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FBI Slammed On Capitol Hill For "Stupid" Ideas About Encryption
blottsie writes: At a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the FBI endured outright hostility as both technical experts and members of Congress from both parties roundly criticized the law enforcement agency's desire to place so-called back doors into encryption technology. "Creating a technological backdoor just for good guys is technologically stupid," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer science graduate. "That's just stupid. Our founders understood that an Orwellian overreaching government is one of the most dangerous things this world could have," Lieu said.
That's kinda just restating what he was saying . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Oh, I think that they understood the concept very well. It's not exactly new; the Romans used it as did the Greeks in a few cases.
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It certainly sounds similar but it's really not.
The CALEA ports aren't really a backdoor though, more like a side utility door it is just to make it easier for the police to do something they could already lawfully do with cause. Get the traffic that goes through the companies equipment with a warrant. The police have always been able to get a warrant to get data from anyone on anything either electronic or paper if they have cause. They can already right now get a warrant forcing you to allow them to install a bug inside your actual phone. The reason they don't do that is because obviously you wouldn't discuss things on it if you knew they were listening. Issuing a warrant to an intermediate with access to criminal information has always been legal. Just like if I ran a string between our homes with cans at the end to commit, confess, or coordinate crimes they could get a warrant to tap it surreptitiously or to force me to allow them to install mikes in the cans.
The Constitution only forbids unreasonable searches.
Their problem is with decent secure end to end crypto there is no independent intermediate handling the unencrypted data that they can issue a warrant to and issuing the warrant to the suspect would just make the suspect not use the thing.
I just wonder if they are doing this stuff to make stupid people believe they can use some simple magical device to never get caught.
Metadata is generally the most important information anyways, which simple end-end encryption doesn't solve. The actual content is usually just superfluous. The metadata lets them know everything about you including where you go, who your with, what you buy/read/watch, who you talk to, when you talk to someone, and all the same information on all those people, which is a much bigger privacy violation then most actual content. Metadata is also a very small amount of data that is very easy for computers to analyze. The metadata will also generally reveal exactly what the content was anyways. If they know you get called by your wife at home on your way home from work and then after less then 30 seconds on the phone turn around and drive to store to buy milk then it's a good bet that call was to buy milk. It would be great for blackmail, I could very simply filter the list for married government or company officials that often end up in the same place as hookers. You could also just filter for married people that often end up alone in a house or hotel room with someone unrelated of the opposite sex.