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Europol Chief Warns About Computer Encryption
An anonymous reader writes The law enforcement lobbying campaign against encryption continues. Today it's Europol director Rob Wainwright, who is trying to make a case against encryption. "It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained. "It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore." This is the same man who told the European Parliament that Europol is not going to investigate the alleged NSA hacking of the SWIFT (international bank transfer) system. The excuse he gave was not that Europol didn't know about it, because it did. Very much so. It was that there had been no formal complaint from any member state.
Given the arrogance of the NSA and other national security agencies, they can expect encryption to increase radically. This is a natural consequence of their refusal to abide by due process as well as generally doing whatever the hell they want because they "can".
That attitude is a double edged sword. And they are just now feeling the bite of the other edge as the global community responds to their behavior.
Not only will the sophistication of encryption spread by it will go from being an option to being a default status quo. In the not too distant future, if they want access to data, they will need to get the cooperation of the owner of that data... or get nothing at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
People haven't figured out the half of it. The Theoretical Computer Scientists are still trying to figure out if P equals NP, when there is both an easy solution (I've tried to submit one version of it, and have written another), and that when conditions of physical plausibility are introduced, it turns out to be the wrong problem anyway. Hard problems arise as soon as you need one more peek at a pile of data than you have. Then you have to guess, and you are at the mercy of the guess. If it is a genuine binary guess and nobody is in a position to force your random number source (and this is totally unrealistic) then you only have a 50% chance of being totally wrong. Things go downhill pretty fast from there. Trust me, my sanity has survived by playing these games in my head for the last decade or so, and there is only one sensible strategy, and it is built fundamentally on sensibly chooing friends you trust. Things then either turn into a lovely blissful world of total cooperation (and I'm still dreaming here), or else devolve into a downward spiral of ever decreasing trust, ever increasing suspicion, and total failure to justify that distrust given that when one determined person want to screw things up, he or she happens to be the 1/1000 that you didn't decide to label a 'madman' and lock up. The law enforcement systems they are demanding don't work even in dreams. They face too many decision processes, can't improve matters by adding more decision processes (and this is the mess that using computers to aid they really gets them), and they are demanding that their task is made artificially simple. Doesn't bloody work that way in our universe. Sorry. We live according to the laws of mathematics and physics, and if you find yourself on the wrong side of them, complaining to lawmakers won't make the problems go away, but can screw up a large number of lives in the attempt.
John_Chalisque
Snooping agencies will fight tooth and nail to keep their snooping powers
The problem with fighting tooth and nail is that it's strategically stupid to fight directly against a larger and stronger army.
The privacy arms race benefits the people, only a false feeling of safety and anonymity stops the people from making it practically impossible (or impossibly impractical) to spy on the general population.
A front attack, however strong it may be, will fail.
Some of us are accusing the agencies of being intrusive, but this is a different problem. This is about having been intrusive in a strategically unintelligent way.
When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure.
Sounds like the kind of secure you wouldn't notice if it was disabled.
Our own government doesn't obey the law, why should we? This is standard Pisoner's Dilemna. Once the other side defects, you must too. Continue to cooperate and you lose. Badly.