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Manhattan DA Pressures Google and Apple To Kill Zero Knowledge Encryption (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a speech to the 6th Annual Financial Crimes and Cybersecurity Symposium, New York County District Attorney for Manhattan Cyrus Vance Jr. has appealed to the tech community — specifically citing Google and Apple — to "do the right thing" and end zero-knowledge encryption in mobile operating systems. Vance Jr. praised FBI director James Comey for his 'outspoken' and 'fearless' advocacy against zero knowledge encryption, and uses the recent attacks on Paris as further justification for returning encryption keys to the cloud, so that communications providers can once again comply with court orders.
A Manhattan DA is going after a California based company that has its manufacturing in China and most of its assets in Ireland. Yeah. Good luck with that.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In a time when leaders are getting more stupid the issues are getting super complex. And that scares the shit out of me.
This particular anti-encryption movement isn't putting a gun to our economy's foot, it's putting a gun to our economy's head.
but the terrorists in Paris seems to have used plain old unencrypted SMS, in French no less.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Irrelevent. Terrorism is the boogyman the government has forever linked to their justification for unlimited access to our private communications. It doesn't matter whether they use it or not, the government wants everyone to be scared into giving up more of their freedoms. Facts just get in the way of that.
If governments urge you not use a specific type of encryption, then you know you are using it right.
Freedom for safety... what could go wrong?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Zero-knowledge encryption? Sounds like they're trying to invent some new buzzword to try to make something almost no one could argue against, secured communications and records for banking, conversations & confidential information (medical records, personal matters, etc). It should also be noted that there is a really good reason for this move to decentralized encryption, the feds simply couldn't keep their hands out of the cookie jar. That and there are no indications that allowing the government full access to communications has any effect on terrorist activity, its pretty obvious that they were hoovering information before 9/11 and it didn't stop that, they've created massive data centers and tied in with ISPs throughout the globe and they didn't stop Paris, Metrojet Flight 9268, Boston or any of the other major attacks. I find it disturbing they can argue for ever increasing levels of surveillance when the massive levels they are already spending tens of billions of dollars and not stopping a few nuts chatting over text messages.
While I'm ambivalent about Zero Knowledge Encryption, the above factoid - they used SMS - is tangential to the point in question. Yeah, the French Jihadis used SMS, but Jihadis everywhere else have been using whatever's out there - not just SMS.
I do oppose any attempts to ban this, since there is nothing stopping Jihadis from developing their own encryption codes and going totally dark on the authorities everywhere.
Only in the final phase when it did not matter anymore. Before they used encrypted communication over the playstation network
since there is nothing stopping Jihadis from developing their own encryption codes and going totally dark on the authorities everywhere.
This is what they want to achieve, as when encryption is backdoored anywhere, its much easier to argue that everybody who uses non-backdoored encryption is a has something to hide and is a criminal suspect.
Considering that unbreakable encryption that can be done by hand and used over any medium has been around forever. It's cumbersome to well.
Denying the public effective encryption does nothing to stop a terrorists from communicating it just lets the government pry into average citizens lives.
No sir I dont like it.
They aren't actually after the terrorists. They're after everyone.
This is about investigator laziness, disregard for law abiding citizens privacy, and expanding power bases for the police, FBI, etc.... What you won't hear until well after the authorities make a power grab are the mistakes of the investigators to use the existing powers they have to foil or stop the plot.
Warrants and limitations on investigative powers are paramount to keeping the rule of law in place. While I can understand streamlining existing warrant procedures to make them more responsive. Such as changing wire taps to follow a person instead of be limited to a selected phone. The powers that be pushed for MUCH more than that. And congress encouraged this behavior in a number of ways, they wrote a blank check after 9/11 for the NSA, FBI, homeland sec for any thing they wanted to "prevent the next 9/11". So in a time of great austerity for many social programs, space, sciences, many agencies and 3rd parties were flush with money to pursue anything they fucking wanted.
Still, the governments of the world have been asking us to give up on having any level of privacy so that they can "catch terrorists". I think they need to demonstrate some things before I can even think about accepting that idea.
1) There's oversight over the collection and storage of the data that guarantees that it's being used for that purpose. There's no possibility that it can be used for other law enforcement operations, for blackmail, or for looking at dick pics (thank you, John Oliver).
2) The program is effective. If you're collecting my SMS messages so that you can stop terrorist attacks, show me that you're catching terrorists that way. Don't collect SMS messages preemptively and then go, "Well after the fact, we found that the terrorists used SMS and we just didn't catch it. But after we caught people who were involved and found their cell phones, we thought it was kind of helpful to see those SMS messages."
3) Explain why the terrorists won't just change their methods. People say things like, "When guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns," and then the same people say, "We need to make it illegal to send encrypted messages that we can't break." It doesn't make sense.
That's just to start. I'll think about more questions when those can be answered.
What we really need is fewer Zero Knowledge DAs.
Pre-broken encryption is as bad as it sounds.
They appear to be under the impression that the only reason one would have something to hide is because one has done something wrong.
Of course, nearly everyone has something to hide... and it is not because there is anything necessarily wrong. Does one wear clothes in public for example? Is there something wrong with their bodies that they feel they must do this, or do they do so simply because their bodies are private? Having something that you may feel is private or even something that you might feel somewhat embarrassed by if it were to be public does not mean that anything is amiss... it means you are human.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In other news law enforcement magically found multiple cells of terrorists in the aftermath of the Paris shootings. Yet they could not find these three suspects before they committed mayhem in the city? The government sat on intelligence hoping to be led to bigger fish instead of arresting the Paris shooters. I do not believe a damn thing the government says or the media reports. While Obama and Hollande twiddled their thumbs at least Putin struck back decisively against ISIS/ISIL in Syria.
This. This. A THOUSAND times This!
Meanwhile, we get "treated" to more and more Security Theater.
If the gummints would aggressively go after each and every of the credible leads they OBVIOUSLY have, the life of the Terrist on the ground would be seen as less and less "glamorous", and sooner, rather than later, the likes of ISIS/ISIL would start having "attrition" numbers, and lack of new recruits, that would start putting a severe damper on their plans for world domination.
And no, I don't believe that the "Martyr Effect" would work in their favor.
Putin's, peace be upon him, strikes against ISIS are, at best, half-hearted and at worst a sham. He is not fighting against ISIS, he is fighting for Assad — a decades-long client of the USSR/Russia. Because of Russia's strikes against anti-Assad fighters, ISIS was, actually, been able to gain ground in Syria on several occasions.
Considering the post-tragedy rise of Le Pen and other European nationalists, who tend to be Putin's, peace be upon him, clients themselves, one may argue, Putin had a hand in the Paris-attack himself. Whether that's true or not, the sentiment such as yours certainly illustrates, how he benefited from it.
I have no love the Nobel Peace Prize winner we are saddled with — his foreign policy is as destructive as the internal ones — but praising Putin seems outright dumb. Obama will be gone in a year, Putin will remain a menacing danger for as long as he lives — and the asshole is fit, hale and healthy...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That is terrorism by definition.
Send him strait to Gitmo NOW!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
This post is a perfect example of why social conservatism is stupid.
You want to oppose importing terrorists eh? How do you go about doing that, pray tell? First of all, just in case you weren't aware: all of the successful terrorist attacks that happened in France weren't caused by Syrian refugees. They were carried out by people who emigrated years prior, who'd been setup as sleeper cells until the time was right to strike. So what do you do to prevent them from entering the country? Prevent anyone who looks vaguely Arabic from entering? That's millions of people you're suddenly blocking there to prevent 0.01% of them (if that) from entering.
But that's not all, is it? There are already millions of them on your soil. Do you kick them out too? People who might've been here for generations, who have families, friends, a job and are perfectly normal citizens? Because if you don't, that leaves hundreds of possible sleeper cells around.
And then, that's not even solving the issue fully. There have been terrorist acts carried out by converted Westerners too. How do you go about preventing that? Ban Islam entirely? That's again millions of people, some of whom have been here for so many generations they're an integral part of your country's history. Plus, it won't really help, since those converted people know how to act "normally" since they've been raised that way and were only converted later on.
But no matter, even if you fixed that miraculously, you'd still have school shootings and crazies like Anders Breivik who are literally indistinguishable from the rest of your population and who can carry out atrocities just as well as that horrible Muslim you're so scared of.
Here's the funny thing too: regardless of where you stop in this dangerous trend, you've still created two classes of people: those who can live in your country and those who can't. You've removed their freedom to "protect" yours. You've failed to achieve what you set out to do, unless you are so egotistical to only care about yourself. And if you're American (which is a pretty good guess from the tone of your post and the website it was posted on), you've also gone against the one thing that made it into what it is: that everyone stands equal and everyone has a chance. Now you don't stand a chance if your skin is brown. Welcome to the Confederacy.
TL;DR: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
> but having access to the phone contents reportedly did allow investigators to make headway in France
So, we have access to encryption (aka real encryption, aka zero knowledge encryption), and the terrorists were not using it. This then becomes an argument against real encryption. Of course, if the terrorists WERE using it, it would ALSO be a an argument against real encryption.
The story so far: Terrorists communicate without using Bibles, or encryption. Terrorists kill a bunch of people without using Bibles, or encryption. Later investigators find phones without Bibles, or encryption.
Nothing in this story involves Bibles, or encryption- if either one is inserted, it's because someone wants to take your Bible. Or more likely, your encryption.
From the New York Times:
French intelligence officials have concluded that Mr. Abaaoud was involved in at least four of six terrorist plots in France that have been foiled since the spring, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced at a news conference.
Mr. Abaaoud, a Belgian citizen who was 27 or 28, went to Syria last year to fight with the Islamic State, but it was not until Monday that French authorities learned - through a foreign intelligence service - that he had returned to Europe, via Greece, Mr. Cazeneuve said.
They had been tracking him, at least enough to break up several other things he was planning. But the problem with this situation, like we all know, is that the terrorists only have to succeed once, while law enforcement has to succeed every time. They didn't even realize he was back inside the country until 4 days before the attack, and that's not a lot of time to find someone who probably didn't want to be found.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black