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New State Laws Could Make Encryption Widespread
New laws that took effect in Nevada on Oct. 1 and will kick in on Jan. 1 in Massachusetts may effectively mandate encryption for companies' hard drives, portable devices, and data transmissions. The laws will be binding on any organization that maintains personal information about residents of the two states. (Washington and Michigan are considering similar legislation.) Nevada's law deals mostly with transmitted information and Massachusetts's emphasizes stored information. Between them the two laws should put more of a dent into lax security practices than widespread laws requiring customer notification of data breaches have done. (Such laws are on the books in 40 states and by one estimate have reduced identity theft by 2%.) Here are a couple of legal takes on the impact of the new laws.
Only laptops. I was worried that we would have to encrypt our entire database.
Forcing idiots to encrypt sensitive files will ...
force idiots to encrypt files (not the ones they should encrypt, obviously) using the password "password" ...
and
lose half the data, believing they encrypted it
and
send the data to half their family, especially anyone claiming to be a hacker, with the subject line "can you tell me the password for this file", who'll put it online on wikileaks (who'll happily -and proudly- publish extremely private information on anyone they don't like, laws and privacy be damned)
Well at least, when the honeymoon's over and it's time for Barack O. to publish his email correspondance he can claim to have "encrypted it" and then send a random string, telling the judge the password has something to do with a very dark hole where apparently many claim the sun does not shine.
How interesting and ironic that not that long ago (1991) possessing encryption tools was considered as munitions!
It used to be that Philip Zimmermann was getting hassled for his creation of PGP.
Boy we've come a long way. Check out the Wikipedia entry on PGP if you can
but clueless users will write the password on a post it note, and probably burn a plaintext CD copy to leave lying around.
Government agencies will be worse.
I'm not surprised it has made so little difference.
As we know, technical solutions are rarely enough to protect data. Human processes and policies can be much more important.
Personally I prefer the UK approach, the Data Protection Act. No doubt it is flawed, and sadly not enforced as rigorously as it should be, but the concept is better. Rather than mandate specific technological approaches, it imposes a set of general requirements on any organisation that holds personal data:
The DPA is one of the few generally excellent pieces of legislation in the UK. It's just a shame that the Information Commisioner's Office that enforces it isn't as active as it could be. But it gives you quite a bit of power to take on companies yourself.
Paul Leader
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that specific software will be endorsed and/or required to meet this new requirement? Probably whichever one spends the most money to "demonstrate" its capabilities to the lawmakers by treating them all to free vacations in the Bahamas. How much do you want to bet that a free solution like Truecrypt just won't meet the "standards" set by this new law?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
It amuses me to see how government always wants to have its cake and eat it too. I agree that widespread use of strong encryption and good security practices is of great benefit to society, but some Senator or law enforcement agency is bound to complain that their ability to wiretap or access encrypted data is being compromised by these better private security measures. Strong encryption and good security are two edged swords, they help us and they help our enemies as well, there is no way around that. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I would rather live in a society were encryption is used, privacy is paramount, and some criminals and evil doers are a bit harder to catch, not a bad trade-off IMHO. However, there will doubtless be howls of indignation from the law enforcement community, which contains more than its fair share of self-righteous authoritarian pricks, about how criminals are getting away with crimes and going unpunished. I suppose that my response to them would be to make better use of the tools and laws that we already have instead of depending upon ever more egregious invasions of our collective personal privacy and abridgements of our Constitutional rights merely to prevent some drug addict from getting his fix or some high school students from posting pictures of themselves on MySpace or Facebook.
Just because a state mandates something, does not mean it automatically happens. Look at speeding, look at drug laws, look at overtime rules for P/T and F/T employees, look at many other unenforced business regulations.
This stuff is like when a judge ordered a server's RAM chips removed and stored as evidence, as they were a 'data storage device'. Government typically sucks at anything like this.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It seems like the Democrats are doing the same thing the republicans did after 9/11. Just as after 9/11 the Republicans pushed Security to an extremist state, Democrats are using the financial crisis to push down all those heave regulations down our mouth...
BS, this is state level law, not Congress, way to troll. Besides these laws were passed way before the meltdown, these are their enactment dates.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
>Also I could see huge problems later on when the only IT guy who knows the key is fired, hit by the obligatory train, or quits.
If you're covered by the credit card industry's Data Security Standard, you're already required to use encryption and you're required to use it competently, with a key management infrastructure.
Corporate crypto deployments have been using some form of key escrow for many years. Availability is as much part of security as confidentiality is.
Assuming here that the above poster is being funny, I'll clear this up for those this might actually cause some concern.
Morrison & Foerster is a internationally recognized and prestigious law firm established in 1883, that has been going by the nickname MoFo since 1973. More on the linked wikipedia article for those still interested or skeptical.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Encryption is good for protecting trade secrets, but useless for protecting social security numbers. Thieves who want to steal credit card or social security numbers can choose from tens of thousands of possible targets, at least one of which will be insecure. We need to stop pretending that social security numbers are useful as identification or authentication, because using an SSN to identify yourself requires disclosing it. We need to switch to a system of public-key cryptography, and put the blame for identity theft where it belongs: on the banks, who somehow decided that a few readily-discoverable numbers and a few easily-forged documents were all that's needed to take a loan in your name.
It's not just personal data on the laptop.
I work for a fairly small company, and while we don't have any person data off our server, and in fact don't really have any personal data beyond names, addresses and email accounts...
Which is why, of course, we have Truecrypt with boot-time encryption on all laptops, so that if they get stolen we don't have to run around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to figure out every single login that needs to be changed.
For those people worried about forgetting password: Burn three or four TrueCrypt 'recovery CD' and write the password on them. In fact, write the password everywhere...just don't carry it around in the laptop bag.
Seriously, half these 'data thefts' are random laptop thieves stealing random laptop that just happen to include absurdly dangerous amounts of data on them. They aren't targeted attacks, and the thief is probably wiping them before boot. But companies have to act like they have all your data because said companies are morons who can't spend a tiny amount of time setting up free software that would stop that from happening.
People often worry about computer security in entirely the wrong direction, worrying about changing internal company-only passwords every month, and then completely ignoring actual outside risks like someone snatching a laptop bag off someone's arm.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Right. Especially for laptops, which tend to have slower hard drives in the first place.
I installed TrueCrypt on my moderately old laptop, an Intel 1.6Ghz, and the only speed different I notice is that, for some reason, hibernation and unhibernation is twice as slow. I suspect this is some sort of bug. Other than that, I forget it's there except when I boot up.
TrueCrypt, by default, uses AES, which was designed for speed on modern processors. (Or, rather, was designed to use exactly the mathematical operations that CPU manufacturers optimize for in order to make games run faster, so as CPUs keep speeding those operations up AES gets faster.)
Ha, I just checked to see if that hibernation thing is a bug, and it turns out that not only is it, but it's been fixed in 6.0 and I should just upgrade instead of whining about it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?