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Governments of the World Agree: Encryption Must Die!
Lauren Weinstein writes: Finally! There's something that apparently virtually all governments around the world can actually agree upon. Unfortunately, it's on par conceptually with handing out hydrogen bombs as lottery prizes. If the drumbeat isn't actually coordinated, it might as well be. Around the world, in testimony before national legislatures and in countless interviews with media, government officials and their surrogates are proclaiming the immediate need to "do something" about encryption that law enforcement and other government agencies can't read on demand.
Apropos: This IT World story (and the New York Times piece it draws from — also published today) about a newly disclosed NSA program through which the agency is "reportedly intercepting Internet communications from U.S. residents without getting court-ordered warrants."
as people start to use steganographic methods.
Governments of the world must die!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
think of the children!
The main link for this article is to what amounts to an opinion piece on some person's blog - it's completely unsourced, and really isn't news at all. The part about the NSA monitoring domestic internet communications without a warrant is probably a story, but it's tacked on to this blog post for no reason.
Finally! There's something that apparently virtually all people around the world can actually agree upon. Unfortunately, it's on par conceptually with handing out hydrogen bombs as lottery prizes. If the drumbeat isn't actually coordinated, it might as well be.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Copy protection often uses a form of encryption. Do they want this to be banned as well?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Governments of the world come get me! My name is Anonymous Coward and I am legion.
In case you thought something happened, it didn't. All that showboating you saw in congress was exactly that.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sorry, election results all over say exactly the opposite.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...can never die.
"ohh no, encryption is terrism"
"clearing your browser history is destroying evimadence"
"don't video me while I'm beating this black man"
"the fourth amendment is a obsolete holdover from the 19th century"
Put on your big girl pants and do you fucking job by the book you shifty slackers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Encryption is a weapon. Like other weapons, it can be used to defend one's own self or someone else, and to commit murder. Like other weapons, it is dangerous and governments hate it like they hate all weapons — they make governing harder.
So, it is not surprising to see governments agreeing here.
What is surprising is to find other Statists — those enablers of the governments' mission-creeps, the lovers of taxes (with which they are "happy" to "buy civilization") to suddenly disagree.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Oh, please, CaptainDork, let us keep a certain politeness on Slashdot. That's MISTER (or MISS) Anonymous Cowardly Bastard(ess) to you.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Have a good day, Sir.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Government desires to disable or thwart encryption run contrary to the highest law of many of the nations saying they can't allow privacy.
A case in point: Canada.
Just because people want something doesn't mean it's legal for the Government to violate it's Constitution in thwarting it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Who is responsibleeee? Ze US?
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/04/us-officials-massive-breach-federal-personnel-data/
We'll just create new encryption mechanisms anyhow. After all, if somebody not the intended recipient can read it, what's the point?
https://youtu.be/2yQgbYL4bIE
@Random_Adam
Sometimes a sig doesn't have to be funny!!
That is also why good posts here are now destroyed and hidden by the new CONservative rulers here. They hate us. They don't want to give us a voice. They take our voice. They hate us. Good posts here now are always marked down to a -1 while the idiot Republicans that toe the line are rewarded. So rewarded. This site has been destroyed.
how about "The Greatest Story Never Told" 6 hour DVD documentary, viewable online for free?
Yes, blocking encryption might make it easy to catch low hanging fruit, but it will win a battle or two and lose the war. ISIS and Al Qaeda do quite well in communications with just old fashioned courier services.
Lets say that the US signs a treaty with other nations (treaties override the US constitution as per precedent) banning all forms of crypto completely except say, Clipper 2.0 and SkipJack 2.0. The bad guys who wind up not caring that their private keys get sucked out and used against them will get nailed at first.
However, the real bad guys will just start going back to tried and true methods which worked perfectly to coordinate criminal activity for centuries before computers and portable devices came along. Yes, location monitoring might help with HUMINT, but as Iraq and ISIS has shown, extremely low tech means have gotten a group of insurgents armed with little more than pickup trucks, AKs and insane levels of brutality to actually form a caliphate which Europe officially recognizes as a sovereign nation and trading partner.
Then, there is the distrust factor. If only key escrow remains, who owns the master keys? If China does, US interests would be destroyed, like the solar panel industry. Eventually nations will keep encryption just so they are not vulnerable to other nations.
Finally, there is the DRM factor. If cryptography is banned, how can console makers keep selling $300 worth of crap for an eight-hour playing game and make money? How do they protect 5k video streams from pirates? Outlaw encryption in the US, China will have it. DRM requires strong crypto, and the big companies know it.
That's a great description of authoritarian libtards who silence anyone who doesn't agree with them by shouting them down or through censorship.
Government is inherently anti-privacy. We create governments in part to provide ourselves with a mechanism to deal fairly with sensitive matters.
That's why government needs to be kept small. Big governments run amok and abuse their power. Just like big corporations, big churches and all the big things you hate. Except you have been trained not to recognize this characteristic in government, and to hate anyone that points it out.
The reason we have secret fleets of FBI surveillance aircraft, NSA digging around in your email+phone+web, CPFB digging around your finances and all the other heinous crap our government is doing is because you have been trained to think the world is intolerable without millions upon millions of over-paid, over-funded government minders enforcing all sorts of prerogatives and doling out all sorts of benefits that you and others insist on.
So enjoy. It's all on you. All of it. And when they outlaw encryption that's on you as well. And there is no copping out with "reform." You de-fund them and send them packing or you live under their thumb. That's all there is.
There is no picking and choosing either; you show me someone that thinks NSA snooping is criminal I'll show you someone that thinks the "protection" provided by the CPFB spinal tap into the finances of the Western world are fabulous. In the end if you have either you have both. It is the natural, inherent, inevitable outcome of big government.
just think of all the personal info that would be flying around the internets in the clear, including credit card and banking info, i doubt that encryption will die anytime soon
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm female and married you insensitive clod!
It's Mrs. Anonymously Cowardess Bastardess.
"bad guys" will continue to use home made encryption and not give a fuck what governments say.
It is obvious for some time now.
ISIS and Al Qaeda do quite well in communications with just old fashioned courier services.
I thought they used smoke signals:
No smoke: wazzuuup! Takin' the day off.
1 Big puff of smoke: Yep - new detonator design works.
2 Big puffs of smoke: Ali who got sick the other day, is feeling okay again.
3 Big puffs of smoke: That new recruit seems very proficient in mixing the chemicals.
4 Big puffs of smoke: Wtf... who else is making bombs?!?
Big puffs of smoke everywhere: Sh** we're being bombed!
How do you figure? In the U.S. the people routinely split the power so they can battle it out to a standstill. Often, on purpose.
Meanwhile, where not voting is legal, it's quite common and few think less of the non-voters.
They only want non-government use of encryption to die.
"US Office of Personnel Management Hacked Again"
Oh fucking hell, quick, you guys, turn the encryption back on again! crap crap crap, on noes! Too late, we suck
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I'll favor banning encryption IF the governments themselves also stop using secure communications methods.
If they have done nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.
That's not highly likely, however.
This Freedom and Democracy thing was worth a shot -- but let's be honest it just hasn't been working for some time now. And to frank, it just gets in the way of the efficient consolidation of power and wealth
If there's one thing we learned from Hitler and Stalin is that they were AWESOME!
Indeed. The parent comment is an interesting exploration of what would happen if encryption vanished overnight, but that simply won't happen. Crypto is out of the bag, and it's not going to go away. Bad guys won't obey the laws.
hidden by the new CONservative rulers here
Meanwhile the top modded and most visible post in this story is an anti-LEO spiel that would be groupthink approved on any libtard site you care to name.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
>that sprung forth from the disastrously misguided policies of Bush 1 and Bush 2 era right-wing neocons -- who not only set the stage for the resurrection of >long-suppressed religious rivalries, but ultimately provided them with billions of dollars worth of U.S. weaponry as well. Great job there, guys.
Pointless stupid political bias that loses your creditability and thus my interest to read further. Great job there, Lauren.
I'm so sick of stupid click-bate articles on /.
Guess I oughta see what's on read https://soylentnews.org/
Caitlyn!
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
spain and russia handle d the issue more discretely then and now.
Unencrypt everything. Come governments show some integrity? Wait that is risky and would let those who do harm exploit you? Then why don't let others do the same?
http://saveie6.com/
Is it a fallacy?
Felons, by law, can't have guns. Felons kill other felons with guns in the inner city all the time.
Drugs, by law, are illegal. Criminals (by virtue of using drugs) continue to use illegal drugs and overdose on illegal drugs.
I don't think they're embracing any particular fallacy by saying something along the lines of "People who do not currently recognize the authority of [x] will continue to disregard the fiats passed by authority [x]."
Encryption (without back doors) for use by governments is absolutely essential to national security.
zacpijlpjmn xjcpjmpt pjwioqmxaj, jaf mkpo fxnk mkpo txt jam. vaa-kaa.
hint: a = o
FUCK OFF and DIE
that is all
They are actually okay with just the bad guys using it because they can have the computing power and attack vectors to break small amounts of encryption (and they'll be able to narrow down who the bad guys are). It's only when everyone uses that it becomes a problem for surveillance.
Now, you may instead think I have that wrong, that actually it was the decryption efforts of the Allies against both the Japanese and Germans that won the war, and you'd be right.
But, I'd also argue that it was the better encryption algorythms and the inability of the Japanese and Germans to defeat them that allowed the Allies to win.
If the Japanese and Germans were able to trivially read our messages, a lot of really nasty things would have happened, and it would have gone a long way to helping them win the war.
I believe having good, strong, ubiquitous encryption leads to a free, just, and strong democratic society. Trample on my freedoms if you must, but don't come complaining to me when your nice democratic society suddenly turns into anarchy and you can no longer drive your bently down the street without being fire bombed by the local mob.
If encryption is outlawed, the no binary computer code should be allowed with out the source code.
And a testsuite should be provided to ensure it is operating correctly.
All computer hardware should have schematics, timing charts, and a complete service manual.
All mechanical devices should include a blueprint and shop manual.
All politicians finances, meetings, votes, lobbying activities, should be transparent, wether in office or campaining !
And DNA can NO be copyrighted, we all share the same codebase !
People are not created equally (physical or mental ), but we want to be treated equally by our social laws !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
The second amendment exists. The founding fathers would be shooting by now. Also, you're a pussy.
Felons kill other felons with guns in the inner city all the time.
Clearly, the problem is that there is such a thing as an "inner city" in the first place. Get rid of those, and no one will ever die by being shot in "the inner city".
"...need to 'do something' about encryption..."
I agree. My suggestion for "something" is "bend over and grab your ankles".
Well, if encryption is illegal they can just bust em for that and drop em in a hole until they give up their keys.
If they do NOT give up their keys, they stay in the hole.
Yes, blocking encryption might make it easy to catch low hanging fruit, but it will win a battle or two and lose the war. ISIS and Al Qaeda do quite well in communications with just old fashioned courier services.
isis and al qaeda? you're watching way too much television, son.
If cryptography is banned, how can console makers keep selling $300 worth of crap for an eight-hour playing game and make money?
read tfa. this is about some complete morons' desire to make ciphered communication between users transparent to agencies, which is suicidal.
No matter how benign or well intentioned the governments might be (and I don't allege that they are, but even if they were)... they cannot stop absolutely everyone who is intent on disregarding the law from doing so before they have potentially caused damage or done real harm.
Utilizing encryption that the government cannot break is no more of an announcement that one might be doing something illegal than wearing clothes in public is necessarily an announcement that there is something somehow physically wrong with a person's body (leaving aside the notion that there might be something wrong, my point is only that it is not a remotely infallible conclusion from the premise).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
how do you know that something is encrypted? I send send any number of things over the Internet that might appear to be encrypted objects. You going to bust everyone who sends data over the net in a format you aren't familiar with?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"a caliphate which Europe officially recognizes as a sovereign nation and trading partner"
I've seen this nonsense on here before. Where does it come from?
oh shit, now they are going to ban pencils. Thanks, Jane Q. for ruining pencils for us, this is why we cant have nice things....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
> treaties override the US constitution as per precedent ...
No. Only in certain very limited cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
From that article: "No agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution."
And,
"The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government."
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Oh well then she has a wiki page. Just like Omarosa.
But... to use key escrow, I presume you have to go to some trouble to get the key from escrow and apply it to specific people. unless of course the escrow is a ruse for just decrypting everything.
Time for the governments to die.
Really, the government is supposed to fear its citizens, not the other way around...
I'm with you brother! Man the barricades!
...just as soon as I've got paid this month so I can make my mortgage payment, queued up for the latest iShiny and watched the new series of XFactor.
No government will ever tolerate free speech. Despite the dreadful power in hand all governments fear the light of day and communications of the public.
They'll crow for this until it happens.
Then they'll want it back because they realize it was protecting their bank account. ...and their e-mail. ...and their Google Docs. ...and their porn stash.
You can't ban guns because the cops need them too.
You are modded down because you are a lying idiotic bigot. Suck it up asshole.
ISIS and Al Qaeda aren't the threats anti-encryption movement is intended to fight. As economy fares worse and worse, people are getting tired of watching the fat cats get richer while they're facing ever more severe austerity and insecurity. We're headed for another age of revolution, and the top dogs are building their bunkers.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
isis and al qaeda? you're watching way too much television, son.
You're spending too much time hanging out at the lit table on the mall.
We know; she's cute. That doesn't mean you should believe everything printed on the leaflets she gives out.
I am all for 33-1/3 revolutions per minute.
Spin in place, revolution brother. Spin in place.
This isn't about organised bad guys at this stage. It's about control over normal individuals.
NSA methods of collecting data en masse and parsing it automatically for certain elements is becoming hugely widespread after Snowden's revelations, as you can only fight that kind of fire with similar fire on state level.
And wide;y used encryption used encryption cripples NSA-style methods, as automatic parsing becomes unfeasible in light of computational/subversive power needed to crack the encryption.
And who is selling guns to these felons, and why aren't they prosecuted?
Oh, most guns used by felons are "stolen". Why not make it illegal to not secure your guns, the same way it's illegal to leave the keys in your (running) car.
Learn to love Alaska
(treaties override the US constitution as per precedent)
Wrong.
I often wonder what possesses people to make blatantly inaccurate statements, such as yours here, on Slashdot. So help me out. Did you just make that up and assume it's true because it made sense to you, are you deliberately misinforming people, or are you some sort of crank?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
If encryption, a mathematical method to protect information, can't be used because the user "could" be using it to hide illegal things
mm ... stop being a human being.
Why did I read your response in the voice of The Dude..
The "trouble" is minimal. The encryption is identifiable by its public keys, especially when the "keys" are nailed to the motherboard by programls like "Trusted Computing" and held by Microsoft in their "escrow", with no policy of resisting any requests whatsoever. Examine the pratices and policy of that technology carefully: it's not aimed at protecting users, it's aimed at both DRM and at making documents _traceable_ to specific sources.
(...) but as Iraq and ISIS has shown, extremely low tech means have gotten a group of insurgents armed with little more than pickup trucks, AKs and insane levels of brutality to actually form a caliphate which Europe officially recognizes as a sovereign nation and trading partner.
You're going to have to provide sources for this as it's a rather plain accusation of supporting terrorism. As an European, I'm not pleased at all of someone spewing bullshit about Europe recognizing ISIS as anything more than a bunch of backward barbarian.
[...] a group of insurgents armed with little more than pickup trucks, AKs and insane levels of brutality to actually form a caliphate which Europe officially recognizes as a sovereign nation and trading partner.
Do you have any proof for this statement (that Europe recognizes ISIS)?
If not: Stop spreading such BS.
"bad guys" will continue to use home made encryption and not give a fuck what governments say.
Heh Heh.
"You SHOULD roll your own encryption, and you can't be too careful so don't forget to make your own PRNG too." -- Well Funded Intelligence Agency
I made that up. But you know it's true.
Which points to exactly what the surveillance is all about, nothing to do with terrorist and everything to do with crushing political activism, silencing the voice of the people under the threat of anything they say could be used to destroy them and their families. Just as the US Federal government under that slimey POS Uncle Tom surveilled, attacked and persecuted via false prosecution out of existence, the occupy wall street movement.
Nothing at all to do with crime and everything to do with again silencing the voice of the majority, censorship, surveillance of that censorship and following up with prosecution as punishment to silence dissent. The corporate masters declaring their right to secrecy and privacy whilst demanding access to everyone's else's lives in order to enslave and control them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"bad guys" will continue to use home made encryption and not give a fuck what governments say.
Luckily for us, they are often not Vigeneres when they do it. At least one (and I vaguely remember reading about another) of the big mafia bosses was caught because he sent his messages using a substitution cypher.
Why doing so complicated and tricky as to build your own crypto? The source code of GnuPG, TextSecure, TrueCrypt and other well-known crypto programs are widely available. One only has to take the old version without the backdoor, or rip out the backdoor. There will be underground developers enough who will do that.
Escrow is soo 1990's. With perfect forward secrecy, there is no single key to escrow. Even if I would cooperate, there is no way I would be able to help someone decrypt my intercepted old TextSecure messages or Redphone calls.
Maybe the internet services and banks should not use it exclusive for em.
Actually the OP was using modus tollens, which is not fallacious at all.
You are confused.
The only encryption that the gov't want to stop is when it is used by individuals.
Corporations and governments still get to use high-quality, secure encryption.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Europe does not recognise IS, either as a sovereign nation or a trading partner. For one thing, "Europe" is not an entity. Do you mean each individual nation in Europe? The European Union? The European Economic Area? The European Free Trade Association?
For another, no individual state and no European organisation has recognised IS.
Then you go to jail. Simple as that. Make a good example of some misguided subject - er, citizen - and the rest will fall in line.
..a caliphate which Europe officially recognizes as a sovereign nation and trading partner.
I mean bureaucrats of EU are senile and corrupt but they still have not stumbled on ISIS.
If Governments want to ban encryption, then they themselves should not be allowed to use encryption. Governments are acting on behalf of their nation, so their citizens should have to right to know everything that they are doing in our name.
No one should have it, or everyone should have it. Anything in between is bad news.
There are fewer bad guys than ordinary people. If using cryptography means being flagged as a "bad guy" with all the unpleasant and life-altering consequences that follow, people will steer clear of encryption and behave as if they were under constant surveillance, which is exactly the goal of the whole business: not bagging some "bad guys" but keeping the populace under strict control.
I just sent an Email to Bruce Schneier on this issue and I guess it makes sense to add it to this discussion:
Hello Bruce,
I see you recently take part in the crypto and cyber war discussion.
I think it is important to look at history: Military Intelligence/General Staffs have been covertly reading letters probably since letters were sent by courier. Something like 1550 A.D. or probably earlier. The U.S. general staff were reading telegrams since the 1920s. The Austrian Empire had a "black chamber" for covertly opening and re-sealing letters 200 years ago. So did the British and the Russians. Maria Stuart was sentenced to death on the basis of an opened letter sent to an agent provocateur. The U.S. gained a superior negotiating position by reading ciphered japanese telegrams in the 1920s in the fleet size limitation talks.
Now, I am quite positive we COULD design+build un-hackable operating systems, CPUs, USB-like interfaces, ethernet interfaces, RAMs and so on. See the L4 operating system, which attempts to prove correct the entire operating system kernel. INRIA has attempted to mathematically prove correct a C compiler.
Also, we need to get rid of using the C language ASAP. In practical use it is a hellhole of insecurity. Both Apple and Mozilla are doing excellent work with the Swift and Rust languages. These languages are "memory safe", which eliminates about 50% of exploits in the CVE database.
BUT - if there were a truely secure computer/OS/compiler on the free market, this would enable everybody to build encrypted communications endpoints aka. "cipher machines". The U.S. general staff would be mightily offended by millions of arabs having a "strong" cipher machine in their homes. So they currently facilitate the subversion of the Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Solaris kernels by covert means (double-paid software engineers in these projects).
We all know this is a dangerous thing and the "cyber war domain" is essentially un-controllable.
Still, we need to address the "strong cipher machine" issue, or they (governments/general staffs) will continue to subvert commercial IT systems.
So maybe "key escrow" would not be a too bad thing after all. Because that would enable the respective(!) national intelligence/police agencies to look into communications without having to resort to making operating systems and hardware insecure.
For example, if you make an HTTPS connection from America to Egypt, both NSA and Egypt intelligence would get a copy of your HTTPS session key. It would be encrypted once with the public key of NSA and once with the public key of egypt's intelligence service. Both key-cryptograms would be sent along with the HTTPS session.
If you sent a message inside Germany, only the BND or BKA (something like the FBI) would receive your HTTPS session key.
As long as the IT thinkers are dogmatic about this issue, the government will simply run over our interests.
Kind regards
XXXXXXXXXXXX
I had this idea of not revealing my IP address to everybody in order to keep some privacy in IRC (and probably to remove at least some port-knocking from the server). Now, for that I need to be in TOR network, making me a criminal (at least some think so). I understand the Internet is was originally academic so there really was no need for "privacy". On the other hand the proponents of encryption are those doing criminal acts AND those who just don't want to share everything with everybody else.
I am afraid of being in the "criminal" group being hunted by the cops, I just need to keep my basic information "hidden". Only 1% of IRC activity is done in TOR and probably because of criminal activity (i.e. not to be seen by the cops). I felt I was in the wrong territory so I just chickened out of it, period. No matter what the "free speech" proponents thinks, TOR was not a solution for me (and I bet GPG/PGP won't be either).
Any be extension, anyone not obeying the law is a bad guy. It's just another law to use against citizens they don't like, i.e. the ones who care about privacy. Encrypted files found on your computer, planted or real, will be evidence of terrorism. Naturally the laws will be anti-terror laws, not just regular criminal laws, and so by definition anyone who violates them is a terrorist.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I see this problem similar to the "let's Skype" slogan when needing to do some peer-to-peer IP chat. You can select something else than Skype but you will be the one doing all the dirty work of teaching how to use "your own alternative". And most could care less, they just want "things that just work". If it sounds complicated or not working out-of-the-box, if it offers no real benefits, it's probably because you have something to hide... Basically the story of IPv6 vs. IPv4 too (minus the "IP addresses will end Soon").
well the documentation is already out there for various crypto algorithms and there are a number of open source implementations to look at so it isn't like this is an impossible task. Also given that these people are already doing something illegal what is to stop them from violating the GPL or just saying fuck it and using a real encryption program.
Time to offend someone
I've always heard that one has no duty to arrange one's affairs to optimize the amount of tax a govt collects.
I don't see why one should have to arrange one's affairs to optimize the visibility of what one does.
Both because it seems right and because anything else won't work except for really dumb bad guys.
Kind of like gun laws don't prevent bad guys from having guns.
Actually, that rule doesn't seem to work very well for the dumb bad guys either.
Jura rapelcgvba vf onaarq, bayl pevzvanyf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The hypocrisy of governments is that they don't want to use key escrow - it's too much trouble. They would just rather collect everyone's underwear.
> the same way it's illegal to leave the keys in your (running) car.
Because most cars are stolen these days by people breaking in to the house and taking the keys off the key chain by the door. Or, just by hitting you upside the head and taking your keys. Same rules apply for guns.
when encryption is outlawed, only the outlaws will have encryption.
+1 Sad but True?
Currently, encryption foes normally points to any given scapegoats. The favorites can vary from locale to locale, but in the US, the big money is in "pedophiles" (they don't normally need to confuse anyone by pretending these are child molesters: apparently pedos are some kinds of Masturbation Wizards, harming children remotely by fapping), and "terrorists", in quotes because while it ostensibly includes ACTUAL terrorists, the powers and surveillance required inevitably are overly inclusive and often aimed at fringe groups that are opposed to something the audience is in favor of (ex: point to animals rights activists if your audience is conservative, point to 70s radicals [some of whom WERE terrorists] and extrapolate that some loud liberal today is the same thing).
But the big push will eventually involve fear of biological weaponry. Bioweapons threaten to become an asymmetric terror tool, but the FEAR of it, and DISCUSSION of it, will quickly quash any and all pro-privacy resistance. A couple small bio attacks will change the face of this debate utterly. Hopefully that doesn't happen but... I mean, it just seems likely, on a moderately long time scale.
...inane comments instead rational thought.
Wonder no longer: the locals call it "Florida."
...big brother subverts your Operating System Kernel. Apparently they already collect HUGE amounts of ssh key material this way. Automated. Millions of keys. Maybe Billions. Snowden was careful not to expose how they kidnap this key material. But he disclosed that they have industrialized it.
So, what do you prefer ? A hairball of "secret exploits" (aka "cyber war domain" or "everybody can poison the well") or a transparent system where you KNOW what happens ?
We have to strike a deal with the most powerful organizations which EXIST. Much more powerful than any kind of Richard Stallman or Tim Cook.
Is it freedom that must die or the governments?
Which is why gun safes are required by law in many places. If they break in when you aren't there, they aren't getting the guns. If they hit you over the head to take them, you report it and it's treated seriously.
Learn to love Alaska
the fact that the idea "make strong encryption illegal / impossible" isn't laughed right out of the room before the sentence was finished might hint at a big global event on the horizon. ... like on a global scale? .. errr... surpressed.
maybe a massive global shifting of the landmasses?
maybe the idea that tectonic plates don't really shift one or 2 cm meter over time but can actually make huge jumps
like that recent movie is like a ANT version to the real thing?
maybe this information needs to be controlled
also weak encryption doesn't exist. it should be called "difficult plain-text".
What planet do you live on? The inner city is gentrified and is a desirable place to live. Felons live in the outer suburbs, now.
- compression with a pre-shared lookup-table?
- data obfuscation using a undocumented compression-algo?
- data obfuscation using a undocumented protocol?
- rot13?
- any encryption-algorithm they (or you) cannot brake within 30 minutes on fairly modern computer?
The only time you will find a Statist (usually these days the political Left) recommend encryption is when they can suggest using their "special approved brand" which they can back-door. You know: government-approved encryption algorithms.
If you trust Government to regulate your encryption, you are a fool. I really don't know a better, more polite, or more subtle way to say it and still be honest. For decades now the U.S. government has consistently PROVED in is untrustworthy in this regard.
Find a good, non-gov encryption tool and stick with it. (TrueCrypt has proven to be good. No significant faults found by independent body, anyway.)
F&#^$ OFF and die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Treaties do not override and cannot amend the Constitution and they may be nullified by statute. What they do allow is limited power to a federal government outside of its enumerated powers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Probably some Russian right wing propaganda, as part of their preparation to reunite with their Aryan brothers in the future Republic of Germany of the Russian Federation.
Wait, what did I just do? Doh..