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Obama: Gov't Shouldn't Be Hampered By Encrypted Communications
According to an article at The Wall Street Journal, President Obama has sided with British Prime Minister David Cameron in saying that police and government agencies should not be blocked by encryption from viewing the content of cellphone or online communications, making the pro-spying arguments everyone has come to expect:
“If we find evidence of a terrorist plot and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem,” Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. “They’re patriots.” ... The president on Friday argued there must be a technical way to keep information private, but ensure that police and spies can listen in when a court approves. The Clinton administration fought and lost a similar battle during the 1990s when it pushed for a “clipper chip” that would allow only the government to decrypt scrambled messages.
By definition, no communication using a 3rd party as an intermediary has ever been totally secure.
But with strong crypto it's secure enough that the 3rd party can see (or alter) your communications. Obama and Cameron and (undoubtedly) all other future leaders want to strip away this protection using the force of law to change how crypto products are designed. You will live your life under the state microscope and, as always, the proper prerogatives of government will be twisted to cover up incompetence and serve the powerful few instead of protecting the dignity of the individual.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Let's get real.
Yes! For fucks sake yes! Let's turn your argument around then? Where would you stop to not make what you say happen? What if it took cameras on each and every person's forehead that are constantly streaming to the NSA? That's fine with you? If that's what it takes to stop killing mothers I mean... If so, where do YOU draw the line? If I can't have private communication with people, I don't feel like I'm human anymore. Then nothing is worth anything to me. Get it?
For all the drivel that people dislike Obama for it amazes me that stuff like this goes almost entirely unmentioned. Republicans love this kind of stuff, too, so it's also amusing that it goes unmentioned. If this was Bush the Fox News nuts would be like, "Hell yeah! Spy on us!" But since it's Obama they have to hide their glee. O.o
I'm not here to defend obama (I'm not american), but british news sites are saying that actually he and UK prime minister cameron showed disagreement on encryption in friday's joint press conference. The WSJ reported an ambiguous statement, but the tone of the press conference sounded quite different to those who were there. Here some paragraphs from a Daily Mail's article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... ...But behind the smiles there remains sharp differences over Mr Cameron's call for US web firms to do more to open up encrypted messages to security services in the wake of the atrocities in Paris last week. ...
However, as the press conference progressed it became clear that differences remain over the extent to which security agencies should be able to snoop on encrypted messages and social media like WhatsApp, SnapChat and Facebook.
You still have your copy. Information should be free. Don't buy imaginary property
I'm getting sick and tired of people chanting that false mantra. Information doesn't "want" anything, so stop anthropomorphising. Should your genome be available to anyone on request because, after all, you'll still have the original, and "information wants to be free?"
Be careful what you wish for - you may get it, and it will get you in the end.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Fake as all the others.
The man acted like a redneck idiot. He used deliberately common-folk language, avoided long words. Soundbite quotes wherever possible. But his educational record is very good, and he even graduated Harvard business. He knew that a popular, everyman president would play well, and an intellectual would be regarded as 'elitist' - so he put on the act he knew would give the best advantage in his career.
Or to say it another way...
âoeIt is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.â - John Adams
So why should information be free? It's not a law of nature, a property of the universe, or any other such. If someone creates the cure for the common cold and keeps it secret even to their grave, that's entirely their business. Sure, they're being dicks, but there's not a law against that (yet).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The government should defend the Constitution instead of tear it apart.
The people should be secure. The people should have the right to assemble, and exclude a government representative from the meeting.
A meeting my phone should have the same protection.
It is illegal for citizens to wiretap a cell phone signal. This should apply to everyone.
It became clear this was not true. Other tools were made to enforce what should have been standard.
Now the government is a little upset that encryption exists.
The truth shall set you free!
Not only that but if this ever became policy, it would create an interesting line that will have to be drawn: What constitutes a hidden message that needs to have its keys or its otherwise actual meaning revealed to the government in plain English?
For example, the US government itself hid its communications from the enemy in the WWII Pacific Theater by simply translating it to another language that the enemy couldn't understand, and then using code within that language.
Although that was actually so weak it was rather pathetic (side note: even more pathetic that the Japanese never broke it, but then again it was never used in long range communication so they rarely had ever heard it in action during a time that they could meaningfully use it) there are a lot of ways you can encode information that aren't necessarily for cryptography, yet even more advanced datamining techniques will easily miss it.
And what's the punishment for sending a message to somebody in a manner that the government cant decrypt without providing them with key escrow, even if your actions were completely benign and you had no intention of hiding anything to begin with?
Before making such idiotic statements? Pretty please? It needn't be me (actually, it sure as FUCK wouldn't be me!) but hire someone who has at least half a clue before making yourself look like a total Cameron to someone who knows even a little bit about security.
A "government backdoor" is NEVER EVER a "government ONLY backdoor". There is no such thing as "government only" when it comes to something where it is impossible to detect if it is being used. If you create a "VIPs only" door to a club and you cannot put a watchman there to guard it and you can't even monitor the entrance to see who goes in or out, how long do you think it will take for people to know that this entrance exists (no matter how well you camouflage it and write "Jehova's Witness recruitment center" over the entrance), notice that it's the easy way into a club and simply USE it, knowing that there won't be anyone who will find out?
And no, requiring some superspecialawesome Goverment-only key doesn't do diddly jack. Because since some government goon with half a day of training has to be able to use it, anyone who knows his way around doors will be able to forge it. And no matter what you say, I simply cannot imagine this being the one awesome exception to the rule of government accepting any half assed job as "a-ok" because they themselves have no idea how to gauge the quality of the work and will accept anything because nobody gives a shit.
No. Sorry. Government-only backdoors do not exist. They're by definition public. At the very least, they are public enough that every OTHER government will have the keys to it, too. One way or another.
And now let's ponder for a moment whether we want the Iran to have backdoors to computers at, say, Lockheed Martin.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
True, but what's the alternative at this point? Because plenty of people have had rallys and marches and whatnot for various causes and haven't effected change. Voting the bad guys out doesn't work because there are no bad guys in modern politics - THEY'RE ALL BAD GUYS!
Is it revolution time? Is that what you're saying? Because I'm not sure what the next step is if not that, and I'm not sure how we know if we're at that point or not.