Obama Administration Explored Ways To Bypass Smartphone Encryption

An anonymous reader writes: According to a story at The Washington Post, an Obama Administration working group considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow the government to break encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals. The group concluded that the solutions were "technically feasible," but they group feared blowback. "Any proposed solution almost certainly would quickly become a focal point for attacks. Rather than sparking more discussion, government-proposed technical approaches would almost certainly be perceived as proposals to introduce 'backdoors' or vulnerabilities in technology products and services and increase tensions rather [than] build cooperation," said the unclassified memo. You can read the draft paper on technical options here.

Comments

If they can break it, ANYONE can break it

[kheldan]

..and at that point it's useless. By all means, try to break it; if you can then that means it needs to be improved.

Obama is All About Transparency!

[Irate Engineer]

Unfortunately he was thinking of one-way glass with the ability to look into our affairs.

Re:I predict the future of a government API

[Attila Dimedici]

You seem to be missing the same thing the idiots trying to get this in place miss. If this gets implemented, it won't just be the governments with access...and because the people trying to implement this will want to be able to spy on people in government, it will be on government computers. If this gets implemented (and it may already be partially implemented), the world will get very ugly indeed, including for the people proposing it.