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Encryption Rights Community: Protecting Our Rights To Strongly Encrypt
Lauren Weinstein writes: Around the world, dictatorships and democracies alike are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand. Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism by not making their users' communications available to law enforcement on demand. Increasingly, governments that have proven incapable of protecting their own systems from data thefts are calling for easily abused, technologically impractical government "backdoors" in commercial encryption that would put all private communications at extreme risk of attacks. This new G+ community will discuss means and methods to protect our rights related to encrypted communications, unfettered by government efforts to undermine our privacy in this context.
I can't imagine any scenarios where any government could practically restrict encryption at all.
Parrrrrtaaaay!
it's on its own.
The first sentence in the summary needs a slight correction.
It reads, "Around the world, dictatorships and democracies alike are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand."
It should say, "Around the world, dictatorships and democracies with governments wanting to become dictatorships are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand."
The question is, of course, rhetorical. One generally wears clothes around other people not because there anything (necessarily) wrong with what is underneath the clothing, but because they cover something that most people consider private.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Lets pretend for a moment that government-mandated backdoors don't violate our 4 amendment rights eight ways till Friday and really will be only accessible to government agencies. (Background sniggering) Stay with me guys. Let's say their birthday wish is granted and all of the big tech companies implement backdoor decryption that only they can access.
Do they really think a single @#$%ing terrorist or criminal with half a brain is actually going to use those services instead of other alternatives? Maybe the next part of their amazingly forward-thinking plan is to convince Richard Stallman to bend a knee and put a backdoor in GnuPG.
This isn't about strong encryption. This is about encryption. This is about talking in code. This is about art that is too subtle for anyone but those who hold sufficient intellectual keys to understand. This is about telling twins that the weird childhood language they developed is criminal because the feds don't have a decoder ring for it yet. This is about Holmes zone of lawlessness in his handwritten journals stored in his some, leveraging fourth ammendment protections to more efficiently kill more people. This is about liberty having a price. This is about the good aspects of democracy requiring an unfettered conversation of free speech to achieve the best ends for its constituents.
Jesus Christ, they can fscking implant passive radar reflecting bugs in usb ports and cables, and cut through buggy ass closed source firmwares like a hot knife through butter. This is Orwellian theatre. This is a bad joke. This is about entrapment, temptation, sin, and religious blackmail throughout the ages past and the ages to come. Wake up folks, read between the lines. The new normal is colorblind gender-neutral corruption. But who knows, maybe with a few more decades of progress towards eradicating widespread casual spousal abuse, maybe we can get to work on sane understandings of cybersecurity for the masses. But they aren't ready to understand yet.
... fucking G+.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The last sentence of the summary was awesomely qualified:
This new G+ community will discuss means and methods to protect our rights related to encrypted communications, unfettered by government efforts to undermine our privacy in this context.
They had to really stretch that sentence to get around the irony of hosting a privacy advocacy group on Google's servers!
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Its the best way to take a poll for the G-men.
What about the right to NOT ENCRYPT everything and still have privacy? The right to expect your spook agency to work to protect your privacy right from spying by foreign countries?
No just foreign countries too. Why should the existing government be able to spy on every up coming politician, political campaign group, journalist, MP, congressman? How is it any of the governments business to watch the communications of its citizens and opponents?
This "you are all terrorists" ergo we spy on you, and "we are all good" ergo we spy in secret with secret laws and secret interpretations of words, how is this defendable?
Talking about privacy on a Google service...
You had me until you said you plan to use Google+. Bye bye.
If a big company has control over everyone's devices, and it takes extreme measures to transfer that control to their owners which few people are capable of taking, then in effect there are a few central places to control the software everybody can run. If something disappears from that vendor's app store, it might as well not exist for 99.99% of the population.
It is CRITICAL to fight against this trend of yanking control of computing devices away from people and placing it with a few companies that, no matter how well intentioned, can be leaned on so hard by major governments that they are unable to resist.
The only safety and guarantee of always being able to use strong encryption lies in decentralization of power.
This is the same tired argument used by the government to "protect us" against "terrorists". And thus the birth of the TSA and Homeland Security. Another bloated bureaucracy that has been an abject failure by every measure. Billions of taxpayer dollars wasted every year and the "war on terror" is no closer to being won than the day it started. Kind of like the war on poverty, but that's another topic for another day.
I don't trust the government having this information and I sure don't trust them to secure it. Just ask the 21.5 million people that had their personal information stolen from government servers recently at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Vulnerabilities on those systems were known since 2007 and yet nothing was done to fix it. As usual, the initial breach was downplayed and otherwise covered up.
So by my count the government:
a) ignored reports that the data was vulnerable
b) did nothing to protect it
c) lied about the true scope of the attack and
d) tried to cover it up after the fact.
And I'm supposed to trust these clowns to have encryption back doors so they can snoop around with my private data? Not bloody likely.
Ima get snuffed 'cause I aint said enough to pipe down
I pipe down when the White House is whipped out
When I see that lil' Cheney dike get snipped out
Lights out, bitch, adios, goodnight
Now put that in your lil' pipe and bite down
Think for a minute 'cause the hype has died down
That I wont go up in the Oval Office right now
And flip whatever aint tied down upside down
Im all for America, fuck the Government
Tell that C. Doloris Tucker slut to suck a dick
Motherfucker, duck, what the fuck, son of a bitch
Take away my gun, I'm gonna tuck some other shit
First, suggesting that encryption is too strong merely says that it is "strong enough to be a problem"... thus advertises its potential effectiveness.
Second, the business community will not and cannot tolerate losing the ability to encrypt while also using the public internet synchronize their databases and handle communications.
Third, who are they actually trying to stop from using encryption? The corps respond to court orders quite readily so a bypass is not required. They're doing this because criminals, terrorists, and other people that are either more overtly hostile or who have nothing to lose by refusing to cooperate are using the technology. The idea thus is to compromise the technology of the enemy by compromising the technology in general. However they have failed to grasp the first rule of criminals... THEY DON"T FOLLOW THE LAW. Which means they'll use an illegal version of the encryption to encrypt. And... sure you could cite them for using banned technology but you won't get the data. Which means this ENTIRE anti encryption campaign is little more than an admission of stupidity.
I want to know who personally is pushing this... because whomever they are... they are fools.
The complaint advertises for the effectiveness of the encryption, the power interests in the West that ultimately make everything work will not permit their encryption to be compromised, and the fucking people they want to actually compromise with this policy will be completely uneffected because they don't follow the fucking rules in the first place.
Thus... whomever is pushing this... is an idiot or a fool... or both.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm assuming this is a steganographic tour de force, meant to illustrate a method to hide even the existence of a message from our unwelcome network-snooping overlords, using either missing words or grammatical errors to cue the clued-in reader to the real message.
However, either:
a) I just can't crack the code, or :)
b) I'm giving you too much credit.
Anyone else want to take a crack at this?
Just another proletarian malcontent.
The boogie monster of rap,
Yeah the man's back
With a plan to ambush this Bush administration,
Mush the Senate's face in and push this generation,
Of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I sprang with the quickness like lightning, disappeared. I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said, "fresh", and it had dice in the mirror. If anything, I could say that this cab was rare. But I thought, "Nah, forget it"--"Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you, yo home to Bel-Air."
Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word, you, who sleep at our vigil and fast for our feast, you with your dislocated reason, have cutely foretold, a jophet in your own absence, by blind poring upon your many scalds and burns and blisters, impetiginous sore and pustules, by the auspices of that raven cloud, your shade, and by the auguries of rooks in parlament, death with every disaster, the dynamatisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst but it never stphruck your mudhead's obtundity (O hell, here comes our funeral! O pest, I'll miss the post!) that the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you cry over, the more bullbeef you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier fumes your new Irish stew
Solved in approximately 42 seconds.
Further, such a system could theoretically be programmed to determine if you are under duress, and not permit access in such circumstances.
Even threatening to throw a person in jail if they don't surrender their password wouldn't help in such a case... all that they would accomplish is putting a person in jail and still not having access to whatever information they thought was worth putting someone in jail for, and keeping someone in jail isn't free, by the way, and at some point it will cross the threshold of making even the slightest economic sense to do so, even if they tried to increase taxation levels to pay for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The secret content within never will be revealed.
The metaphor would be funny if it weren't so sad.
Serious message to that G+ community. If you're serious about privacy, then hold your meetings elsewhere. Not only does it send the wrong message to be doing this at Google, but what's worse, it shows that you are in denial of the very premise that user privacy deserves protection.
Only the blindest of Google fanbois refuse to see the company as a major advocate of privacy denial when Eric Schmidt makes it so plain that he is devoted to ending privacy. The conflict of interest couldn't be greater.
Good statement!
The attempted limits on encryption are of a kind with (unconstitutional) attempts to restrict citizens from keeping and bearing weapons.
The very same loving, caring, and benevolent government, that provides our children with "free" public schools, is also the one with a Federal Department of Education having its own SWAT team.
Other examples abound. You can not claim consistency in your thoughts, if you approve of one, but not the other...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Aren't we protected against self incrimination?
Assuming they don't outlaw random messages.
So if the government asks us whether this was random data or an encrypted message. Aren't we allowed to respond with: "I refuse to respond to this question on the grounds it might incriminate me."
...buy an Enigma.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
ENCRYPTION IS RACIST!!!11!!
There, now the campaign to ban it will gain unstoppable momentum.
Now where can I get my six figure policy consultant gig??????
Whooooooosh!
"... these initiatives try to ensure the government's ability to conduct electronic surveillance. Some dangerously Orwellian assumptions are at work here: that the government has the right to listen to private communications, and that there is something wrong with a private citizen trying to keep a secret from the government. Law enforcement has always been able to conduct court-authorized surveillance if possible, but this is the first time people have been forced to take active measures to make themselves available for surveillance." - Bruce Schneier (1994)
"Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures14 , shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue15 , but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I strongly feel that "secure in their...papers" means strong encryption. In the US. The end.
What a bunch-a-punks
If they could, they'd ban opaque envelopes and envelopes with adhesive seals.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.