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Omand Warns of "Ethically Worse" Spying If Unbreakable Encryption Is Allowed
Press2ToContinue writes In their attempts to kill off strong encryption once and for all, top officials of the intelligence services are coming out with increasingly hyperbolic statements about why this should be done. Now, a former head of GCHQ, Sir David Omand has said: "One of the results of Snowden is that companies are now heavily encrypting [communications] end to end. Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys. They will have to get closer to the bad guys. I predict we will see more close access work."
According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which reported his words from a talk he gave earlier this week, by this he meant things like physical observation, bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers.
"You can say that will be more targeted but in terms of intrusion into personal privacy — collateral intrusion into privacy — we are likely to end up in an ethically worse position than we were before."
That's remarkable for its implied threat: if you don't let us ban or backdoor strong encryption, we're going to start breaking into your homes.
shame if something was to happen to it.
We're self entitled assholes, with nor regard for the law, and if we don't get back doors to encryption, we're going to become even more ethically challenged, self entitled assholes with nor regard for the law.
I sincerely hope one or more of their people get shot breaking into some place and not identifying themselves as agents.
Fuck, but governments are willing to slide into fascism and tyranny.
I you can't operate in the law, you should be subject to it ... and tried for criminal activities.
Papers please, comrade. You have nothing to frar if you have nothing to hide.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'd rather see bugging of rooms and physical observation of actual suspects rather than weakening the security and rights for absolutely everyone.
Besides, it's not like organised criminals will stop using encryption just because it's illegal. (I almost can't believe we're talking about effective encryption being illegal)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Most of us practice head shots for hours at a time.
People in the South tend to have guns within reach at all times; what could possibly go wrong? :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Gaining covert physical access to a targets home/phone/computer is going to cost a lot more than just typing some commands into a terminal window. That would mean that ubiquitous surveillance goes out the window, and thus less collateral surveillance.
In addition it would also mean that covert physical seals could be better used to detect if your privacy has been invaded (Has the dust bunny on the back of my computer moved?), which is actually a step forward compared with electronic invasions.
I can't see anything wrong with all that (unless of course you take Omand's point of view that you have to watch all of your populace all of the time)
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Targeted surveillance is exactly what *should* be used, because it can self-regulate. There is a cost associated with each target, so there must also be a benefit otherwise it won't be done. So widespread strong crypto sounds perfect: it takes surveillance/intelligence ops back to the physical world where you pay per target and not per system of mass surveillance. And think of all the emissions saved at the datacenters!
Making it worst for 1 or 2 persons or even a hundred (realistically, how many people can you break into home and put a bug) will make it better for the privacy of a few dozen million. Go for it do your worst. Bug the shit out of those few houses. Physically. Like you used to. And like you probably already do as anyway computer communication is only 1 form. Woopy-doo.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
open the door not only for government snoops it will also allow criminals to steal identities, steal passwords, steal credit card numbers, and anything else of value, this idea that the government needs to spy on everything sets a bad precedent and is intruding where privacy is really needed the most
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
we are likely to end up in an ethically worse position than we were before.
Actually, no. In order to do the more involved things, "physical observation, bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers", they have to get a warrant. This ups the ante and they must present a convincing argument to the judge for the need to surveil the people in question. This increases oversight, expense, and the human resources required. That means less shotgun approach and more focused surveillance only where needed.
With digital communication they felt entitled to capture any information they wanted, since there wasn't an obvious physical intrusion. Obviously they could not handle this in a responsible manner, and thus our free society is making the necessary adjustments. So that's just too bad for the spies. Sorry.
Better known as 318230.
The thing to note, though, regardless of the BS nature of most of these statements, is that physical intrusions like breaking into someone's home and bugging their place of work etc. doesn't scale, so in that sense strong encryption thwarts mass surveillance.
It is not those being spied upon, it is those doing the spying. And they will do all these things anyways, regardless of whether people use encryption. In addition, industrial espionage is obviously a large part of the game. The NSA has been propping up some sectors of the US industry for decades.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Looks to me, they are going back to good old pre-Internet methods (bugging phones, taking a peak at your computer at your house, etc.). Good old 80's and 90's. Worse case scenario is back-doors or no strong encryption. Going back to less scalable, less practical methods is practically status quo. At any rate, screw them!
Simple: They suffer from paranoia, delusions and megalomania. Like the typical fascist. They cannot stand people having secrets and they cannot stand not being all-powerful. They are a source of clear and present danger.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, that's because your sense of ethics is screwed up, not surprising given your line of work. The rest of us actually prefer that it cause you significant trouble to perform espionage and surveillance so that you actually have to target your limited resources to cases that matter, instead of going on fishing expeditions.
And from a purely practical point of view, banning strong encryption isn't going to help anyway because the only criminals and terrorists you are going to catch from relying on mandated weak encryption are fools. If you don't understand that, you are a fool yourself; if you do understand it, you are just a liar.
No "worse" is possible. So go ahead!
I wouldn't issue that challenge...
See this finger? Spin on it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Long past time to dismantle the government and rebuilt it from the ground up.
They've forgotten they are to serve us, NOT the other way around.
So can the other guys.
Including the bad guys who we are encrypting to protect our data from.
While there is a slew of people who fears big brother. But for the most part we do are best to block petty criminal. Who can take our data, spread it across the crimeosphere, for profit. While we become a victim, with a reducing credit score, and losing decades of good will you accumulated in your life.
To think the US is the only source that can do this, is actually quite hubristic. There are other countries with large data centers, there are companies with the power to do so as well. If you wait 2 or 3 years then the power will be able for the average person to crack.
But let just say Google had a hole where the bad guys got in and were able to use fraction of it power to crack weak encryption they could get a lot of damage done before they found out.
Strong encryption isn't about stopping the feds, it is about stopping the petty crook.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
encryption, strong encryption particularly, is employed explicitly to deter and invalidate government transgression against ones property and person without serious legal recourse. If the existence of strong encryption, that is encryption you cannot defeat, becomes a factor in determining the application of a warrant then the glove is off. The state no longer cares who is guilty or innocent, as speech itself in the course of the first amendment has been deemed suspect in all cases. The FISA courts could be used, certainly, but even through the means of FISA an unacceptable precedent of false positives could call into question the very means by which Omand threatens to "up the ante." In short, it could be the clean death of FISA many seek to achieve.
Either way Omand, your threat to us is empty handed. What would you seek to achieve with this unfettered access to our privacy? your agency failed to protect us against the boston marathon bombings, The aurora shooting, and countless other domestic acts that would qualify by any other definition as terrorism. Besides, terrorists know an empty threat on twitter is just as effective in disrupting american freedom and grounding planes. They know that intractable war without end is a brutal tool to re-enforce their ideology and their objectives, and they know we're always ready to send another batch of soldiers into the meat grinder if it means validating our 50 year old broken foreign policy.
so no, i think i stand with every slashdotter (and intelligent person generally) when I say long live the 4096 bit hash, and praise be to the elliptic curve. may the multi-factor crush your blind and arrogant crusade.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I have my 9mm and AR-15 handy, they will be risking their lives if they try to break into my home whil I am there.
Do you idiots seriously believe that if the government was going to target you for surveillance, and go to the length of breaking into your home in order to bug it, that they would do so while you were there????
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As much as I'm deeply displeased that the attitude would be 'give us what we want or we'll take it, Stasi-style'; I'd see a situation where the spooks are forced to resort to physical intrusion as a vast improvement.
Implicit in the GCHQ flack's 'threat' is the idea that totally invisible 'no touch' surveillance is somehow better and nicer. In the sense that it has better PR, and is easier to maintain (and on a massive scale) without public outcry or logistically overwhelming amounts of black-bag work, this is true. In terms of the relationship between the clandestine agencies and even the pretense of democratic government, though, I'd say that it's exactly the opposite.
If team spook has the advantage of technology for scale and efficiency, and is capable of invisibly watching more or less everything without any visible signs of having done so, you have about as imbalanced a situation as one could reasonably imagine. A perfect panopticon; but so subtle that you sound like some sort of schizo nutjob for suggesting that it is happening. If they actually have to break and bug, this will mean more physical intrusion; but it also creates a de-facto limit on how broadly they can pursue fishing expeditions, and how reasonably they can make the assumption that they will never be caught.
If what he says about more encryption is true; bring it on.
With or Without encryption you can still send messages no will understand. Example Rabbit is in the hole. The package has been delivered
The more difficult something is and the smaller scope something covers, the smaller the cost- benefit. Spying on everyone through technological back door - very low cost, questionable benefit. Physically spying on someone you actually suspect of doing something - very high cost, hopefully high reward. This cost is what keeps the government in its place.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
That way we can have people watching you from inside your house.
It is not relevant what we believe in. Relevant is the fact, that error might be fatal. FUD for everyone.
You are correct, what you think is not relevant at all. Especially with Police Nation-Wide Use Wall-Penetrating Radars To Peer Into Homes
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He has a point, but if encryption is made breakable, everyone will break it, not just the "watchers".
Exactly. "Bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers" requires agents to specifically go to a certain location, probably after getting a specific search warrant. That's how policing should be done.
If we cannot break your encryption, we can always break your knees.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Let's think about this for a moment. The chief complaint of the Snowden revelations is that it presents a broad swath domestic surveillance that violates everyone's privacy and 4th amendment rights (presumptively). So when we see statements about how the intelligence agencies will start engaging in more close access operations versus blanket monitoring, why do we presume this is a bad thing? Certainly no one thinks that attacks on Charley Hebdo or Sony, or other similar terrorist attacks is good? Why would we think that "less ethical" methods to employ "close access work" would be a bad thing if we can stop terrorist networks from attacking innocent civilians? Where do we strike that balance?
..collateral intrusion into privacy â" we are likely to end up in an ethically worse position than we were before
Translation: Give away your privacy to us, now, or we'll TAKE IT FROM YOU.
Memo to 'Intellgence community': GO FUCK YOURSELVES, ASSHOLES.
Enough is enough. This shit has to stop, now. We are free citizens of our respective countries (..well, OK, some are more free than others, some aren't very free at all. One problem at a time); we are not inmates in a prison, which is exactly how they want to treat everyone: Monitored and guarded 24/7/365, and all communications monitored and inspected. FUCK THAT SHIT!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This is excellent. Tapping all the world's communications is cheap and easy (especially when any person or company can be strong-armed), bugging individuals is expensive and difficult. They'll have to restrict this activity to those who they strongly suspect, rather than spying on the communications of all known sentient beings in the universe and then seeing what sticks. Less widespread privacy invasion, more effective surveillance instead of growing the haystack. Sounds like a win/win to me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Who still believes these lies?
It's not about getting to the 'bad' guys, hasn't been for a long time.
It's about power for the government.
Terrorists/pedophiles are not stupid, they write their own encryption software and are not going to get caught allowing secret services to prevent them by their activities on social media.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
That these people think that it is less of an invasion to sweep up all of your electronic conversations than to bug your home, is a measure of how distorted the debate is. The real reason that they would prefer to tap electronically is that much lower cost and lower chance of discovery. It is arguably a bigger invasion of privacy.
So, in other words, they'll have to do real police work if they can't tap everyone's phone without a warrant. Boo Hoo.
They've already been breaking into homes, businesses, embassies, and so on. Ethically, stealing information is stealing information - the only difference here is in level of effort in both acquiring and sifting through it.
Don't you think they're implying that they will black-hood disappear you, and then beat you with sticks until you provide the information they want? That seems like an obviously ethically 'worse' situation.
Why do you think that processors have remained at roughly the same clock speed lately?
It's because NSA has been using ever increasing areas of our CPUs for surveillance purposes.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I would much rather than suspects are bugged with physical devices following warrants, than everyone is pre-emptively datamined for the six lines with which to hang them.
"...why you always gotta make me hit you?"
You can't use a threat to extort a concession from someone when the threat and the concession are identical.
"Let us steal your information or we will steal your information"? Yeah, okay.
They are trying to scare us to get their way. This sounds like what Terrorists resort to, to get their way. These people are no different than Terrorists and they should be treated as such.
"Endeavour to persevere"
The Constitution put in barriers to policing. It's a filter, making it cost a bit if you want to go after someone. This doesn't totally eliminate the threat of tyranny, but it slows it down quite a bit.
So, this clown is saying "hey, if you don't let us do this low effort illegal spying, we're gonna do high effort illegal spying". Even if he's right, this is still good news to me. You need to put shoes on the ground to go after folks. I can't do a blanket surveillance on everyone, no more LOVEINT illegal spying just because you can. I think this is better than even stronger laws. I can ignore the laws of man, but harder to ignore the laws of economics.
"In the UK however, rights DESCEND from government. This is philosophically far different from the situation in the USA."
Google "Magna Carta."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I'd hate to see that happen but if you break into my house you probably should do it when I am not here for the sake of your own mortality.
Perhaps the number of laws being broken by this whole black bag show should finally be addressed.
If the "law" pathologically disregards the law then why the hell should anyone else give a rats ass about the law?
Personally, I don't think anything I do is worthy of anyone time to snoop but who knows maybe spying on my search for a good place to take a vacation will save somebody else some time.
Blanket surveillance through global system compromise is a bunch of BS anyway since there is a high degree of probability that those who want to hack the surveillers using their own tactics.
The reason that we have locks is because thieves actually steal stuff. Increasingly we are having trouble distinguishing the good criminals from the bad.
...I predict we will see more close access work...
How is actually watching the person you wanted to watch ethically worse than mass watching millions in secret?
Well...Thank you for avoiding spying on us by spying on us.
Individual bad actors will always have access to unbreakable surveillance. Even now, there are encryption systems quite capable of foiling any agency.
All this does is make the agency unable to do mass trolling of the citizenry. You only object to that if you assume that the enemy is the citizenry.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
There is strong encryption, and there is unbreakable encryption. They are not necessarily the same thing.
Strong encryption is theoretically breakable, but it is not computationally feasible to do so. What is computationally feasible changes with time. Look at how key-length standards for RSA have changed, for example.
One-time pad encryption, on the other hand, is not breakable. It doesn't matter how much computer power you throw at it: if you don't have the key, you can't read the message.
...laura
"Unless you let us operate without restriction, we will operate in an unethical way....."
...going to RETURN TO breaking into your homes...
FTFY
I am not a number - I am a free man!
"Direct access" methods (tailing people, planting surveillance devices, etc) do not scale anywhere near as easily as network surveillance -- each "direct access" target requires a significant fixed cost in resources and manpower. This imposes discipline on the snoops and forces them to pick and choose actual suspects instead of trying to scoop up everything.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I realize that they dare not explicitly say that is what they are going to do, but once they are caught doing it, it will amount to exactly the same consequence as if they had.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The UK, among other European states have a long history of colonialism. The US of A has also developed a strong taste for colonialism and mass resource theft. Were these states to disengage the act of "bringing democracy" to other places via drones, aircraft carriers, warplanes, tanks and troops, and instead send teachers, doctors, and engineers then we would not be in the mess we are now. We have hundreds of years of colonialism to show us why it does not work very well. Had the states spent the vast war budget on sustainable energy research, we would not be on the "oil drip" and melting the icecaps and searing lungs. Moreover, a lot of these 'ethnics' that certain European states object to would stay in their own lands as opposed to emigrate en masse to flee war and poverty. Work out why there is this so-called terrorism and generally there is some long, bitter history of colonialist misadventures behind it that made a minority elite wealthy. If you clip the trouble at its source rather than stifle its symptoms, you would be more successful.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
If they want to protect us... http://www.independent.co.uk/v...
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Headshots take that right out.
Jed and Jethro practiced ricochet shooting in the 60's; using a Barett 50cal makes it a bit harder, but what else do we have to do all day? :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I sincerely hope one or more of their people get shot breaking into some place and not identifying themselves as agents
Which gets labelled as a terrorist attack and is used to justify further occurrences of same
Twinstiq, game news
Or indeed "The Declaration of Arbroath" where the nobles and church in Scotland made clear that the king was answerable to the country. The UK isn't just England, after all.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Good! Finally!
This is exactly what they should have been doing all along, instead of launching mass-spying programs on every citizen from the safety and anonymity of their office desks.
Physical intrusion is much harder to scale and automate. It will also make intelligence operations more prohibitively expensive for governments. Nice try Omand, but you've only proved non-backdoored encryption is even more desirable.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I see the "close access work" as a bit of a red herring, and the "ethically worse position" is the real story. Mass surveillance is just too nice to give up. So, I predict that we will be seeing government malware that infects large numbers of computers in order to attempt to maintain the status quo.
The 2nd amendment is inviolate in the face of over 30,000 gun deaths a year.
Proposal: let’s make the 4th amendment inviolate until terrorists kill over 30,000 Americans a year.
Since this will NEVER happen, we have absolutely no need for these treasonous (as they kill the 4th amendment) fools to ‘protect’ us by spying.
Re-employ then as septic tank cleaners, street sweepers, any number of jobs more valuable than spying.
So true, sadly... See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories -- even temporary ones -- of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people -- the employed, the somewhat privileged -- are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls. That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
" it takes surveillance/intelligence ops back to the physical world where you pay per target and not per system of mass surveillance"
You really think the NSA isn't going to pursue the destruction of privacy, regardless of how easy it is? As of less physical encryption will force them to respect us?
P.S. What passes for "Targeted surveillance" in recent times.. hasn't been very targeted at all.
Bugging individual suspects is not ethically worse than pervasive mass surveillance of the population as a whole. The former may or may not be unethical, depending on the circumstances, the latter is always immoral and dangerous to democracy.
and online shopping gone......
As well as accessing any other kind of sensitive information (grades, health, etc.).
And how is this supposed to help them catch the "bad guys"? Since any "bad guy" smarter than a rock will:
1) Not use email, text, web, Facebook etc. as it is compromised. Those that do are quickly caught and eliminated from the gene pool.
2) Use strong encryption regardless if it is illegal or not (as if anything else they do is legal).
I am curious to know how many "bad guys" are caught because spy agencies have been able read their email and texts? Maybe when it all started, before anybody knew how it worked, they caught some dumb folks but now that the cat is out of the bag? Like seriously is this some lame Bond movie where the villain explains his devious plot in an e-mail, in clear text?
My guess if they catch most people using stuff like networking, known associates and such.....Which you can still do WITHOUT breaking encryption (if I email a buddy of mine an encrypted email, although they might not be able to read the contents, they still know I am keeping in touch with the person of interest).
> but the suspects can easily dispose of "evidence" (illicit drugs) in the toilet.
So it's too hard to put a bucket or stopper in the sewer line?
And the international Data Treaties the Senate confirmed with the EU and Canada that make such actions illegal and unconstitutional.
Get a warrant! A specific individual warrant!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So.. if we don't let them spy on our digital communications all willy-nilly their threat is that they will.. have to do things the old fashioned way?
Unless warrantless home/business invasions become a thing, I would consider this to be exactly what we want (which after reading TFA is what they suggest as well.)
Of course, it wouldn't overly surprise me if he's suggesting warrantless home invasions.. but I suspect that would be a significantly harder political fight than warrantless wiretapping (and that's already pretty hard thanks to Snowden and others.)
Then again, even warranted home invasions could be troublesome if the whole "encryption=presumption of guilt" bullshit that's been bandied around (by the same people of course) actually takes hold.
Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys. They will have to get closer to the bad guys
you mean, "do real legitimate intellegence work"
You can say that will be more targeted
problem solved. the lack of ethics isn't the fact that intellegence services exist or function, its the fact they were being deployed against the population of the entire world as a whole, hence everyone being considered an "enemy". This allows them to target people without really taking additional steps to target them, giving next to no oversight on who can be targeted and for what. This opens the door for national security and terrorism resources being used to fight the ever failing war on drugs, harrrass protestors, without leaving as much of a trace. It would even allow analysists who moonlight as private intellegence to be able to carefully extract data for their nightime employers, leading for intellegence work being used to harrass critics and enemies of private individuals and corporations.
Sure this could still happen, but it'd leave a bigger paper trail, and oversight is easier. I think this is ethically better. I think Omand has it backwards.
Accidents do happen. People come home at odd times. Obviously the agencies are less than flawless. If they start breaking into people's homes, a few will get shot.
So, they'll job out this to criminals, who will hit your house later. No skin off the NSA's nose. This, however, will result in a few less criminals. Not bad.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Possibly if they where really a life threat and you had a license or something.
Don't set a trap(Fails even in the USA), shoot them in the front, and have a 'legitimate' reason to express fear for your life. Them having weapons of their own(knives should work) would help.
If you DO end up shooting one in the back, being able to state that you were aiming for his buddy that hadn't turned yet might work. Or 'he turned as I pulled the trigger' while sobbing or something.
Remember, human reaction speed is something like 200ms. If you decide to pull the trigger a moment after he decides to turn, it's quite possible that you'll have pulled the trigger before you recognize that he's turning, too late to recall the 'pull trigger' impulses. And while guns fire fast, they still take time, giving him time to turn a little more.
I don't read AC A human right
I'd say give the cops medals for NOT shooting the homeowner shooting at them thinking they're home invaders.
It's also yet another reason why I want to get a home security system that records. Including audio. Maybe I can set it up to forget the audio(and video) unless there's gunfire within an hour?
I don't read AC A human right
Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys.
I'm glad to hear that as I'm sure everyone else is.
Now if you could give up trying to spy on all the other guys, we could become friends. You see, the problem is your "kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out" approach of just vacuuming everything in and leaving the decision about who the bad guys actually are until later.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They will have to get closer to the bad guys. I predict we will see more close access work.
It beats running a drag net on the entire Internet just to see who you can catch doing whatever.
Have gnu, will travel.
While a possibility, I think you are giving them too much credit. I think these people are indeed opponents of individual freedoms and hence are destructive authoritarians of the worst kind.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The more work a spy agency has to do to spy on someone the less likely they are to do it to people who aren't actually worth spying on.
Its the whole "lets collect every single piece of data we can just because we can" spying that we need to STOP. There is NO evidence that such spying was any help in catching the people who shot up the chocolate shop in Sydney or the newspaper office in Paris (or that stronger powers to spy on everyone or to force ISPs and others to retain more data would have helped catch these people).
The US government has lots of avenues to outlaw effective encryption. Court decisions which have extended the power of the tax and spend clause and interstate commerce clause give the federal government the authority to do so. There has just been no need because it has been easier to subvert encryption through other means at least up until now.
...by this he meant things like physical observation, bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers.
Which means that you will now have to have an actual agent go do this (hopefully with a warrant, but those are just soooo passe now days). This will limit their ability to just scoop up all data on everybody everywhere, and actually just concentrate on, you know, bad guys and stuff.
What he calls "ethically worse" spying, I think is more ethical. First thing, spying that happens closer to the intelligence source is less impersonal. Yes, there may be "collateral damage" in terms of people observed who are not involved, but those people will be disregarded unlike in electronic intelligence gathering. There may be people connected to the target who stand a better chance of actually being seen as just a coincidental bystander rather than having all the minute details of their life gathered as just another faceless source of ones and zeroes.
This "ethically worse" spying would require sane selection of subjects because flesh and blood agents available to work on-site are not as cheap or plentiful as hard drive space. That alone could eliminate the majority of "collateral damage". Speaking of flesh and blood agents, real world intelligence gathering in person on-site can't be performed by a robot replacement. Actual agents get to keep their jobs instead of being replaced by more advanced eavesdropping robots.
I'd like to know just what definition of "ethical" Omand is using here.
The one and only worry about going back to the old way of spying is that it would turn out the warnings of Big Brother were right all along, and there aren't enough humans to keep up with the workload. But there's a simple way to correct that dilemma: the government can know what you've said OR who you are; not necessarily both. If unbreakable encryption is created in such a way that it positively identifies a user -- or at least an administrator of the system in question -- then that protects that person's privacy while allowing intelligence and law enforcement agencies to go about getting actual warrants to access data, like they should. And chances are, Bobar Isisguy isn't going to register his identity to access such tech, leaving such persons vulnerable to spying.
...by definition such tactics will be far more targeted.
Which is a good thing.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The bulk of the laws involving surveillance pivoted on this "Close" work. It was hard to do, and it required some motive to be "worth the effort". So in the old days where you needed to intercept physical mail or actually enter a property to spy, the laws were in balance.
Of late the state has had a free ride, with the information being pumped into it at central stations and spycraft was just a click away. And the state has gotten fat and lazy, and with the decreased minimum effort the spying has become free. And the state, fat and happy, likes it that way.
But strong encryption would put the state back into the footrace. It would require the same work and effort as the old days. Boo farking hoo. It was _supposed_ to be hard to spy. The entire Big Brother 1984 idea was about the destructiveness of surveillance made too easy to bother being selective. The "just watch everybody" economy of effort leads to gluttony and abuse. We kwow that.
So Omand's "warning" is that of the plaintive child. But mom, then I'll have to _try_ and I want my participation trophy!
So Omand has made the case for why strong encryption should be universal so that the state cannot engage in universal surveillance.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
instead of privacy.
Sorry, sir, but I would never have raped your daughter if only she'd kept up the habit of dressing in revealing clothing. Now that she dresses like a nun, I have no choice but to strip her bare and have my way with her.
It isn't any "ethically worse" though, it was just easier to do before, and easier to conceal.
Anything that makes the government's dirty little unethical secrets more obvious I am all for.
Privacy isn't a crime, encryption isn't a crime, protecting yourself from an out of control corportogovernment is not a crime.
They get closer to the bad guys to catch them. HEY, we WANT someone doing something against terror. PLEASE get to the bad guys. But STOP spying at the rest of us.
So E2E encryption is great. Breaking it is possible (mostly side channels), but needs a lot more efford. So they will stop spying on everyone and target the really suspicious ones. That's no guarantee you will never be targeted, but a guarantee, that most people will have their privacy while the bad guys are observed.