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Russians Order Mobile Phone Encryption Removed
PenguinRadio writes "The Moscow Times is reporting that Russian security officers (The FSB, formerly the KGB) ordered all mobile phone providers to switch off their encryption systems for 24 hours, so the police could eavesdrop on all calls. An alert, either an exclamation point or an unlocked padlock, was sent to the phones in question. This is the second time such an order was given - the last time was after the hostage crisis involving Chechnya fighters in a Moscow theater. At least the Russian has the courtesy to warn all their phone users that this was going on. Not sure what the standard FBI procedure is on something like this..."
So should we just resort to random police raids? I'm sure they would find plenty of illegal stuff, but at the same time I really don't want some police person coming over to my house when I'm trying to have dinner with my family. This is pretty much the same thing. I don't want to have to worry constantly that I'm doing something slightly illegal and will get in trouble on a technicality.
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"o one cares about you and your puny little life and conversations. But you would certainly care if someone was planning on blowing up your train station or office building."
I agree with you here. The Gov't isn't going to blackmail you. However, if the gov't can get in, why couldn't somebody else?
I think the privacy moans and groans are overrated, but I did have a nice little scare when the RIAA announced it would start to sue P2P users. I want my privacy to protect myself from them. I'm not worried about the USA knowing about my personal life (they do anyway, duh.), but when encryption is ordered to be turned off, suddenly I'm open to the world.
"Derp de derp."
NICE troll. I also love how it's moderated "insightful." People are so fucking stupid sometimes.
Let's get cameras put in our houses too. I mean, if you're not doing anything wrong, then who cares? Your life is normal and boring, the FBI won't care about you! So it's all ok! Don't worry your pretty little head about it.
Quote: "They certainly don't care that you are having a fight with your wife and calling your girlfriend to make arrangements to stay over tonight."
What if I were some fledging politician rapidly gaining popularity for my almost rabid support for privacy and constitutional rights, young enough to still be idealistic and uncompromised by lobbying?
Then my fight with the wife and subsequent visit to the girlfriend become quite relevant to The Powers That Be (TM).
Don't laugh, this is the kind of stuff the FBI dabbled in under Hoover.
Privacy is privacy. There must be checks and balances to ensure that powers are not abused. These checks now do not seem to be sufficient (or existent, in some cases).
There's a reason we call it "erosion" of rights. It's a slow, insidious process - but that doesn't make it any less threatening.
At the risk of sound trite, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Nope. Sorry. I don't care whether or not the government is trying to track me specifically, but frankly, given a chance, I would rather risk a train station exploding than live under a tyranical goverment that does what it pleases, such a government could easily off people at a faster rate than terrorists can and I want those checks and balances IN PLACE.
With what you suggest, I think it the equivalent of federal agents being able to search anyone's house, for any reason at all, without oversight. If they wanted to, I'm sure they can find a lot of stuff to nail you with if your opinions are out of favor with the current administration, say you're a Democrat or Libertarian when there is a Republican in office.
Quite frankly, there was a warrant system for this sort of thing.
I don't care if you think that most everyone leads a boring life. That doesn't matter, what does matter is a goverment that thinking they can barge in everywhere without cause, without due process and quite frankly, possibly humiliate or blackmail anyone they please.
By announcing publicly that they're going to be tapping everyone's cellphone for the next day or two, they will have denied Al-Queda or whomever it is they are worried about the ability to make secure phonecalls. So maybe, if the organisation was about to pull a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be able to coordinate their actions and would have to abandon the attack. Alternatively, maybe the point of the exercise is that the people of concern would be forced to use alternative, more vulnerable means of communication (landlines or face-to-face meetings).
What do you guys think?
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The difference is the general level of hassle and red tape, as well as accountability. Of course if you're up there in intelligence I'm sure you can unaccountably "tap" the land phone network at will using more advanced systems (Echelon and whatever's come since come to mind) - but if you're just part of some FBI field office trying to handle an immediate situation akin to the Chechnya incident the landline option means you have to get authorization and go on record for doing it, and you have to be precise about what you're tapping, and you could be delayed by all the BS. If you can tap the airwaves easily (supposing you have a laptop that can crack the effectively 54-bit encryption of a GSM call on the air), you can do it without the fuss and without being accountable.
Don't forget also that finding the right landline call to tap might be a needle in a haystack problem, but finding the right cellular call can be fairly easy if you're on-site near the caller, since you can just look for strong enough signal strength to be within a given radius of you physically, and furthermore even triangulate the signals' positions.
11*43+456^2
" So should we just resort to random police raids?"
But why stop there? Such a half-ass effort will surely miss far too much illegality. The only good solution is to have daily (or even more often) police inspections of every home, office, person, vehicle, etc. And just as an added precaution, we should install video cameras on every street, in every ally, and in every room of every home, office, or other such structure. From there, all the visual information could be fed into a lovely Oracle database, having been sorted by an advanced AI system. That way, any and all illegal acts are caught on tape, and the law-breaker can simply be put in jail, or perhaps even more simply, to death. Since we have it right on tape, there's obviously no need for a trial. And since those who break the law deserve to be caught and punished, no one should have any problem with this. After all, you're not doing anything illegal, immoral, or undesirable, right?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Wasn't a main point of the PATRIOT act that providers of any communications couldn't notify the suspect if eavesdropping was occuring? Turning off encryption would be as good as admitting that, so it's probably illegal to notify.