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The NSA Wants Tech Companies To Give It "Front Door" Access To Encrypted Data
An anonymous reader writes The National Security Agency is embroiled in a battle with tech companies over access to encrypted data that would allow it to spy (more easily) on millions of Americans and international citizens. Last month, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple urged the Obama administration to put an end to the NSA's bulk collection of metadata. "National Security Agency officials are considering a range of options to ensure their surveillance efforts aren't stymied by the growing use of encryption, particularly in smartphones. Key among the solutions, according to The Washington Post, might be a requirement that technology companies create a digital key that can open any locked device to obtain text messages or other content, but divide the key into pieces so no one group could use it without the cooperation of other parties."
Fuck the NSA!!
The designers of the Clipper chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip) had just about the same method in mind: encryption for the users, with an independent organization knowing the master keys and being able to hand over session keys to decode communications to government institutions. It was actually the reason why PGP etc were invented.
We have a similar situation here: the gov wants to have the keys to encrypted machines. Theoretically, the same arguments can be brought up again: it's bad because the keys may leak, it weakens the encryption because there's another set of keys that can be bruteforced or found in a smarter way, but it's also pretty ineffective: the phones that allow people messing around in their systems (Jolla, Ubuntu phones, rooted Androids) will just have third-party, non-gov-approved encryption in them and criminals (and people not really comfortable with NSA snooping) will subsequently use these.
Even if it were somehow perfect, the NSA has proven itself to be untrustworthy. It apparently can't even police its own staff to stop them spying on their girlfriends and wives, let along stop them walking off with huge archives of information. If Snowden could do it then I think it's reasonable to strongly suspect that the Chinese, the French and anyone else interested in that stuff has infiltrated them too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Apparently the Supreme Court decided that that would be unconstitutional, but it's Just Too Important(TM) so it's fine.
They fell for a number of reasons - any one of which they could have shrugged off, but they all came at once. Rebellions from inside, invasions from the east, loyalty to the empire strained by imposed religious reformation to some strange new monotheistic cult and economic struggles as an empire built on constant expansion ran out of new land to invade for tribute - and then all that during a succession crisis which left the empire fragmented and unable to muster up a unified response. There's no one factor that lead to the collapse, and the collapse itsself was a slow process - you can't find a single year and declare the empire ceased to exist here.
Wow, I just looked into that some more and it's pretty horrifying. The ruling was more than it being "Just Too Important(TM)", it was that it is too important to the State. That line of reasoning allows for just about any unconstitutional law to be upheld. Even the dissenting decisions were more concerned with the effectiveness of the checkpoints and considered the violation of the Fourth Amendment that they represent an accepted and foregone conclusion.
The majority opinion from Rehnquist: "In sum, the balance of the State's interest in preventing drunken driving, the extent to which this system can reasonably be said to advance that interest, and the degree of intrusion upon individual motorists who are briefly stopped, weighs in favor of the state program. We therefore hold that it is consistent with the Fourth Amendment."
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.