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Obama Says He's 'A Strong Believer In Strong Encryption'
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. President Barack Obama spoke with Re/code recently on a variety of topics relating to technology. The talk included the president's thoughts on encryption, which has been a controversial subject in tech circles lately after government officials (including Obama himself) have publicly complained about default encryption in modern communication tools. In the interview, he says he's a "strong believer in strong encryption," adding, "I lean probably further on side of strong encryption than some in law enforcement." Obama puts it another way, more bluntly: "There's no scenario in which we don't want really strong encryption." However, the president says the public itself is driving concern for leaving law enforcement a way in: "The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers."
"The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers." - Welcome to leadership Obama. Where sometimes you have to make unpopular/hard choices and live with the consequences.
What he has done is something completely different..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I remember when he was a strong believer in transparency too.
People are stupid. Like, really fucking dumb.
Couple that with a 24 hour news cycle nonstop coverage, first time some attack (even 9/11 was utterly minor in terms of life vs, say, annual car accidents) happens, you have these dumb sheep throw the Constitution out the window and yell 'Murica while going full tilt behind a nearly decade long attack on a country that had nothing to do with it.
If you think there is fixing this country, you are severely overestimating the ability of an educational system, any educational system to pound out the stupid. If it could have done so, we wouldn't be still debating evolution and vaccines.
... of HIS data.
What about the other %99 of actual police work that doesn't involved compromising my rights, we just going to toss it?
Yet I want you to give me a copy of the key and trust that it wont fall into the wrong hands or be used illegally against me. See how stupid that sounds Obama?
...is just not paying attention.
I never bought what he was selling, but any democrat who still supported him after he signed an extension of the PATRIOT act is a goddamned hypocrite.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So order the NSA to quit figuring out how to attack us and have them figure out how to protect us.
I hope this doesn't sound too much like the tin-foil hat view of the world, but this whole business of the government's "need" to monitor everyone's phone calls, e-mails, web browsing, smartphone GPS coordinates, travel etc., makes me think of a very significant thing that Noam Chomsky once said, namely that in a free society, where people can do what they like, the government (or the ruling class) has a strong motivation to develop state-of-the-art tools to influence the way people think, whereas in a society where physical actions were controlled by the State, like in the old Soviet Union, the ruling class there didn't develop mind-twisting distortions of reality because with physical control, mind control is unnecessary. And Chomsky identified this as the cause of the total distortion of political language and thinking in the USA in particular, and in physically free countries in general.
Now I'm starting to think that the whole NSA spying thing, and government spying in general, is a direct result of the lack of physical control of the populace. In principal, people in the free countries can think what they want, but only if the government knows what people are thinking at all times. I guess monitoring everyone's thoughts like as if we were all prisoners on parole is a direct consequence of physical freedom. If people are granted the freedom to _do_ what they like, they must give up the right to _think_ what they like, or at least they give up the right to share their thoughts privately with others.
"leaving law enforcement a way in"
like a warrant?
You can keep it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
"Obama Says He's 'A Strong Believer In Strong Encryption'"
At least he's made it clear: he's 100% against strong encryption.
..When I hear this, what my brain sends back to me is "We just struck a deal with Apple and Google to let them have our way into your phones whenever we want."
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It sounds like he's caught between a rock and hard place. He might, personally, believe in strong encryption and privacy. But, the series of events since 9/11 have made a stance which prevents the collection of information to prevent another attack a difficult one to sell to the public.
Strong encryption can protect secrets and privacy. The secrets and privacy of the common man is worth protecting. The same technology can also enable our enemies to operate in stealth. Should we have another 9/11 experience and the suspected perpetrator used strong encryption to protect their plans, the public will scream that not enough was done to prevent the attack. How should the president respond?
I am an advocate of strong encryption having started a business in the 90's to provide secure email and file transfer. I also remember the advent of the Clipper chip and the reasons behind it subsequent defeat. We liked to believe our privacy was not being infringed and then Snowden revealed how our intelligence community was violating our rights. At the same time, we haven't had another terrorist attack on our soil lending credence to their methods (valid or not). Snowden, however, also released information on other data and intelligence collection methods. That disclosure allowed our enemies to operate with more impunity through the use of strong encryption and by adjusting their methods to avoid detection.
Sadly, that protection strong encryption provided in order to protect our privacy and rights now becomes a marker of potential threats with other intel methods compromised. Weakened encryption or strong encryption with a backdoor would, theoretically, permit the gov't to pierce the veil when other intel might have put the focus on an innocent citizen and users of strong encryption would be marked as threats.
We, as a nation, have allowed the events of 9/11 to shatter our society and live in a world where our believe of privacy through ignorance was shattered by Snowden's revelations.
The revelations that Snowden provided on the intelligence collection programs aimed at our own citizens, supposedly for our protection, were necessary. However, the disclosures of other techniques and operations on the international front has given our enemy insight and tactics to be able to circumvent critical intelligence collection methods. In that regard, he has done tremendous harm. And, with the shutdown of those programs, the fight is now over when and how strong encryption will be permitted.
What I want to see is a published register of all SSNs.
The Social Security Number was never intended to be a 'security key' for citizens. When I went to college, our SSN was used as our student ID number, in fact.
The government should simply publish each and every SSN. Who has each number, etc. Doing so would render SSNs immediately useless for identity thieves, and the financial industry would be forced to stop using them as a 'trusted identity number.'
The public is not driving a "demand" for law enforcement to have a way past people's strong encryption. They're driving a navel-gazing demand that everyone else's strong encryption be breakable, but not theirs.
Worse, law enforcement is ignoring the fact that they're supposed to get warrants to access people's information, and are bitching to high hell that people are taking steps to stop their illegal snooping.
Too bad, fuzzballs. You, the NSA, CSEC, GCHQ, and everyone else who thinks their "need" to spy is greater than my need for information security can take a spin on a sharp pole.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Of course, encryption software could use the evil bit to determine which method to use.
Still demanding answers for 9/11. Please release the full document.
Dear Mr. President,
Back in 1997 a group of leading experts wrote a paper about "leaving law enforcement a way in". From that paper's Executive Summary:
The deployment of key-recovery-based encryption infrastructures to meet law enforcement's stated specifications will result in substantial sacrifices in security and greatly increased costs to the end user. Building the secure computer-communication infrastructures necessary to provide adequate technological underpinnings demanded by these requirements would be enormously complex and is far beyond the experience and current competency of the field. Even if such infrastructures could be built, the risks and costs of such an operating environment may ultimately prove unacceptable. In addition, these infrastructures would generally require extraordinary levels of human trustworthiness.
It's like when he says that he "believes" in the right to keep and bear arms. There's an asterisk in there somewhere.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
He is also a strong believer in
-closing Guantanamo
-transparent government
-closing corporate tax loopholes
-elimination of no-bid contracts
-Santa Claus
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.