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Nevada Businesses Must Start Encrypting E-Mail By Oct. 1st
dtothes writes "Baseline is reporting the state of Nevada has a statute about to go in effect on October 1, 2008 that will force businesses to encrypt all personally identifiable information transmitted over the Internet. They speak with a Nevada legal expert who says the problem is that the statute is written so broadly that the law could potentially open up a ton of unintentional liability and allow for the interpretation of things like password-protected documents to be considered sufficiently encrypted. Quoting: 'Beyond the infrastructure impact, the statute itself looks like Swiss cheese. Bryce K. Earl, a Las Vegas-based attorney, ... has been following the issue closely and believes there are some problems with the statute as it is on the books right now, namely the broad definition of encryption, the lack of coordination with industry standards and the unclear nature of penalties both criminal and civil.'"
. . . which Nevada legislator's friend or relative just happens to sell some kind of compliant encryption solution.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If they are not clear on the definition of encryption, just ROT-13 your messages twice and specify that's the type of encryption you use. You then have to ROT-13 it twice again to decrypt.
If I am an ecommerce website, am I now expected to encrypt all http traffic destined for customers I know to be in Nevada?
... the encryption of my customer records at Nevada's brothels.
I just hope they do more than password protecting the word docs...
The technically illiterate are passing legislation on technology!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
It's too weak. You can use it, but you must encrypt everything twice just to be safe.
Let's say you're a guy with a lawn mowing business and you have your web site (which you crudely built yourself) printed on the side of your truck.
Now, someone emails you with their name and address asking for a quote.
Good luck trying to figure out what this law (http://www.leg.state.nv.us/Nrs/NRS-597.html) means!
p.s. seems to me that the lawyer who wrote this article ought to know the difference between "affect" and "effect"...
"Think about all the hotels, resorts, golf courses, pawn shops, nightclubs, check cashing, ski lodges and small businesses this is going to effect."
I have developed a system by which each character is taken and broken up into a pattern of ones and zeros. The exact pattern is determined by looking up the character in a table. The receiver has to unscramble this pattern of ones and zeros by looking the pattern up in a similar table and then regenerating the character.
I call this system ASCII and I believe that it is a simple type of encryption, albeit with a very public public key, and no private key.
Can I start a lawsuit to sue some company that does NOT do this, go to a jury by trial, but then do a terribly bad job of defending my position and set precedent that the defendant does not need to encrypt this stuff before a 'real' lawsuit comes about and sets precedent the other way?
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As of posting time, representatives of the state had not gotten back to me with comment.
It was later found that the reason for this delay was a system-wide shutdown & widespread panic as they couldn't figure out how to encrypt or decrypt any of their correspondence properly.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
ISTM we should phase out any unencrypted protocols going over the internet.
This particular law may have technical shortcomings - but if it takes close-but-not-quite right laws to raise awareness to the common person and politician that much internet traffic is unencrypted, I'm all for this law as a stalking horse to-be-improved-upon.
And just think if we eventually migrated to most internet traffic being encrypted. Much of the bittorrent-throttling / AT&T-spying / NSA snooping paranoia could be avoided.
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Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
So businesses merely need to refrain from putting social security numbers, drivers license numbers, and passwords in email and other insecure communication channels and they're good. They can even send the password, provided they don't send the account number along with it. This makes forgotten password recovery a bit harder, but it's not impossible to comply with.
Even if it is, setting up certificates is a hell of a lot easier than what you proposed. The very best security systems are where good security is easier than bad security. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often.
It's not like we've had any keys lost lately.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I use ROT26. It must be twice as secure at ROT13.
So based on this legislation, resetting a users password and sending them the new password via email is illegal?
This is an extremely insecure procedure, unless you make sure that, upon receiving the e-mail, the user will quickly log-in and change the pass to another one (the mailed password only used as a temporary pass). Or if the mail actually is a special reset-URL which could let the user choose his own.
An email is just as secure as a postcard. Everyone (for example the postman could read it). Same for the e-mail : it transits un-encrypted and could be intercepted at any point on the way to the receiver.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Personally identifiable information should be encrypted.
Sincerely,
xz'Kxv!y{Ycut="xgq'^e;
...isn't primarily with the law, it's with the Nevada definition of "encryption". Writing definitions of such things for legislation is a more difficult problem than you might think. (I helped draft Virginia's definition of encryption, and what we ended up with ain't perfect.) But in this case, Nevada's definition just plain sucks.
One of the challenges of writing legislation is that you really can't refer to specific technologies, otherwise you end up having to update the law every time the technology is broken.
Also, if you rely on a punch list of approved technologies, you effectively block out alternatives. ("But your honor, I used Blowfish because it's more secure than Triple-DES." "Sorry, son, Blowfish isn't on the list I see here. Guilty!")
Unfortunately, this is a case of "Not a Bad Idea, Piss-poor Implementation". There's a lot for Nevada to fix here.
This legislation will force industry to develop and pay for it, regardless of whether the customers want it or not. Yes, we all want encryption on everything; but an overwhelming majority of computer users don't care enough to actually do anything, even though it would only take a bit of time and effort. Now, what happens when your bank send you your private encryption key and instructions? Most recipients will either delete or (at best) ignore the key. Later that month imagine their anger when their bank statement is encrypted and they have no idea how to decrypt it? Or do you really get the impression that the average American (Nevadan?) consumer is intelligent enough to implement, say, GPG? If so, do you think the average consumer is energetic enough to do so?
Leave this job up to market forces - the free-enterprise economy is infinitely more responsive to the needs and wants of the average consumer than is the Federal or even any of the State governments.
Your government advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting identity theft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop identity theft for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from identity thieves
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) identity thieves don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of identity theft
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Dishonesty on the part of identity thieves themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about your legislature:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid people for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I am officially gone from
Prevent, impede, delay or disrupt access to any data, information, image, program, signal or sound;
Under this definition of "encryption", I could argue that by compressing the file it would "delay access" by making them wait for the time 7zip takes to unzip. So now zipped files are encrypted?
The hard part of this problem is getting MS Windows users to use email encryption. Your pretty much screwed if you use MS LookOut. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I would encrypted all my email if people that I'm sending to could read it. I would refuse any email that is not encrypted if I could get people to encrypt their email.
The above is not worth reading.
...Igpay Atinlay!
Seriously...show me one governmental agency that does ANYTHING with technology well and I'll accept governmental agencies telling me what the rules are regarding said technology.