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US Tech Giants Ask Obama Not To Compromise Encryption
An anonymous reader writes: Two industry bodies which represent Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and others, have written to President Obama urging that the U.S. government not seek to legislate "official back doors" into encryption techniques. The Software and Information Industry Association and the Information Technology Industry Council sent the "strongly worded" letter on Monday, saying, "Consumer trust in digital products and services is an essential component enabling continued economic growth of the online marketplace. Accordingly, we urge you not to pursue any policy or proposal that would require or encourage companies to weaken these technologies, including the weakening of encryption or creating encryption 'work-arounds.'" The letter is the latest salvo in a public battle for secure communications, one that has reached the public eye in a way that few security stories do.
Why do we need encryption rules in the TPP?
A key priority for the U.S. semiconductor industry regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement currently under negotiation has been to introduce rules to prevent restrictions on the import and use of commercial encryption technologies.
You can bet VPN and other technologies are on the plate too.
If you Google "encryption and TPP" you will find a link to the PDF without having to fill anything out.
http://go.semiconductors.org/w...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think if they can't manage to convince politicians how dangerous their plans are, there will be some TV adverts that tell the lay person in an easy to understand way what is going on and what the risks are.
If the same message is brought to people in adverts by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, and they all tell you that the politicians want to mess up your life, that would get people's attention. Not just on Slashdot.
After the last renewal of the Patriot act, wouldn't it just be easiest for the US government to name each of these companies an "ISP" so they'd be compelled to collect information on their (unencrypted) servers?
And when they ("they" being industry, in a continued response to this attack on privacy) discover the government has done this maneuver and start encrypting said servers/services end-to-end, what will be deemed an acceptable configuration for ISPs then?
The entire point of industry here is there should be no middle ground when it comes to weakening privacy. Justify your access through proper (read: Constitutional) channels, or piss off. You haven't proven that the abuse of this power is effective at doing anything but crushing consumer confidence.
No matter how well intentioned the government may be in requesting a crypto back door, all it does is open up a hole for potential criminals and state actors to steal information from individuals and corporations alike. Unless the government was somehow able to indemnify and protect all parties involved, there should be no back doors. End of story.
Wow, these idiots actually think that they will be the only ones with access to these back doors? They'd be hacked in minutes, and every secret that every American company had would be in the hands of the Chinese, Russians, and independent hackers.
These idiot authoritarians need to be taught that their idiocy KILLS American business. But then, I guess they don't care. They think they can just print their way to prosperity.
Most of the recently proposed crypto algorithms aren't American. The cat is out of the bag - crypto is an academic subject now, and everyone's participating.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
A government that does this:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
is simply no longer interested in the rule of law other than to further their handler's interests.
So, request away! Ask for a pony while you're at it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
There is no pro Microsoft bias on slashdot. /sarcasm
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Weak encryption is effectively the same as no encryption. Encryption has no value unless it cannot be broken. You cannot make encryption only weak for the "good" guys. It simply doesn't work that way and wishing will not make it otherwise. Any government official that argues in favor of weak encryption is either ignorant of how encryption works or is corrupt/self-serving and just wants their job to be easier without regard to the consequences.
Yes I am fully aware that "bad" guys having access to strong encryption presents certain challenges. However weakening your own encryption to the government can spy on the populace will not EVER solve that problem.
Would Canada under Harper and the Conservatives be that much better? His government brought forth the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act which did not mention children or predators anywhere but in the title, and would have expanded government surveillance powers had the bill not been stopped by public outcry.
Scotland would have been a good choice had the independence referendum passed. So I guess now you're going to have to learn Swedish.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What is this, the Third Reich?
How about Iceland? Lots of privacy, and plenty of cooling for data centers... Either way, when exports become hard, companies can just leave.
Why not Iceland?
Too many damned diacritical marks for one thing.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Are you saying that backdoor'ed encryption is a mathematical impossibility, or that it won't work in practice because the backdoor key will eventually leak due to hacking, rogue employees, etc?
It is almost certainly a practical impossibility and I'm confident it is a mathematical impossibility too. A key is either possible to crack in a reasonable amount of time or it isn't. There is no middle ground. You can hand a key to whomever you like but if you create the backdoor by weakening the encryption then it is weak for everyone who would be interested in cracking said encryption. If the NSA can figure it out, so can others. Furthermore, each additional party you had a key to creates another vector for attack which is the practical problem. Even if the encryption were somehow secure we know from experience that keeping the systems that store the keys secure presents some security challenges that we are in no danger of solving.
when I was a kid, this is the sort of thing I would expect to hear of the USSR... now it's here...
it seems to me that if they force backdoors or weak security, wouldn't that hurt most us based IT security vendors?... wouldn't that force any that wanted to sell internationally to relocate outside the US?
what is the point of any encryption at all if there is a backdoor built in, or it's weak to begin with....
Anyone else catch the nonsensical bomb-threat at the White House yesterday?
I was passing a TV set to CNN and that was the focus. I've not seen much about it otherwise.
But they evacuated the Press Room once or twice.
Eventually somebody stood at a podium to opine about how we all need to address this issue of Encryption because it hinders their ability to catch the bad guys when the bad guys "misuse" encryption.
I was incredibly offended at the very idea. It's so stupid - you either use it or you don't. Using encryption to keep the feds from looking over your shoulder and reading your communications is not "misuse". It's the entire purpose and absolutely correctly used as such. And in the context of the US, it would seem we have the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments to consider.
Not only was I disgusted at this moment of sheer propaganda, I found myself very inclined to believe the entire thing was completley staged.
Have they forgotten that we had multiple people over the years trying to sell/give away nuclear weapons secrets from the very beginning of the program?
And I bet for every person that would sell nuclear weapons secrets, you could find a thousand that would sell backdoor encryption keys.
How can they possibly imagine that no one could be found to divulge the backdoor for a few million dollars?
For one thing, certain Wall Street firms would have the backdoor keys within days, if not hours.
And if money didn't work, those firms aren't at all afraid to use their ex-FIS/GRU employees to do whatever it takes.