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Poll Says Most Americans Favor Crypto Backdoors
Sideways The Dog writes: "According to this MSNBC article, "72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be 'somewhat' or 'very' helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C." I realize that I'm preaching to the choir here, but it is scary how many people do not realize that the bad guys are not going to play fair here. Even granted that people may not realize the tools are already out there for the bad guys to use, I wonder what the polls will say when the backdoor gets compromised and 72% of people get their bank accounts wiped." Update: 09/19 19:26 PM GMT by T : Declan McCullagh adds a link to "the actual text of the question asked by the
pollsters, which Princeton Survey Research Associates describes here." Note the numbers on this page as well.
Congress was quick to blame sophisticated encryption methods for the massive intelligence failure last week and is proposing that government officials should have backdoor access to encryption products to aid national security.
Funny... and here I had thought that the primary reasons given for the massive intelligence failure were due to budget constraints and de-escalation of the intelligence community. Sources from the CIA and various government officials have come out and point blank stated that they have a severe lack of spies out there to actually infiltrate these terrorist cells...
So how do they jump from that to blaming it on encryption? Sheesh.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Please, anyone who takes an online poll seriously is loosing his mind.
The mindless law-and-order rednecks who hang around at FreeRepublic.com regularily post comments on their forums encouraging their members to "Freep" the poll (using their lingo). Now, if Slashdot had posted a notice requesting that *we* all 'Slashdotted' that poll - do you think the results may have been different?
Without the usual mention of The Three Greatest Lies (Statistics, Statistics and Statistics), I will mention that ONLINE polls even miss the basics of reasonable methods... like unbiased 'random' samples for instance.
I have kept my e-mail signature the same for over three years, but on the day of the WTC attacks I changed it to this quote. I think now more than ever we are in danger of losing the encryption war. Besides back door or not the criminal isn't playing fair. They will use their own encryption mechanisms. Its not hard to make one. Then again you all knew this.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Okay: Everyone raise your hand who is willing to die for their right to use crypto. I mean really die -- or even suffer serious bodily harm -- standing up for your rights?
Whenever I see these topics come up, they're always accompanied by one-line comments "They'll only get my gpg when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!" Come on now -- would you let them kill you rather than give up your crypto?
You find out what people truly, honestly believe, deep in their hearts and souls, when they're faced with the raw reality of standing firm against inimidation and violence. Looking down the barrel of a gun is a damned good test of one's convictions...
All about me
Now, one of us uses a copy of PGP (pre-backdoor) or codes his own blowfish app and uses it to encrypt her letters to CyptoGRRL Magazine. How is the US going to stop her from doing this?
What do officials say?
"We were randomly sampling the crypto streams traversing the net and noticed that our backdoor key didn't work on your message stream. You are in violation of US Code BlahBlahBlah."
Doesn't that seem to open some other sticky questions? I mean, if I'm not breaking the law (other than using strong crypto), how are they going to tell or prosecute me?
It seems that you are protected by the chicken and the egg principle. To wit, to know that I am using "undefeatable" crypto, you have to get a wiretap (or a search warrant). To get a wiretap you have to prove that I am breaking the law by using undefeatable crypto.
Besides, development of Open Source versions of crypto programs would continue in other parts of the world. The US won't be able to stop that. I could just download the program from CryptoGRRL.de (as long as the server actually resided outside of the US).
The danger here is not a technical one, but a political one. It's a lesson history tried to teach us once before, but I haven't seen anyone really doing a comparison to a very similar set of circumstances that have happened prior.
Today I'm sure that the majority of our leaders in government are honestly concerned about how to deal with how to thwart attacks like we all saw last week. To do this they see information gathering as a critical tool to use for these ends. To gather this information they wish to put together an infrastructure of snooping abilities that go far beyond issues dealing with cryptography. We're also looking at phone tapping and possible postal snooping. The majority of citizens at this moment are more than happy to give up these liberties to give law enforcement the tools they seek. Lives are at stake after all!
Okay, so what happens when there's no longer a terrorist threat to be dealt with? Does this infrastructure just vanish? Not bloody likely. I don't believe that there's any kind of conspiracy today from either the right or left side of the spectrum to misuse these tools. What about 10 years from now? 20? 50? Can we really entrust a governmental body we haven't even seen yet to only use these kinds of tools in an honest way?
To keep this non-partisan, let's say the "Widget" party takes a majority in both houses and the presidency. Once in a majority, what all stops them to increase this monitoring built on the infrastructure we are proposing today? How can we be assured that what they're monitoring isn't just criminals, but the opposition party campaigns? Rather than a tool for law enforcemnent we could be looking at a tool for political power.
As to the comparison I was referring to at the beginning of this post, I'm of course talking about the rise of the Nazi party to power in Germany. Too many similarities to be funny. Weak economy, terrorist attacks on urban areas, a populace all too willing to give up liberties to those that can deliver on the promise that they won't have to be afraid of a building blowing up on them. Oh, and a bit of a racial element tossed into the mix.
No, I'm not even beginning to suggest that the Nazis are looking to take over America. What I am saying here is that there is a precedent to how people are reacting to these recent events. The German people openly welcomed the kind of lock down the Nazis brought with them because they saw the streets truly get to be a safer place. Unfortunately, what they didn't see was the enormous cost of that safety until it was far too late. What I'm concerned about is that in our fear at this time we may very well not see the high cost we will end up paying decades down the road.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
the problem is, there's just no correlation between deprivation of existing personal communications freedoms/rights and increased security. the 'bad guys' will continue to deploy what they have (or develop better) and the rest of us will have taken several steps backward in our civil rights.
stop appealing to pure emotion. the imagery of the WTC catastrophe and the slim benefit in security you'll gain by trashing personal freedoms isn't based on rational thinking, but purely on emotion. the lawmakers need to think long and hard about how effective it will be to further regulate the law-abiding population.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."