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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!”
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.
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.
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!”
"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 SHIELD.
It protects people from spies, fraudsters, and other 3 letter criminals.
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.
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
"bad guys" will continue to use home made encryption and not give a fuck what governments say.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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!
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.
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.
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 protects against thieves of commercial and industrial secrets as well. Imagine the temptation for the NSA, sell to the highest bidder on Wall Street the new prototype of an advanced machine of a European company that they just copied from an email from an executive that they were spying.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
(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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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