Slashdot Mirror
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.
Event the Old York Times had to pull its crap article about encryption.
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.
but the terrorists in Paris seems to have used plain old unencrypted SMS, in French no less. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
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.
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
"Manhattan DA Pushes for Zero Knowledge Policy"
You're welcome.
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.
Is he related to Jimmy Carter's secretary of state Cyrus Vance? The one who had to resign after a botched attempt to save the US hostages in Iran in 1979?
The more power you accumulate in one place, the more that place will attract greedy psychopaths and power-mongers. Imbalance of information knowledge is power and the key to domination. Encryption while on the grid is one of the few ways we have to prevent an accumulation of power that can be abused by those attracted to it. It puts everyone closer to the same footing. Equality of power in each citizen is what made our country strong. If we want to save lives from devastation over the next couple of generations, maybe we should make encryption stronger and invalidate any secret courts and secret laws... because... you know... imbalance of information.
What we really need is fewer Zero Knowledge DAs.
Pre-broken encryption is as bad as it sounds.
The encryption is genie is already out of the bottle - there are already apps available to facilitate encrypted communications. The government seems to think that if they add encryption backdoors to newer apps/services that the terrorists will be dumb enough to use them instead of what's available now.
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.
What is being danced around here is the fact that, messages that are encrypted are almost assuredly already given a higher "score" in the SIGINT world than non-encrypted messages.
That is likely one of the reasons the Terrists in Paris used UNENCRYPTED SMS to communicate. So the "signal" gets lost in the "noise" of a gazillion other SMS messages-per-second, instead of creating a "Sore Thumb" by being "encrypted".
And it is a foregone conclusion that another staple of SIGINT, the "connections" and frequency-of-communications between one known bad guy and others is often as important, and sometimes even more important, as knowing the CONTENTS of the messages themselves. And that kind of "signal" is much harder to eliminate.
If bad guy "A" communicates with bad guy "B", who then communicates with bad guys "C", "D" and "E", who then communicates with unknown guys "F" through "AA", even without knowing the contents of those communications, we have gathered enough intelligence to start actually surveilling some or all of those people, which WILL, in short order, reveal what is being planned, and by whom.
So, if we outlaw all "cipher-based" encryption, the real baddies will simply build "codes" that ARE cleartext, and APPEAR to be innocent "what's up? Wanna do lunch?"-LOOKING messages; but are in fact, messages of a far more nefarious sort. And so in the end, the terrists continue to have the jump on law enforcement, and all of us regular citizens lose the ability to have private, encrypted communications with business partners, friends and family, or just because we don't particularly like writing our emails on postcards.
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.
You're right and there's only one sure-fire solution. Kill Everyone. Without exception. Nuke the entire planet. Only after everyone is dead will we be safe.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What you described above is true about the current president's father - Hafez al Assad. He was indeed a thug, and a terror ruler, rivalling both Saddam and Gadaffi. He backed Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah. He engineered the assassination of several Lebanese leaders, particularly their president elect Bashir Gemayel. He massacred thousands of people in Homs in response to a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. During the Iran-Iraq war, he supported Iran, and during Operation Desert Storm, he supported the US, given his hatred for Saddam. He opposed Egypt's and Jordan's peace deals w/ Israel, and therefore caused the Golan Heights to get annexed by Israel. Just like Saddam remained in power by having control of his military and curbing the Shias and Kurds, Hafez Assad kept hold of things by curbing the Sunnis of his country.
His son, who succeeded him, is a completely different character. He started his reign like Gorbachyev, trying to bring in reforms. However, once the Arab Spring rebellion started, just like others in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrein and Yemen, his hands were forced. Unlike the other Arab countries, which had largely monolithic Sunni Arab populations (except Bahrein and Yemen, one of which got occupied by Saudi troops and the other is now in a civil war), quitting was not an option w/ Assad, not just for his own safety, which could have meant him going the Gadaffi or Mubarak way, but also not an option for the Alawite led Baath coalition of Alawites, Druze and Christians. So the fact that there was a significant portion of the population ready to back him was what plunged Syria into a civil war.
I'm no fan of Putin, but I'm w/ the Russians on this one. In the early part of the civil war, before ISIS/ISIL became a big player, the US backed rebels - the Free Syrian Army - were guilty of ethnic cleansing of Allepo and Homs of Christians. Under the Assads, Christians lived relatively peacefully in Syria - like in Iraq, but unlike in Egypt or Lebanon. Once the US troops left Iraq, the new 'democratic' regime of Maliki and Haidari allowed pogroms against Christians, who then fled to Assad's Syria for safety. Once this civil war started, both Iraqi and Syrian Christians started fleeing to Lebanon, and then abroad. On one hand, the US doesn't want to discriminate b/w Muslim and Christian refugees from Syria, and yet, they're opposed to Vlad propping up the Assad regime. Well, they can't have it both ways.
Russian support to Syria is what has prevented a bigger bloodbath than there would have been. Going forward, it's hard to see Syria remain a single country. It was a bad model in Iraq, and remains one in Syria. A partition of the region along ethnic lines - w/ independent countries for the Kurds, the Druze, the Sunnis, the Alawites would probably be the best solution - for both Iraq and Syria.
All that said, Assad's regime is nowhere near those in Pyongyang or Havana in terms of brutality. What Syria has going on is a civil war not b/w the supporters and opponents of a government, but b/w the majority ethnic group - Sunni Arabs - vs the rest.