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FBI Director Continues His Campaign Against Encryption
apexcp writes Following the announcements that Apple and Google would make full disk encryption the default option on their smartphones, FBI director James Comey has made encryption a key issue of his tenure. His blitz continues today with a speech that says encryption will hurt public safety.
The issue is the balance between public safety and personal privacy. Denying the citizen of any democracy the right to encryption of their personal communication is not an appropriate response to the perceived threat to public safety that same encryption would bring.
just that simple, Director.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You don't deserve privacy because criminals don't deserve privacy.
I suspect, he is right — it will hurt public safety.
But it will improve individual privacy and America has always valued the cantankerous Individual above the glorious Collective, that other cultures prefer...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Choice #1: my smartphone isn't encrypted, the FBI "protects" my safety
Choice #2: my smartphone is encrypted, the FBI can't get to my data.
I choose #2 thank you very much.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Please think of the children!
Who are downloading things w/o paying for them! Seriously, isn't that all the FBI really cares about these days - protecting copyright holders?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It is not our job to make his job easier or effortless.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Our phones and computers are the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects".
Encryption affords us the security promised by this amendment.
Does this make the collection of data by various "letter agency" and police law enforcement departments tougher? YEP!
Does it raise the possibility of criminals "slipping through the system"? YEP!
I, for one, REFUSE to be pre-criminalized , simply because I don't choose to automatically drop trou whenever someone demands to see "ze papers". The only appropriate answer for this sort of thing is "Fuck you. Get a warrant."
I also refuse to abrogate my rights and privileges due to an idiotic appeal to emotion (think of the CHILDREN!)
*I* am not victimizing children. But, the way law enforcement wants to set things up, EVERYONE gets lumped in as would-be rapists, molesters and murderers.
Jim Comey needs to be told to shut the hell up, do his job *RIGHT* and be a good little soldier.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No matter how strong the encryption algorithms are themselves, there's nothing to stop the FBI from planting a malicious app (a keylogger for instance). They could even serve Apple with a warrant to require them to install this app as a software update.
Umm... you need to learn how warrants work.
This comment got modded to 3???
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment. Trying to stretch the Founding Fathers' words of over two centuries ago to your pet cause in 2014 is a can of worms that no one should want to open.
It's like you don't understand what "effects" are.
Our phones and computers are the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects".
No, the modern day equivalent of "papers and effects" are... your papers and effects. If you want protection to be applied to technology that didn't exist in the Founding Father's time, then do the honest thing and press for e.g. a constitutional amendment. Trying to stretch the Founding Fathers' words of over two centuries ago to your pet cause in 2014 is a can of worms that no one should want to open.
"papers and effects"
Your personal effects include your smartphone. If the government wants to peek at it or seize it, they need to get a warrant.
Also, they want people to NOT use encryption at the same time that they're warning companies of the attacks by Chinese cyber-hackers. Someone needs to tell this guy "You can't have it both ways, dude."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
FBI / NSA: Dude, you're becoming a monster.
Citizen: You made me this way...
All encryption does is protect the individual from self incrimination and prevent them from using illegally captured traffic and metadata to do parallel construction a.k.a. lying about the source of evidence.
The purpose of this is to lobby Congress to make it illegal for Apple, Google, or any open source project to supply users with strong cryptography.
It's the same argument that was trotted out during Round I of the Crypto Wars (and the Clipper Chip), where the "compromise" was CALEA, which made it illegal for telephone companies to provide secure communications to their subscribers.
Enough time has passed (and enough people have forgotten that the Clipper Chip was sufficiently flawed - beyond the defective-by-design key escrow scheme, I mean - that it would have been thoroughly broken a decade ago), that he thinks he can refight the Crypto Wars and win.
He might even be right about that. Let's prove him wrong. Call or write your Congressman. If your Congressman leans liberal, make it clear that Americans have the right to secure their digital effects. If your Congressman leans conservative, make it clear that American businesses cannot compete with foreign service providers if they are hobbled by burdensome government regulations such as those that would require the building-in of backdoors into American products and services.
Strong crypto secures the rights of American citizens and improves the competitiveness of American busineses. The costs of Director Comey's proposed solution greatly exceed any purported benefits.
Why?
Papers... and effects. Do you know what "effects" are? Here's a quick google search that turns up an answer right in the search results, no further linking needed. And it's right there, under noun, definition 3. That's the one the constitution meant. It says:
So a phone or computer is quite literally (and I mean "literally" in the literal sense) an effect.
Warrant or GTFO.
Also, why are we so hung up on "papers"? I'm pretty sure our founding fathers didn't care about dead tree pulp and were more concerned about protecting the information on the paper. In that light, why would it matter what medium the information is contained on? Be it chiseled stone, carved wood, or a cellphone?
Why not "Obama Admin Continues Its Campaign Against Encryption"?
Because they really don't care about the type of encryption Apple and Google are providing. They can get your (meta)data in so many other ways it's irrelevant.
This faux outrage from the FBI stooge has nothing to do with any perceived difficulty in spying on citizens, it's about harm-management for the corporations that've been negatively affected by spying revelations. Nothing but smoke, mirrors, red herrings and misdirection all the way down.
Don't believe a word of it, they've shown repeatedly they're self-serving and untrustworthy. Question everything they say and do, and ALWAYS look for the money trail.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."