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Former FBI Chief Keeps Up Anti-Crypto Campaign

Posted by timothy on from the live-freeh dept.

ganns.com writes "Former FBI director Louis Freeh is urging lawmakers to limit encryption products that don't include backdoors for government surveillance." Still urging, that is.

4 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. They can urge all they want by Unknown+Poltroon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ive got pig latin, paper and pencil, and too much free time on my hands. Lets see them decrypt my mail. Even I cant read my damn handwriting.

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  2. Red Herring, and LIES by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The man is a disingenous fraud, a good politician, and an incompetant in the fields of security and intelligence.

    Freeh needs to find a whipping boy for the failures of correlating the various peices intelligence datum, which occurred on his watch. Restricting legal access to crypto will only assist in the illicit observation of constitutionally protected speech by private individuals, and destroy what little competitive advantage is enjoyed by U.S. software industries over their counterparts in Israel and India.

    The algorithms and the source will not go "back in the can."

    Louis Freeh is responsible, in a large part, for the biggest intelligence failure in modern recollection. None of the failure in this effort was for lack of access to encrypted communications, but from standard failures of organization and communications within the concerned agencies.

    The Heritage Foundation - not normally critical of the FBI's mission - has this to say:

    But what if FBI intelligence fails to collect, analyze and share this information? This could happen, the commission found, because "the guidelines under which FBI agents operate ... are badly written and confusing. These are guidelines that set out the terms under which the FBI can open a preliminary inquiry against somebody who may be suspected of being a terrorist. All of us read them (they run to about 42 pages) and we had a number of current and former FBI agents testify that they found them confusing."

    The commission recommended that then Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director Louis Freeh rewrite the guidelines into "more easily understood English."

    Moreover, the FBI had no procedure for disseminating useful information for analysis within the agency or sharing it with other government agencies.

    Information which was obtained, in Los Angeles, for example, but did not immediately apply to the case at hand, would simply not leave the regional office, even though it might provide important clues for another investigation, says Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, Ambassador at Large for Counterintelligence during the Reagan Administration and former Managing Director of Kissinger Associates.

    Encryption wasn't used in this instance. No evidence for it has ever been found. Freeh has a broader, more insidious agenda here, involving free speech and civil liberties. Unfortunately, the record shows that deep, analytical thinking about these issues is outside the grasp of the majority of America's elected representatives.
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    1. Re:Red Herring, and LIES by jeffy124 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The algorithms and the source will not go "back in the can."

      I believe the proper & more accurate expression is "getting toothpaste back in the tube"

      Also, he must think terrorists are idiots. If you knew that Country X required backdoors in crypto products, would you buy a crypto product made in Country X and then use it to hide plans about lauching attacks against Country X? It doesnt take much for terrorists to get their encryption products from more lenient sources - like Canada for example.

      And like you said, it's already out there, and ain't goin back.

      Frankly - I dont think his urging will go very far beyond discussions like these.

      --
      The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
    2. Re:Red Herring, and LIES by lal · · Score: 5, Informative

      According to Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, Freeh is also responsible for the failure of the FBI to keep up with technology. At the end of Freeh's tenure, FBI agents were using 486-class computers and had to email attachments to home computers to transmit pictures. Freeh resisted upgrading the FBI mainframe infrastructure as well. He's clearly not capable of making judgments about crypto.