could be collected was outgoing dial pulses, using a "pen register".[1] (The one shown in Wikipedia is mine. It's a beautiful piece of antique brass telegraph technology. It records dial pulses as dashes, and has to be wound up like a clock, with a big brass key.) The Supreme Court decision allowing "pen registers" without a warrant refers to these "extremely limited" devices. That definition has been stretched and stretched by law enforcement into all non-voice data collected by telcos.<p>Law enforcement still wants more.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register</a>
> In one case, law enforcement didn't pay their bill, resulting in the person being wiretapped having the wiretap connection show up on their bill, blowing the case.<p>In the fictional world of The Wire, one of the "wires" were blown when the guy checked on his mobile bill to find out his account was flagged to not be disconnected. I'm sure this was art imitating life or inspired by type of thing
The Wire is allegedly one of the more realistic crime shows in how incompetent it portrays the police.
It was created by a journalist and a cop, who both had long careers in Baltimore before working on the show. Not surprising how realistic it is. (Also a beautiful work of art beyond the realism.) If you find the show interesting, David Simon's book "Homicide" is a great read.
And a few of his other series, such as Treme, The Deuce, and Generation Kill are all fantastic.
"The Corner" is also a great read by him.
Digital forensics examiner here; it’s extremely accurate especially for the tech involved at the time. I think I spotted a very small handful of things it had to kick under a rug for the plot to work, which is unbelievably small for a show like that.<p>It’s easily the best LE show that exists, but not just because of its accuracy; it’s incredible in its pure honesty. Some of the cops are total worthless shit bags, worse than the best of the criminals easily. Allowing that overlap, one that exists in real life, injects a whole lot of nuance into the story that is basically nonexistent outside of the show. And allows characters to grow and improve. It takes writers with actual LE experience (which they had) and a lot of talent to write that kind of thing without totally blowing it.
In their defense their target was amazingly adept.<p>Many criminals even today don't engage in basic counter measures like you see on that show.<p>And I'd call them "dysfunctional" more than inept. Bad leadership stymied by political goals overcomes even good policing.
Criminals with competence still operate in big numbers today, but LE very rarely targets them. The soft targets are just so abundant and easy, and the LE incentive system does not reward choosing hard targets at all.<p>Doesn’t help that a big chunk of the competent criminals have fully or partially internationalized their operations which acts as a very strong shield against LE.
You’re doing my boy McNulty dirty.
That, and the alcoholism
Never watched the wire...but I remember back 25+ years ago some people joking about not paying their phone bill to see if the phone was tapped.<p>They claimed that since it never got shut off when they didn't pay it must be tapped.<p>Possibly correct I suppose...
Or that bit wasn’t true to begin with.<p>The billing accounts never would have crossed the same desk,<p>let alone been crossed.<p>The lines also weren’t terminated at the suspects’ homes. So, again, no vector for the bill to be sent there.<p>I’d lean towards “myth” on that - until a more convincing story appears.
The cost dynamics have flipped in the past decades. What we have now is "Surveillance Too Cheap to Meter" <a href="https://cacm.acm.org/practice/surveillance-too-cheap-to-meter/" rel="nofollow">https://cacm.acm.org/practice/surveillance-too-cheap-to-mete...</a> Because storing data is cheaper and often economically more useful than not storing it.
> The one shown in Wikipedia is mine.<p>neat!<p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Pen_Register.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Pen_Regi...</a><p>assuming you still have it, it wouldn't be the worst idea to update the pic to something without chromatic aberration and motion blur. the wiki pic is probably the worst of the bunch compared to others on google image search :)
If any legit museum, or attorney involved with Fourth Amendment issues, would like it, please contact me at nagle@animats.com. It's just sitting around.<p>I bought it on eBay years ago, out of curiosity, and fixed it. I built a little control box to go with it, with a phone dial and a 9V battery, and found a source of paper tape and ink. So it can be demoed. If it ever is used in a court appearance or legislative testimony, that would be better than it sitting in a box.
Yeah I find the phone-taken images much worse than camera-taken even despite the astonishing number of megapixels and amount of technologies promised in the phones nowadays. Sadly most people don't buy the camera because it's too expensive and you need prepare yourself to take it with you (so the most photos are taken instantly with the phone)
"Back when Rudi Giuliani was prosecuting organized time" I can't even fathom he'd not be cashing checks from the mafia to go after other families. Odds are good that historians will find that he did.
He traded Italian organized crime for Russian organized crime.
A similar story around this is the controversy around various Mumbai “encounter specialists” (a violent incident between police and gangsters is an “encounter”) and whether they were effectively hitmen for some faction of the local mob. Always thought it was quite intriguing stuff.
> In the real world, it does feel likely that we’re going to hit some sort of a ceiling on the number of useful bugs, and probably we’ll hit it soon.<p>This doesn't resonate with me. I see companies adding more sloppily written features with AI. I see more bugs in the software I use, not less. While it's plausible that software is getting both buggier and more secure, I suspect those two move in the same direction not opposite.<p>My guess is that we're getting better at finding _existing_ security issues with AI (and thus fixing those issues), but simultaneously adding more insecure surface areas _at a faster rate_.
One way to resolve the tension here is to note that CNE and lawful-intercept access to phones depends generally on platform vulnerabilities, not application code vulnerabilities. Low-level platform code churns less, absorbs more fixes under AI workloads than it does new features, and works in a constrained space where guardrails are easier to provide (and where those guardrails already have institutional support at Apple and Google).<p>Over the long term this state of play could change, and IC/LEO organizations could start leaning more on application vulnerabilities than on platform RCEs. But the action would probably still coalesce around a couple of app-layer targets that could themselves be hardened.
> My guess is that we're getting better at finding _existing_ security issues with AI (and thus fixing those issues), but simultaneously adding more insecure surface areas _at a faster rate_.<p>This does seem to be true in the vibe coding era, which I expect will implode at some point. But LLMs could certainly lead to a future where vulnerabilities are scarce. The best time to vet security factors is designing the model and writing the initial code, and LLMs are extraordinarily useful for this too. Most code with security implications is not written by a security expert.<p>An LLM can be the most anal and well informed security expert you can find. If you write the code yourself but have one in the loop from the start, the code will be in much better shape.
I don't know, my colleague refuses to use AI and I've been seeing more bugs from their side, while reducing bugs on my side with the help of AI.<p>That said if companies want to "ship ship ship fast", then yes even AI can produce bugs or regressions if not carefully reviewed by the human.
I don't have any colleagues like that anymore, but even as far back as the last half of 2025 I was seeing that automated AI review was becoming effective enough that I considered it essential to any project where security was a serious concern.<p>These days we're generating multiple times more code than we were writing before. That means a similar multiple of opportunities for bugs to be introduced - so the ability to automate security review is more impactful in proportion to that.
> <i>while reducing bugs on my side with the help of AI.</i><p>How do you know? You might be adding (latent) bugs every time your LLM fixes one for you.
> I've been seeing more bugs from their side, while reducing bugs on my side with the help of AI.<p>You should question your ability to see any bugs on YOUR side.
Have you asked your colleagues what it’s like to deal with your code?
The point is that people who want to be secure can be more secure than ever while people who don’t care about security will be less secure than now.<p>Author claims something slightly different but that’s how I would look at it.<p>The extremes are more potent because either you get super secure 10 times vetted system or you get underpowered model slop with all the vulnerabilities it entails.
> I see companies adding more sloppily written features with AI<p>I think this is a side-effect of the old product management process adapting to AI. We (as an industry) were never very good at defining features rigorously, because there was a smart human in the loop who had to implement the feature and could push back on sloppy definitions.<p>Whereas security bugs are easy for the LLM to define and fix.
Disagree, and in a way it feels like we are dealing with inverse issues: the security "skill" is well defined and will be also engaged with by an agent. Communication companies are further incentivized as any failure is at best reputational harm. Meanwhile SaaS companies are not strictly required to have good UX for their human end users, largely because those users will likely work around the issue. also network effect vs low costs of switching for for comms
My hot take is that AI is a multiplier. Software engineers skill can be measured on a scale from -10 to +10, where 0 means you introduce as many bugs as you solve, or something along those lines(this scale is loosely defined, don't think too much about it)<p>Any engineer who's skill value evaluates below 0 on my scale, ends up with a large negative number when they use AI. Anyone with a positive number ends up with a large positive number.<p>The extra bugs you're seeing are from devs on the wrong side of 0 on my poorly defined scale.
They’re not “bugs” they’re “quirks”! Our software is so quirky. It’s a feature!
On one side, you have pieces like this, where seemingly there are constant fights between serious actors with large and properly distributed budgets, employing top tech and top minds; on the other - regular news of the hackz, where responsible person in charge of security with root access failed to grasp basic technical knowledge (several times), ticking every checkbox in "never do this" list from security best practices, which led to every customer being pwned.<p>It's like two parallel worlds, that exist in the same place at the same time, but somehow don't cross.
I started my career in the military, and got lucky enough that SOMEHOW, we convinced them to fund a trip to GDQ for educational purposes.<p>Anyways, while there I attended a little roundtable on software security. It was me, representing a small unit from the Air Force, some dude from Google, and like 15 game devs.<p>Despite only being a dev of 5 years at that point, I was SHOCKED at the lack of knowledge on software security. Even simple concepts seemed completely foreign to the game devs, though the Google dude seemed to have a really solid understanding of security.<p>Obviously game devs and website devs and all kinds of devs have different focuses, but it just blew my mind that out of all the topics there I might’ve been considered a comparative expert in, security was somehow the one. I wasn’t sure if that was a major plus for military devs or a major concern for the other devs, but now I’m starting to learn in the latter direction.
Without knowing when that was, I can't be sure how concerning it is.<p>As an end user, security in game development seems to hit a minimum is the early 2000s.<p>I recall playing EverQuest and using ShowEQ on a Linux machine on the same network as a proxy to silently eavesdrop on the traffic to show a map of the game with all the hidden/obscured/visible stuff all present. They either never encrypted that traffic or I quit playing before they did.<p>As multiplayer games started to become the default, netcode improved quite a bit and basic encryption was implemented - but I don't recall a single multi-player game, ever, that was free of hackers when playing online.<p>It feels like over the years the issue moved from remote exploitation to hiding processes on the user's machine. That has lead to kernel-level anticheat systems. I'm unsure of the effectiveness as when they started to become common I moved all of my gaming to dedicated hosts because I wasn't willing to give that level of access to my "real" computers. That said, I've certainly not noticed a decrease in the perceived number of cheaters.<p>These days, as far as I know - and to be clear, this isn't an area of deep interest for me - I'm not worried about my gaming accounts being compromised through technical means. It feels like that sort of security is a solved issue overall, although I suppose it's also possible that other forms of exploits have simply gotten easier/cheaper.
> It feels like that sort of security is a solved issue overall<p>...ish. The solution is false positives and a permanent underclass. You can't play those games unless you're on windows and you grant root to the anti-cheat.<p>I don't care much about that, but i do care about people being unemployable because some amorphous machine doesn't like the way they comb their hair.<p>Last century, if you grew up five to a room then at least you knew why you were marginalised. It wasn't just, but it was legible. Now, some of us are living in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
I've never seen an exploiter on Clash Royale.
Security in the game industry is a sick joke. There are dozens of RCE riddled titles sold on Steam at this moment. For example, many past titles on "Call of Duty" series with CVE-2018-20817 [1].<p>BTW, I highly encourage all EU citizens to prepare Cyber Resilience Act complaints for September 11, 2026 when the law kicks in ;-)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops2/comments/1v3xowq/just_entered_a_game_on_pc_and_the_hacker_opened/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/blackops2/comments/1v3xowq/just_ent...</a>
Hah. It probably shouldn't be <i>that</i> surprising? Most engineers learn security on the job, not school. Game devs don't deal with -- and don't need to deal with -- the kinds of security issues Google and the military do.<p>Google has probably the best security team in the world, and they need to. The military deals with state actors by definition.<p>Gamedevs need to ship. I'm not saying they don't care about security, but short of some showstopper critical problem, it's not a thing and doesn't need to be.<p>It doesn't matter if your game is secure if nobody plays it lol
Games are a different product altogether. Game developers want to have fun and create a fun experience. Security is almost always something they'd avoid if they could. They'd rather spend the time on more polish, juice or play testing.<p>Besides stopping cheaters, in almost all conceivable cases, security doesn't make a game better.
I think that's going to be the central tension of the next few years. The article suggests that software becoming more secure is going to lead to renewed calls for a "legitimate" backdoor for law enforcement to access everything about the device. Well, that security means nothing if someone phishes Kash Patel, something which has already happened. You go through the weak link, which is almost always the human.<p>I could see a future where the government is replaced by the software system which has the fewest security flaws, simply because it is the last thing left standing as everybody hacks everybody else. We end up with a Matrix-like or Terminator-like future where humanity now lives in service of the machines.
K shaped economy and K shaped development?
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I don't think the thesis that a government will be able to do something will ultimately hold. I don't see how they can avoid "going dark" in a democracy.<p>we live in a world where the government can't even do much about illegal drug markets anyone can access by downloading a piece of software.<p>if they pass laws that mandate backdoor access and block software which doesn't conform more and more people will move to the dark networks.<p>and if they effectively block the dark networks (in the limit they will have to block all encrypted communications) then we will be living in a tyranny.<p>freedom is messy. accept that digital crime can only be solved when the criminal makes a tangible mistake. LLM's will be building profiles on criminals to help with identifying mistakes.
> we live in a world where the government can't even do much about illegal drug markets anyone can access by downloading a piece of software.<p>I think it's a mistake to think they <i>can't</i> - rather, they <i>won't</i>.
The problem that Matthew Green is calling out subtextually is that democracy is likely to disappoint nerds on this issue: a random voter in the country 10 years from now may very well not share your priors about this issue.
consider the implications of a government where setting up an encrypted network is a serious offense, or where detecting encrypted communications is routine. the average voter doesn't matter. if they are willing to go that far it's a tyranny and the average voter doesn't matter anyway because they spy on everyone and have LLM's profile everyone (in that context even if voting still happens it doesn't matter, they will nudge the voters however they wish due to the information asymmetry).
It doesn't need to be a serious offense. The current playbook works fine. Anything the Constitution prevents you from doing, have a private company do it for you. In this case you lean on, pay, or give preference to private companies to install back doors. Have the SC rule that you can't sell devices with certain encryption guarantees anywhere on the planet because planetwide commerce affects interstate commerce. Things like that.
> democracy<p>Still?
I've always loved the ridiculousness of the "going dark" label when law enforcement can't access encrypted chats or a back door isn't built into a piece of software. When there are security cameras on the vast majority of houses, stop lights and in people's hands, and when so much meta data about people's associations are shared from Google, Facebook, any other social platform, how in the world can they say they are "going dark". How did they ever solve crimes before these things?
Wire taps That's the point.
Yes, are there any data points to suggest that this arms race is balanced any differently than it ever has been throughout history?<p>The cops will find a way, the criminals will find a way. It's ultimately people v. people with access to the same level of technology.
It breaks my heart that the governments with unlimited budgets who have hired the best and brightest will have to put in serious effort to get the bad guys, and potentially find it not worth it to casually spy on the whole world.<p>I am just beside myself at such an idea that people looking to feed the prison machine cannot as easily find excuses to turn normal citizens into prison feed.<p>Just super sad guys.
> excuses to turn normal citizens into prison feed<p>What felonies are those normal citizens being convicted of that's landed them in prison?<p>I get the basic 'not wanting everyone's comms to be monitored' part. I think there's an important conversation to be had because indeed, that can't be the answer.<p>But it sounds like you're saying most people who are convicted of felonies based on a jury unanimously being convinced by the electronic evidence against them... those people are unjustly in prison?
Unironically yes, we convict people of felonies for the dumbest fucking reasons and working a jury is literally a science.
The issues with the justice system are well documented. Please do not try to straw man what I am getting at.<p>Certain people are arrested and detained far often than others, because of who they are and not what they did.<p>Many positions in the justice system prioritize conviction rate above all else.<p>There are many problematic relationships between legislators, law enforcement and the for-profit prison systems.<p>Our position in this list should make anyone afraid:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...</a><p>If LE decides you should be "taken off the streets", regardless of if you did the crime you are accused of, you are likely going to prison for <i>something</i> unless you are wealthy. If you are wealthy, they may not bother. All very interesting.
The one who threw a ham sandwich at a Nazi at a protest?
>It breaks my heart that the governments with unlimited budgets who have hired the best and brightest<p>Why would the "best and brightest" work for governments that pay a fraction of market price?
I'm supposed to be concerned that the US government and Israel won't be able to hack everyone's phones?
The reason why this might worry people who don't like the US/UK/Israeli governments is hidden in a secret place...a paragraph that is neither the first paragraph nor the last.
Tl;dr the argument is if three letter agencies can’t buy or make exploits anymore because all vulnerabilities are patched, they will ramp up legal and legislative pressure to make vendors install backdoors. Which is bad and we should all worry about.<p>One of the author’s blind spots here is the concept of “digital sovereignty”. The US is continuing to ban more and more Chinese-made hardware out of fear that the Chinese govt has installed backdoors in them… which you could interpret as an admission that the US does exactly that with American made products. Globalized supply chains are, erm, complex, and few if any companies are really going to be able to achieve “digital sovereignty” with hardware. But with software it’s actually plausible, though obviously hard. Whether or not the feds have actually installed backdoors in Microsoft Outlook, foreign govts are rightly concerned that they have, and are increasingly pushing to avoid US made software for simple national security reasons.
Which is to say that they will become more authoritarian and aggressive? That's not a good reason to be unhappy that they can no longer hack shit. They shouldn't do that either.
The trouble is, sometimes governments do things that they shouldn't do.
There are lots of things governments should and shouldn’t do, but unfortunately we don’t live in a vacuum, and need to consider the consequences of actions, rather than simply hope everyone is somehow forced to react the way we expect and desire.<p>In a nutshell, what I’m saying is “They shouldn’t do either” is at best a platitude and at worst a distraction preventing critical thought.
By this logic, we should never try to escape our abusers or resist our oppressors: we should just capitulate now, give them everything they want, and that way they won't escalate to (more) violence.<p>In a nutshell, this is bullshit. Bootlicker bullshit.<p>In a <i>democracy</i> (which our Western nations are certainly <i>supposed</i> to be, though that's become less true over time), if the people in government are doing things that are counter to the interests of the people, the appropriate response is to <i>replace those people</i>. Protest, contact your representatives and senators, contribute to campaigns that oppose what they're doing, etc.<p>And, of course, in an authoritarian state, if they decide they're going to add in backdoors to our phones, or ban encryption, or take whatever other draconian measures, then it doesn't matter a huge amount <i>how</i> we, the people, express our opposition to this; it's <i>extremely</i> unlikely that we have just enough collective strength and will to prevent them doing A, but not to prevent them from doing B instead. Either we can stop both, or neither.
So our strategy should be to shut down AI so it leaves vulnerabilities everywhere? Not sure what you are saying. Fixing security bugs across the world's software isn't some single policy action that we can vote on.<p>Governments should behave. I know they don't, but they should, and the population should do everything in their power to force them to. What other choice do we have?<p>Please demonstrate your powerful faculty of critical thought and explain what we should do instead.
Not who you replied to. "They should" isn't a solution. "Here is proposed legislation," "I started a petition," "i spoke with my congressman," "vote for Pedro." These are concrete. "They should" isn't anything.<p>Like SMART goals, I believe the other commenter was pointing out that platitudes lack specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely aspects required for organizing and achieving progress.
Read the article. That's what the article says.<p>> Thus: over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs.<p>> While I think this is great, for law enforcement and offensive intelligence agencies, it’s going to be a nightmare.<p>> So what do we do about it? I honestly have no idea. [...] it’s just occurring to me that we’re on a long greasy slide to a place that will look different than where we are today. [We’re] just going to have to hope that this time we make the right choices.
Nope. The article’s assertion is that governments will start to put enormous pressure on tech companies in their borders to include backdoors in their systems for LEO use. This in turn may lead to “nationalized” software e.g. what Russia and China largely do now, but in many more countries. You may have no choice but to use phones, computers, and software that is backdoored by your government - everything else will be illegal.
I think "nope" is in reference to "hacking" system. The point of the article is that hacking by software vendors that sell to law enforcement was a pressure relief valve that deflated the movement that the FBI was pushing at the time to have Apple (and others) build backdoors into their systems. If the phones could be hacked, and backdoors were not necessary the FBI could back off and still get what they want. If the FBI can't get what they want, they can either pressure the companies like Apple, or they can pressure congress to make laws requiring this. The phone makers could stand on principle, go to court, but the courts in the US are not very tech savvy, and usually deferential to law enforcement. Other countries may be better than the US, but some are definitely going to be worse.<p>So is a backdoor worse than a security vulnerability? I don't know but that is what this article is about.
It sounds like we should be gearing up for that fight then, so we can win it.
What do you mean "Nope", you mean "Yep" right? What you are describing is precisely "more authoritarian and aggressive"
His argument is that the government is going to start forcing tech companies to install backdoors in their tech, now that (hypothetically) they can't use hacking anymore.
That was my first thought as well... But remember, they've got unlimited Mythos while we barely have Fable.
Right? I saw "I’m concerned that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about to go dark, meaning lose a huge portion of their capability." and my first reaction was GOOD.
Which part of the article made you feel this way?
> In fact, the worst part about this dynamic is that these potential new backdoors will begin primarily useful for allowing the US to weaken its own systems, which will in turn allow foreign adversaries to find new ways to attack our communications. This deliberate self-sabotage will happen just at a moment when we’re finally learning how to defend our own infrastructure.<p>I don't understand how you can both argue for that law enforcement (and intelligence) agencies will force others to implement intentional backdoors AND also everyone will be using AI to find and secure ALL potential holes in the software so there won't be any vulnerabilities anymore.<p>Wouldn't one AI or another detect this deliberate backdoor and report it, as it'll look just like any other security vulnerability, the only difference being the intention?<p>I have respect for the author so I feel like I probably misunderstand something from the overall text rather than I somehow have a better perspective on this topic that the author knows very much more about than me. I felt like I nodded along all up until "So how is this a problem?" and now I'm not sure I understood correctly.
> Wouldn't one AI or another detect this deliberate backdoor and report it, as it'll look just like any other security vulnerability, the only difference being the intention?<p>That's precisely the author's point: deliberate backdoors will be more adversary-exploitable than ever before, but the demand for such from law enforcement agencies is likely to ratchet upwards.
Why can't the backdoors themselves be more sophisticated? I understand that expecting such sophistication from legacy companies is a joke at this point.
> deliberate backdoors will be more<p>But that's one step after, I'm trying to understand how those backdoors even end up in software if everything gets automatically reviewed by the people working on these codebases? Wouldn't things like these be flagged by systems other than the developers tasked by the agency to implement it? How can law enforcement actually get these things implemented without big parts of the engineering team not seeing warnings about it happening?
I'm not sure you understand what is being described here?<p>If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."<p>Note that this does certainly already happen a lot, but it's also not something that can happen across the board (like the author points out). Apple, being one of the largest companies in the world and who has one of their biggest selling points being their security, has explicitly refused to do this to the point that the intelligence agencies couldn't break into an iPhone until another company found a way to do so.<p>>I'm trying to understand how those backdoors even end up in software if everything gets automatically reviewed by the people working on these codebases?<p>The people working on these codebases are "in on it." Of course, we're talking backdoors which are very subtle, target very minimal infrastructure, and are known about by very few people. But, like I said, companies are currently shipping products with backdoors in them knowing they exist already. AI doesn't change that dynamic.<p>>Wouldn't things like these be flagged by systems other than the developers tasked by the agency to implement it?<p>The only people who would have access to the systems that can even be flagged by this stuff would be people who would know about it. Keep in mind that the scale we're talking here is massive. Think about how software development works at companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. There are devs working in offices all around the world where they only ever have access to a fraction of the code that company owns. These companies are very capable of keeping their stuff locked down. It's a necessary component of their work.<p>>How can law enforcement actually get these things implemented without big parts of the engineering team not seeing warnings about it happening?<p>Hopefully my explanation at this point is clear, but just to be concrete: backdoors are, by design, very hard to detect. That doesn't mean they're just sneakily written code that humans don't notice as they read over it, but, instead, they're very subtle implementations in very specific parts of huge systems that are already locked down to the point that the number of people who even have access to those portions of the systems are very limited. These agencies don't slip in backdoors without anybody noticing; they convince the minimal number of people needed to know about it to implement it. Again, we're talking about a meeting between the directory of a three letter agency and a CEO, where the CEO then directs the CTO to implement the backdoor who then instructs the handful of very high-ranking engineers to do so.<p>AI systems in these companies may very well flag these backdoors to the people who already know they exist, then these people can tell the AI "hey, those are their on purpose, so just move on," and the other 99.99% of the company will never know they exist.<p>I suppose it's important to emphasize, again, that these systems are incredibly massive and complex and most people at these orgs don't have any access to most of these systems, so it's not like you can expect an intern running BugBot across a repo and expecting it to find a backdoor.
I think people take the FBI or CIA too literally. I imagine they don't need to talk to owners and it's probably not even ideal. It might just be easier to get plants in the organization.<p>I would imagine most big companies, like Microsoft, have dozens of CIA and FBI plants in their organizations. Agents who are legitimate software engineers, tasked with acquiring intelligence and undermining security.
> If you're a US company building an app/device/etc. such that an intelligence agency like the CIA or FBI would want access to the data in that product which is normally secured, then they're not going to try to sneak it in there without your development team knowing. They're going to have a meeting with the owners of the company and say, "hey, we'd really like you to implement this backdoor for us, and in return we won't cause you in problems."<p>And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".<p>(And you move out of the US.)<p>And since this is a foreseeable future, you should start acting <i>now</i> to prepare for that future.
With laws like Chatcontrol and all, other jurisdictions are not necessarily any better.<p>In fact, we're increasingly seeing a desire to build the "backdoor" directly into the software, e.g. mandatory age verification, client-side scanning, etc.
> And then you say, loudly and publicly, "all the source code of our software is public, and our binaries use binary transparency so it's not possible for us to build a binary that doesn't match the source, and people will rapidly find this in our source code at which point we go out of business and you stop having a product to backdoor in the first place".<p>> (And you move out of the US.)<p>And then everybody claps.<p>Name me a software or hardware company—one big enough that the US government would actually <i>care</i> to force them to add a backdoor—that would be willing to give up the US market? The only one that's shown the least bit of backbone is Apple, and while I like them and appreciate what they've done in that vein so far, they're never going to move to open source software running their stuff, and they're pretty well embedded in the US, and very, very unlikely to try to move regardless of the headwinds there.<p>I'm fully with you that this would be a wise and moral thing to do, but frankly, our tech companies are neither wise nor moral. They are self-serving, greedy, and many of them have wanted to become the neofeudal overlords of a new order since before Trump started smashing the old one.
I'm not suggesting giving up the US market. I'm suggesting moving out of the US and continuing to serve the US market from elsewhere, because the US does not have a nation-wide firewall. And working with organizations mounting legal challenges to "please destroy your company in order to put in a backdoor for us".<p>Certificate Transparency has essentially eliminated the problem of backdoored CAs, because attempting to do so would destroy an entire CA. Binary Transparency can do the same for software.
I'm not sure exactly what you think that will accomplish...?<p>Companies have to follow the laws of the <i>countries they operate in</i>, not just the countries their physical headquarters are in.<p>That's why, for instance, Apple has to follow the DMA in Europe.<p>Furthermore, <i>especially</i> for many of the tech companies, where they are located is an integral part of their culture. They are Silicon Valley. You're going to have a very, very hard time convincing any of them to up stakes and move.<p>And further-furthermore, move <i>where</i>? Europe has, unfortunately, made similar authoritarian noises (eg, Chat Control). China is <i>already</i> more of an authoritarian state than even Trump's USA. Ditto for Russia, and, AIUI, India, though both in somewhat different ways.
I suspect they want a backdoor that basically acts like a front door (current password regimes). That is, a kind of high level password that decrypts traffic given a specific, changing, password that only the government has access to.<p>It's seems like an odd-duck for sure, and I doubt it's a realistic proposition. I do think "perfect encryption for dummies" is all well and good until organized crime organizations are able to challenge the government in certain regions of our country.<p>All of this sends us deep into the realm of political philosophy, the nature and purpose of governments, and the freedom vs security tradeoffs we live with.<p>I listened to the latest Plain English podcast this morning, which was explicitly about the potential for a ransomwarepocalypse in the coming years, as open models let any tom, dick, or harry become capable of a plug-and-play ransomware attack, instead of that being left to the realm of professionals. It's a bit nerveracking to think about every nigerian prince scam suddenly becoming a sophisticated attack on your local water sanitation system.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/vWvazbGPCCI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vWvazbGPCCI</a>
Ah, like new regulation requiring a "Portal For Law Enforcement" for platforms over X MAU or something?<p>I think I can kind of see that from the text re-reading it, it's kind of hidden though and not so explicit if this is what he is trying to communicate. Thanks for giving me a new perspective to read it with!
> In fact, the worst part about this dynamic is that these potential new backdoors will begin primarily useful for allowing the US to weaken its own systems, which will in turn allow foreign adversaries to find new ways to attack our communications.<p>The author agrees with you and addressed this point. The US forcing backdoors into its own systems ("own": Those for sale and distribution within the US) would create vulnerabilities making those systems weaker.
"backdoors" aren't holes, they are well-documented superuser APIs. The hack will be by compromising the API user's credentials (moles, stolen passwords, etc), not compromising the server's design intent.
I dunno man, if there's a deluge of new AI generated code at all layers of the stack I think there will still be vulnerabilities.<p>Like if we were willing to stop adding new code and just have a small secure code base, AI could maybe help us find all the vulnerabilities in that code base.<p>But people have consistently been unwilling to do that. Like if we were willing to stop adding code we could have stopped decades ago and done SQLite level testing everywhere and probably have found almost all the bugs already.
When we've got people who don't know the difference between ssh and bash creating SaaS companies that generate revenue, yeah there's gonna be a lot of insecure code going out, but that same person can also tell the AI "red team my app to find vulnerabilities and then fix them", and the AI can competently actually do that, I don't know that there will be. I'm not saying that's never going to happen, but the bar is getting raised on both sides.
Plus, the interest and expertise and passion used to favor the red team, attackers. If you wanted to defend against them you had to get on their level, or hire someone on their level. Thats either expensive or requires a time investment that doesn’t make sense for someone who is trying to do much more than just defend against attackers.<p>Now it’s just as you said- asking AI to red team your app will get you pretty far.
Sounds like a pretty strong argument to self host, and otherwise be in charge of the software you use.
Including your AI agents. And models become problematic. There very likely is and/or will be lots of pressure for US AI labs to make models help law enforcement. It could be by implementing backdoors in generated code, or not report some exploitable bugs, or something else. Similar for agents, they basically become the threat in your infra…<p>(It’s of course not only the US, just that the largest AI providers are US based and we know from history how US agencies operate)
Yep.<p>I'm using open weights models on a privacy-focused provider right now, and that's adequate for my current usage, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where my agent's access level to my data (and to a lesser extent, my accounts) is becoming something I'm not comfortable sending outside my network at all.<p>My hope is that models that are roughly on par with Deepseek V4 Flash can be run on hardware that I can own for <~$5k in the near future. We're close, but not there yet as far as I know.<p>The only long-term solution to this is self-hosting.
There is literally no protection or difference of an opensource model doing this.<p>An actual objection I had while talking to an aerospace company was they don't want opensource models because the threat of it having a poisoned training example on specific systems.<p>It's easily the most hidden malware possible, completely undetectable until an exact set of tokens unlocks it. Is it line 100,543 of your security product? You will literally not know until it plants it in there.
You can review generated code manually or with models from a second vendor (ideally from a different country). Attackers would have to poison both <i>and</i> do it in a way that also makes them ignore the planted malware when reading code.<p>Open models also let you read reasoning traces. That means anomalies would show up when the backdoor activates, like a run of unrelated words or a jump in top token probability. It's only undetectable until the first time it happens.
To the best of my knowledge (which, admittedly, is far from comprehensive), that kind of attack on a model shouldn't actually be possible in a deterministic fashion.<p>If you can't stop them from sometimes telling customers things like "yes, I <i>will</i> give you a penthouse suite at our hotel for only $3/night", why would you be able to guarantee that, with some specific set of tokens, they would produce a perfect and undetectable backdoor customized to the code at hand?
I don’t think it has to be perfect or deterministic that way. It’s enough to have a bias towards implementing a backdoor in some circumstances. Something like, if the machine seems to be used in a Chinese environment, the model is biased towards missing some security issues, or towards implementing the type of bugs that can be used for an RCE, or similar.<p>Anthropic has done such checks at the agent level: <a href="https://cybersecuritynews.com/anthropic-claude-hidden-code/" rel="nofollow">https://cybersecuritynews.com/anthropic-claude-hidden-code/</a><p>Their excuse was defending against distillation attacks but you can see how that can be abused
How do you think self-hosting will help in this situation?
Self host + open weight models, exactly the things that openai/anthropic don't want you to have
This "going dark" scenario would require new legislation. With secure enclaves, modern smartphones can't be cracked open in the manner that the FBI wanted in the 2016 case. So there's no such thing as "court order tech company to crack phone" anymore. It would have to be "outlaw tech companies from producing phones that they can't crack open", which is very different and does not fall under any existing US statute.
I think the authors treatment of backdoors and exceptional access is a narrow focus.<p>We will certainly see “front door” access as various places have or are attempting to enact client side scanning, id verified online access, software root of trust remote attestation, and the general attack on e2e.<p>Taken together your identity tied to unmodifiable software, necessary to access the web or modern economy with client side scanning and no e2e … is a front door.<p>All this has nothing to do with ai, bugs, hackers or security vulnerabilities, let alone backdoors
For the HN 14 day record since I didn't see this yet: in genuinely critical situations, if the threat model includes a device/service being used against one's self, "the only winning move is not to play" (stop the use of the device/service!)<p>In the same manner, if the critical concern is a device/service being used against one's self remotely, stop the use of the device/service if it is capable of remote access or data collection for later retrieval.<p>The ultimate baseline reality is that deciding to care whether or not remote access/data retrieval is using a method supported by the device manufacturer/service provider and/or whether doing so is allowed by the current legal system is too late.<p>Premptive HN disclaimers: I acknowledge the growing unavoidability of devices and services supporting remote access and/or data collection as I type this here on my phone. Remote access and data collection are very convenient and somehow still expected by device owners and service users to be under their control alone. It can be difficult to determine if a device or service supports remote access/data collection. There are often immediate consequences and eventual legal consequences for stopping the use of devices or services that belong to others. Working to change the legal system to slow/reduce use of devices and services against one's self and encouraging others to do the same is admirable.
Best-written article I've read all week.
I would like to point out that the last year when not a single law enforcement agency anywhere in the world could have possibly tapped anyone's phone was 1876.<p>150 years ago was the invention of the telephone, and I think that articles like this seem to assume that prior to this, police just never caught any criminals.
> 1876<p>A year when police were relatively rare, and quite new in the western legal experience, having only emerged from slave patrols in the United States and from the founding of the 1829 Scotland Yard in the United Kingdom. This is a year with living memory of a time when the state did not employ people to do what was ostensibly the civic responsibility of every person to quell crime and protect others.
I think what’s unintentionally eye-opening about this chart is the recency of “law enforcement can read your text communications.”<p>Law enforcement doesn’t need this surveillance ability at all. All time periods prior to 25 years ago didn’t have it.<p>Additionally, there is no correlation between “law enforcement reads text messages” and crime rates going down.
Not trying to defend our national dystopian nightmare of a surveillance state — but I'm pretty sure this is wrong?<p>Crime's been decreasing for years, and (from what I understand) this year is tracking to be one of the safest years on record?<p>Definitionally, there absolutely has to be a correlation (not causation) between those two factors you listed.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates</a>
Didn't freakenomocs claim it (crime rate) was (primarilary) about abortion in the 1970s and less unwanted (and unsupervised/undisciplined) children growing up?
These charts make the exact point I was making.<p>Most of the crime decrease from its peak happened before the year 2000.<p>That means back in the days of law enforcement needing to do low-tech wiretapping techniques, crime was still rapidly decreasing.<p>There’s just not even a correlation. And, as a reminder, correlation is not causation even if it was there.
Doesn't this just mean criminal suspects will be forced to unlock their devices using biometrics (in the US)? That should buy law enforcement some more time until biometrics go out of favor.
Governments and their agencies shouldn't have any access to the communications of private citizens. If something like terrorism is the issue, the correct response is to use the wealth and resources of the government to address the root causes of those attacks, not to undermine my right to privacy.
This is untrue when private citizens are in conflict (legal or physical or whatever) and the dispute needs to be mediated or resolved. The 'root cause' may well be she said/he said and the legal system may well have need to resolve this by looking at private communications.<p>Strong emphasis on the <i>legal</i> system part, but you've completely dismissed that private communications frequently are required to address causes of issues and the word subpoena makes it rather clear that refusing to comply comes with penalty.
> This is not a call to action for experts to rally behind a sophisticated plan. Like so many things about the AI revolution, it’s just occurring to me that we’re on a long greasy slide to a place that will look different than where we are today.<p>heh. long greasy slide. It really does feel like that.
Man I thought from the title this was going to be about next-gen AI being able to zero day everything so effectively that software security is meaningless and we'd need to basically shut it all down, go dark.
Considering from a point of view stipulating that perfectly secure software is possible. I don't think it follows that the limititation that it would place on intelligence is necessarily a net loss.<p>Apart from the obvious harms of invasion of privacy, and fishing expeditions being biased to the places you decided to fish. There is the simple fact that data can be misleading, especially without context. An interceped communication is a piece of data that is intrinsically tied to the trust of the inteceptor. A few people with an agenda can collaborate to create a seeming truth by 'discovering' the same thing from different sources.<p>Requiring warrants compelling information holders to provide data, not only serves the task of protection from abuse but also create a record of provenance that can be verified.<p>It also provides a degree of symmetry in capabilities which discourages actions that one party may do over another if they are motivated to act because they have a temporary advantage over another.
We will know we've made systems secure when laws focus on compelling people to <i>provide access</i>.<p>These laws exist - they aren't the focus yet. Right now there's still no need; just hack the device or compel the cloud service to give the data, why waste energy getting consent from its owner!<p>More bugfinding AI, more end to end encryption, more CVEs and more fixes, cannot happen soon enough.
> In this case, we’re just going to have to hope that this time we make the right choices, for no other reason than that they’re right.<p>I'm more curious what could be a right choice, and more importantly who is the "we" in this, as many decisions are largely made by companies and governments.
As far as I'm concerned, the right choice is that the US government learns to live with remotely secure devices in the hands of everyone. No new laws are passed to force hardware/software makers to insert remote backdoors. Law enforcement and intelligence services have to investigate targets using metadata, publicly posted information, the numerous online service providers who are already subject to warrants, and physically proximate surveillance.
I think US law enforcement will just continue to wiretap everyone at the "SSL added and removed here" SaaS known as cloudflare.
No system view. The law agencies can develop exploits to intercept our phones, that is a new, and totally unseen before threat.<p>Unless you remember 2013, Snowden, that nothing was done (at most was some concern about doing it to US citizens, the rest of the world doesn't deserve privacy), all US (and/or five-eyes) based web companies must disclose users information and be forced to not disclose that, and things kept going surely at a faster and more intrusive rate in everything else, and of course phones.<p>You are complaining being sprinkled by water while at the bottom of the ocean. At least the big companies can find their own vulnerabilities with the AI tools you mention, the rest of the doors are still wide open.
Without vulnerability derived backdoors I am convinced the government will strong arm the corporations to build a backdoor for the three letter agencies—at least in the US. But we also are at the dawn of quantum systems which could make interception and spying impossible or at least made obvious to the user when it happens.<p>Exhausting infrastructure vulnerabilities even without quantum could be a game changer for many technologies and enable things we can’t do right now, like vote on our phones.
I think that one of the reasons they (frontier companies and the gov) will be putting so much effort into curtailing bugs and vulnerabilities is to limit the blast radius of future AI models. Imagine with the new Sol Ultrafast, they could have pwned Hugging Face in 6 hours and not 4 days (IIRC).<p>It also seems likely to me that the US Gov. probably already has routine mechanisms for compelling targeted software updates for persons of interest, so I'm not sure that a more formalized backdoor than automatic updates is going to be surfaced in the mainstream, unless that is avenue is also cut down somehow.
Google has started publishing "binary transparency", this would help detect unusual software updates, while other methods (including AI) would help detect normal backdoors.<p>Basically in the AI age, the difference between a vulnerability and a backdoor diminishes..
I may be naive, but how would binary transparency be effective if they ship an update to disable that on a target device? As long as there is a need for legitimate automatic software updates, the possibility of pwn updates will always exist. Plus a myriad of layers, keys and other stuff they could use NSOs to 'seize' and inhibit knowledge of their effort from leaking, or cleverly hide in plain sight. And someday, with the help and speed of AI.
I predicted a long time ago that if computers become unhackable LEA and intelligence agencies will push for laws that require backdoors to be built into hard- and software.<p>It will be interesting to see if my prophecy becomes reality.<p>BTW I also hate that Hacker News is being dominated by articles on A.I. lately. Maybe we should vote on HN reducing or even eliminating A.I. related news?
tcp/ip itself is the ultimate backdoor, similar to the pstn backdoor in the post.<p>genai doesn't change that anytime soon?
Some people point out AI can cause bugs as well as fix them, and its a valid point. But the question is: what will the ratio be?<p>If automated pentesting in PR review CI pipeline will become table stakes - which is very plausible - maybe the OP has a point.
I completely disaggree with this take. Modern AI is not <i>yet</i> capable of finding multi-component bugs as advanced as those produced by firms like NSO.
This guy is worried that we might stop having exploits, and that's somehow ...a bad thing?<p>I thought I've read the worst takes about most things, but this still deserves some kind of prize.
I think the problem is that, without organic exploits, we will have to create backdoors on USA systems, making our systems especially vulnerable in the global ecosystem.
> In April, Anthropic announced a new model called Mythos that was optimized for software vulnerability finding<p>No, it was just good at it because it wasn't RL'd against it. I know this is a small detail, but it tosses journalistic credibility in my eyes.
Even after the initial leaks, Anthropic themselves say they've improved on cybersecurity amount other things, giving the perspective (even if not 100% clear) that one of the focuses was vulnerabilities:<p>> In response to questions about the draft blog post, the company acknowledged training and testing a new model. “We’re developing a general purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. - <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/anthropic-says-testing-mythos-powerful-new-ai-model-after-data-leak-reveals-its-existence-step-change-in-capabilities/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/anthropic-says-testing-mythos...</a><p>It is possible it is both, they used to RL against cybersecurity, but also didn't explicitly do any qualitative tests and added/changed more data because of those results. For Mythos, they stopped RL'ing against it, and also now intentionally try to make it better.<p>Unless of course they've actually noted exactly how things were trained here in some technical report and I've missed it, that's possible. Anthropic aren't famous for being very public about their internals though, but would be curious to read more details about it if it's out there from the horse's mouth.
Matthew Green isn't a journalist, he's a practitioner (and a cryptography professor at Hopkins).
RL'd?
i wonder how many open source projects have alphabet boys building trust as contributors for eventual backdoor planting
> So what do we do about it?<p>I just hope that politicians don't jump in and say "we know how to fix it", because unfortunately where they put their hands, they just make things worse (regardless of which country)
But Matthew, think of the kids!!1<p>Honestly though, framing this as a "tech issue" doesn't help IMHO, it just muddies the water. Ever since RSA was invented privacy has been about educating people on how to use it effectively and _why they should care_. If voters now are choosing authoritarianism over democracy and individual freedom, I think we have to face the reality that after almost 50 years of fighting battle after battle on the technology front, we've largely lost the war on the home front in this regard.
So I've read dozens of complaints that AI produces insecure code.<p>I, for one, usually tell my AI to start with secure code, make it small, and modular.<p>This is the first article I've seen that now says the opposite ! AI will make code <i>too secure</i>!<p>Since the small amount of AI coding I've done often results in buggy code (even a shell script written today) with the AI go-to solution of "write more buggy code to fix", this seems counterintuitive.
Nononono no more of this shit<p>I remember walking into some shitty congresscritter's office with a fucking years old one pager, with a few more citations written on the bottom in pen because I wasn't going to bother making it pretty this time around.<p>You should have seen his face when i asked him straight up: dude, you seem to have a problem processing information. Are you having some kind of medical issue? Because I'm not the last staffer: If you abuse my time, I am never coming back here again to add more citations to a fucking one pager from 1999 -- I'm making it my mission to remove you if you fuck this up on purpose ever again.<p>(Or something to that effect -- I've been told I can get a bit aggressive in my rhetoric.)<p>This was approximately 2016 and that individual is no longer in office.<p>I stand by my words.
> Defenders are now in the process of patching every bug they can find, often with AI helping them. Entire development toolchains are being rebuilt to incorporate powerful vulnerability scanning before software reaches the testing phase. This does not mean that every bug will be found: even calculating the number of bugs in a piece of code is probably uncomputable. In the real world, it does feel likely that we’re going to hit some sort of a ceiling on the number of useful bugs, and probably we’ll hit it soon.<p>> Thus: over the next two years, major pieces of software are likely to run out of remotely-exploitable bugs.<p>His conclusion sounds extremely optimistic to me.
Considering the amount of AI slop being generated today and LOCs that no one actually reviewed, I doubt we will run out of vulnerabilities to exploit...
article read to me like a typical rehash of a typical offense-defense cycle. AI would have written a better article.<p>I personally welcome such spiraling offense-defense cycles as it is one of the main drivers of the technological progress.
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> I’m concerned that AI is going to make software much too secure.<p>Lmao this is like “I’m concerned the raccoons that I see in the storm drains are going to make our sewer system much too efficient”
Childish, nation-states as powerful as the US have access to much more potent stuff. Maybe they'll be forced to rely more on their Intel ME/AMD PSP/modem (cf <a href="https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ModemIsolationResearch" rel="nofollow">https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ModemIs...</a>) backdoor and ANT James Bond catalog.