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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.
You cannot restrict it, but you can make it "Illegal to use", like in Cuba.
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.
You had me until you said you plan to use Google+. Bye bye.
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.
They could simply reprogram the internet to block encrypted trafic.
Good idea - those "e-commerce" and "online banking" fads were just about done anyway.
Strong encryption use just makes a message stand out.
Years ago when Bittorrent first started encrypting traffic there were loud complaints from GCHQ and MI5 about how it was making their lives much more difficult. Previously encrypted traffic stood out and helped them, but suddenly the (bit)torrent of encrypted data was making it difficult to separate interesting traffic from pirated music and TV shows.
I'm sure they have upped their game since then, but the basic principal is sound. If everyone starts to encrypt everything all the time it becomes much harder to figure out what is interesting. It also makes them waste resources trying to store or decrypt data that turns out to be worthless. Fortunately for us more and more apps implement encryption by default.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC