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Top Democratic Senator Will Seek Legislation To "Pierce" Through Encryption (dailydot.com)

Patrick O'Neill writes: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption to allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order. She told the Senate Judiciary committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability to read encrypted data. "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."

12 of 556 comments (clear)

  1. All I have to say is by istartedi · · Score: 4, Informative

    2345 A3DF 5782

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    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. Or you know... by i.r.id10t · · Score: 5, Informative

    "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."

    You could be involved with your kids and *you* be in charge of who they are communicating with via your playstation

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  3. She is merely following precendent by l2718 · · Score: 4, Informative
  4. Re:She's 82 years old by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Informative

    Still nothing like a "series of tubes" though.

    You're talking about a powerful senator who sits on several defense and intelligence related committees who - on seeing some Code Pink protesters outside her house trying to fly a pink plastic mall kiosk toy helicopter with a 10-inch rotor (and tethered to some string!) later told reporters that she'd had people spying through her windows with a drone, and that all of them should be illegal.

    "Series of tubes" is downright informative by comparison to her grasp on technology and her urge to run people's lives.

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  5. Re:She's 82 years old by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Informative

    she doesnt mean well,. that woman has NEVER meant well

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  6. Re:Speaks with forked tongue by Zak3056 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hypocrisy is nothing new with her--Feinstein ALWAYS carves out exceptions for herself. Despite being one of the most anti-gun politicians you'll find in the US, she carries (or at least used to carry) a firearm for self defense.

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  7. Re:Okay... by edtice1559 · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, the OP isn't saying that at all. Public key encryption is computationally expensive so SSL implementation use asymmetric encryption in order to securely establish a session key. After that, faster, symmetric encryption is used. Unless you've been living under a rock, it has been discovered recently that the algorithms used to generate those symmetric keys were not well implemented and, therefore, the keys could be guessed. (Those also rely on a prime number which was cut and pasted which is what the OP is referring to here). It doesn't matter how secure the key exchange is if the key itself can be guessed! https://www.digicert.com/ssl-c...

  8. Re:Okay... by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well there are forms of encryption that cannot be broken in this universe, and others that are probable unbreakable in any universe for even messages shorter than this sentence so that is good enough for me. There is the venerable one time pad (OTP) which can be shown to be unbreakable as at best all you could get were all possible messages of that length. The really neat thing about OTPs is that they are so simple you can teach them to a child and they can understand how they work and can do them with nothing more than paper and pencil. Also if one were to try and brute force keys on symmetric key encryption you would run out of energy in the universe at around 270 bits using conventional computers, or 540 bits using quantum computers, that is assuming you have an ideal computer. Even then at 540 bits all you have done is cycled the counter and haven't done any useful decryption. Unfortunately asymmetric key encryption schemes based on prime factorization, elliptical curves, or discrete logarithms are broken using quantum computers but are still pretty strong on conventional hardware. The good news is that there are some asymmetric key algorithms that appear to be unbreakable even on quantum computers.

    So to sum up I'm not really worried about things that will take longer than the heat death of the universe, and if the US government has access to substantially more energy than is available in this universe then we have bigger problems. The first that comes to mind is waste heat even with an ideal computer.

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  9. Re:She's 82 years old by techno-vampire · · Score: 3, Informative

    I didn't; I live in California I've been voting against both of our left-wing loonie Senators for decades, for exactly this reason, plus the fact that they're both anti-gun hypocrites with concealed-carry permits.

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  10. Re:Will somebody think of the children! by MachineShedFred · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, no.

    UEFI is just a new standard of firmware that replaces BIOS. It does many things better than BIOS. It's why your new PC boots so fast. It gives hardware OEMs the ability to add pre-OS drivers for different hardware. Largely, it's a good thing.

    "SecureBoot" is just a module for EFI that (poorly) attempts to prevent boot loader rootkit hacks. A lot of people like to bitch and gripe about SecureBoot because Microsoft played with the idea of requiring it to be there in order to run Windows 8+, but you can still load Windows through the good' ol EFI Compatibility Service Module. Oh, and you can disable it on basically any motherboard I've ever seen, including ones from OEMs like Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Many people were afraid that SecureBoot would require a 'jailbreak' of an EFI PC in order to load whatever OS you want on it, and these rumors are completely unfounded except for in the most marginal circumstances. Just turn it off if you want to do any of that.

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  11. Re:and frankly my dear fellow... by Firethorn · · Score: 3, Informative

    She's a frequent offender over on my gun boards as well. Having examined her record, I would actually rate her as a Fascist. There is rarely an expansion of government power that she doesn't support. She's pretty far over on the 'statist' side of the spectrum.

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  12. Re:Okay... by tricorn · · Score: 4, Informative

    The reference to re-using primes is about Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol, which is susceptible to breaking discrete logarithms for a given prime. This is currently feasible with 1024-bit primes, and it is true that a significant number of web sites share the same prime modulus, which makes the expense required to break that prime worth it.

    This is a different problem from factoring the modulus used in an RSA key, which is what you're talking about.

    Breaking modern encryption algorithms without the key is infeasible, with or without quantum computers. The attacks are all going to be on the key agreement (often called key exchange) algorithms. RSA and DH are both vulnerable to quantum techniques, but there are other algorithms that appear to be safe.