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James Comey: the Man Who Wants To Outlaw Encryption
Patrick O'Neill writes: "There has not been a tradeoff between liberty and security in our response to terrorism in this country and in our efforts to offer security to the people of the United States," said James Comey, now the director of the FBI. Comey was the number two man in the Department of Justice during the Bush years when NSA and law enforcement surveillance of Americans grew to unprecedented heights. Now he's pushing to stop encryption by default on Apple and Android devices.
And this guy is the director of the FBI...for real? :-/
More and more surveillance of Americans instead of the supposed enemies. This is the US after 9/11 and the Boston bombing. Welcome to 1984.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
Correct, there has not been a tradeoff between liberty and security in our response to terrorism in this country and in our efforts to offer security to the people of the United States. What there has been is a complete and utter disregard for liberty and destruction of individual rights. Forget tradeoffs, the Constitution was abolished, that is what happened.
You can't handle the truth.
False, although mostly true so far. Notably, the intrusiveness of airport security has gone way up, for the big example on the false side.
Mostly what there's been so far has been a tradeoff between *privacy* and security. As in none of the former.
I feel for the guy--his job is to prevent another 9/11. He gets the call if a city blows up. And he probably really cares about defending liberty.
But unfortunately, pervasive surveillance without amazingly well-engineered procedural oversight and security will inevitably lead to tyranny. Anyone who doesn't see that isn't stepping far enough back. He's concerned about the next five years; I'm concerned about the next twenty or fifty.
I suppose there's an AI issue, too--a singularity is going to get into this data in a few decades. I can't predict what an AI a hundred times smarter than any of us might do with it.
From TFA: Comey said in an Oct. 2014 speech "Justice may be denied because of a locked phone or an encrypted hard drive." I can somewhat understand that from an investigator's perspective.
But my take is that lots of people are constantly attacking my devices, from the petty skript kiddies to corporations wanting secrets to the NSA who wants everything. Most of the attacks never see justice, they are never prosecuted. There is no justice in most cases, only criminals who break in.
If my devices are properly hardened in advance, I don't need to wait for the government to apply "justice".
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Yeah, but the reason he wants the default of 'no' is to make it easier to monitor communications. He doesn't give a shit about the 4th, naturally. The government shouldn't be dictating the default setting either, which is what he wants.
because we might need to look in your house for terrorists. Also get rid of locks on car doors because we might want to randomly search your car
I never understand why people consider it news when someone takes a position that is 100% predictable given who they are.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The government has all the power here. They can easily OFAC the crap out of any security chip that can't be owned by side channel attacks. Judging from laptop TPM scene where vendors have gone as far as enumerating list of vectors they don't even try to defend against... seems to me like open season for anyone with the resources to pull it off.
Anything protected directly by user entry into a smart phone is bound to have no usable entropy by itself anyway.
Failing this we have baseband processors with full read write access to OS memory to reduce material costs. I would be surprised if there was a consumer baseband on the planet without capability of being field "upgraded" by Agent Smith... at least from various accounts of ancient feature phones being turned into bugs.
While I don't doubt encryption will make things more difficult if/when it catches on you can bet the feds will invest in beating it and they will win at least for the subset of people who don't really care about security.
I have a feeling the bigger issue with ubiquitous encryption for TLAs is that when everyone uses encryption then the ability to use the fact that encryption was used to justify suspicion evaporates... that's what I think they are really afraid of.
A law that will affect innocent citizens and dumb criminals. The criminals the FBI is after will probably be aware of it and manually turn on encryption.
I wouldn't want just anyone to know my bank password for example. Even if the feds weren't going to do anything malicious with it, if *THEY* can see it, then so can people with less honorable intentions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
James Comey is
BWgSZ9ZYLw5I kmoBvJiRvnO7uQU9x6NoYlKBOaO vmb3df8lNwkgeFc30rNPB9kh09Fr61CxW24IkH3YWKRe8H YdTd8YHzpRBMQJcwyxn+O3cUPQ4sP2dN4GEA/9v17IipHz12Bon8o7dc0o8UaOj3tl Pr19cq3meoufARx7PLJ0SKclb3LG7SxW+GTISS1cRGpDRr d0NvdC8lHHkfyDx5YGnIp DUgQa9lMCpQbHSln40 LCosKrQamj4Ni27wIbikaSWV+IiDsn jyfc7eLKlq QSOgCFzMsBglGzC2+j9HifrKU/z9Fzc8HZ3UiaQahMiOj EnohZdYQqCdPAmeZlEkK/qaZBtwA13A BLrbolhR0C/NSgvA hPZzh7oj33/LHPY8tC TP7zXULYP/RsccmOc aS88VzbzOAaRwEf9KCu1YtKICdVyGlYhn5IN4q vM80+vNtkc0QiRUdKW
And I'll tell him that again to his FACE!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Lol, are you drunk? Most people are not going to pick up their guns an revolt against the government unless one thing happens: The government comes into THEIR town, and tries to take THEIR house/car/money/loved ones. Nobody is going to grab an AK-47 and march on Washington because the feds are reading their e-mail to grandma.
And the feds probably know it too, or else they wouldn't be doing it....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is why we need encryption to be ON by default. So we don't let these idiots use that argument. The peasant public will always fall for it, it's for the children after all.
No matter how wrong they are they will always argue that encryption is suspicious until it is always activated by default. And with Snowden's revelation that is far from unreasonable to expect that from our software.
When it's your job to catch bad guys, everyone starts looking like a bad guy
Anyone who follows the above approach ain't not going to catch many crooks
You simply do not catch crooks by hammering everybody and their dogs
Top crime investigators throughout history don't treat everybody like criminal. Instead, they put themselves in the shoes of the criminals so that they can get to see what the criminals see, think what the criminals think, and understand what the criminals gonna do next ... and then all they have to do is to set a trap for those criminals
And in the case of this so-called 'chief' of FBI, all I can say that under his tutelage FBI ain't going to achieve anything meaningful
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In order to trade off some of A to get some of B, you have to actually get some of B. In this case, we've given a lot of A and gotten nothing for it
I have read many comments here and what you have said is so very true I just need to add to what you have written
I came from China
I left China back in the early 1970's, way back when the entire Chinese society was in a turmoil, where nobody can live in peace because the social contract between the government and the people had broken down
A political struggle at the top echelon resulted in a power-struggle at every level, and power grab was everywhere ... the so-called 'Red Guard' was a by-product of power-grabbing exercises, mostly at the local level
Anyway, people at large in China had no say --- they kept on losing their liberty, their livelihood, even their lives, --- with some driven into madness and many simply committed suicide since they couldn't take it anymore
To put it in simple terms, to the average Chinese citizens, what they had gone through in between the late 1950's and the early 1970's was that everything they had was taken away, just like that ... yep, without any tradeoff
Now that I am an American, I am alarmed at the current development within the United States of America
The people in the USA will be facing the same thing the people in China faced, if nothing is being done to stop TPTB
What happened back in China was that there was no one who could stop Mao. Zhou En Lai tried his best to slow Mao's incessant hunger for power but he just couldn't muster enough strength to halt Mao in his track. All Zhou could do was to do patchworks here and there
Even Zhou suffered greatly during the social turmoil. His own daughter was brutally slaughtered by Jiang Qin, that feisty wife of Mao, and even with his own daughter slaughtered, Zhou couldn't do anything
The experience from China should be a lesson to the Americans ... that is, even if you have someone who has conscience INSIDE the power structure, it is still NOT ENOUGH when TPTB turns ugly
And if the Americans don't do something now --- frankly, even now, it may be too late --- they and their children will eventually be facing a similar fate the Chinese faced some 50 years ago
I certainly don't wish that to America, my adopted country, but I am afraid that too many of the Americans are way too brainwashed to be able to comprehend what is going on and what is going to come
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... with people like this in control of anything.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Remember that rancher who had SWAT teams descend on his ranch intending to kill and bury his cattle "for taxes unpaid"? His neighbors showed up with rifles and the government employees started acting more polite.
We can play the word games too. Instead of "encryption", let us start calling that kind of computing a "baroque data formatting" or something else. I am very confident coders can play much better than lawyers.
It wasn't for unpaid taxes. He was grazing on public lands and then refused to pay the grazing fees. He was basically being a mooch and the right only jumped to his defense because they could make up this story about he was a victim of government overreach.
"There has not been a tradeoff between liberty and security in our response to terrorism in this country and in our efforts to offer security to the people of the United States,
Last night the parking-lot exit from one of the terminals at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport was flooded.
This meant there were now only 2 ways to get out of the terminal: walk through the rain, or take the tram that connects the terminals.
The tram was inside security and most passengers had already existed security, either to get their bags or for other reasons.
Prior to 9/11, they had the liberty to re-enter security, take the tram to another terminal, and arrange for their ride to pick them up there.
Thanks to a "tradeoff between liberty and security" they were forced to either sit in the terminal for several hours while the flood cleared or walk out in the rain to get to another terminal (the buses that connect the terminals couldn't operate due to the floods).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
He's totally wrong about this issue. But this is the guy who stood up when Bush administration thugs (Card and Gonzales) tried to get the Justice Department to sign off on their warrantless wiretapping program. He refused, prevented them from going around him and later threatened to resign: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... You can disagree with him on encryption (and I do), but this is not a guy who has no respect for the Constitution.