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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."
Perhaps the good Senator should reflect upon what King Canute actually intended to say when he made his demonstration about his inability to stop the tide.
Mathematical algorithms, like so many parts of our physical universe, don't give a flying fuck about Congress. It's like trying to pass legislation to make Pi equal to 3.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A.K.A. "will somebody please add backdoors that will eventually get abused by the government and then used by thieves and hackers to do even worst shit."
Because it will rapidly become de rigeur for companies that are serious to use encryption that can't be broken on that basis. US companies can be part of that - or watch as their meal ticket evaporates...
Some republicans are too, but I wonder if there is an area of life that politicians, especially Democrats - don't want to control?
"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."
If you are so worried about a predator talking to your grandchildren through the Playstation network, why are they using it unsupervised?
Take care of your own problems, don't make the government do it for you.
Take this sig and smoke it.
She is all for spying...except if it is on her...
The bad guys are just going to keep using existing software that doesn't have these backdoors (esp open source software that can be vetted). In other words, this legislation will accomplish absolutely nothing but making mainstream communication tools less secure.
Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein, born Dianne Emiel Goldman[1] (/ËfaÉnstaÉn/; born June 22, 1933), is the senior United States Senator from California. A member of the Democratic Party, she has served in the Senate since 1992.
Served on the Senate since 1992.
82 years old with no fucking clue what she's talking about.
I have a concern about the IM apps my grandchildren might use and a predator getting in the middle and spoofing messages from their parents. A predator could pierce through encryption and send messages like "mommy won't be able to pick you up from school, but uncle bob will, so do whatever he says."
Math is hard.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
she deserved no less. she's an embarrassment to the state of California and the United States. (No, I did not vote for her or her "friend" Boxer.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You could be involved with your kids and *you* be in charge of who they are communicating with via your playstation
I don't have kids, but every interaction I've ever had with them has taught me that when you're not looking, they're doing everything they can to test their boundaries. Keeping watch over them 24/7 is not a realistic ask.
Regardless, this is not a reason to weaken encryption. If watching what their kids do online is the only concern, a parental control mode that does logging should appease even the most capable of helicopter parents.
This bill would require a court order before the encryption can be "pierced".
Well, if you have a court order, you don't need to pierce the encryption - if the suspect fails to give you access to the messages in question, you can lock him up for failure to comply with a court order! And you can keep him there indefinitely until he complies! THE GRANDKIDS ARE SAFE!!
#DeleteChrome
"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
Not only that, but kids have ALWAYS had clandestine communications. When Senator Feinstein was a teenager, I'd bet a lot money that she went for a walk alone with her friends sometimes. You go to the park, you walk in the woods or the meadow (in more rural areas), or whatever. Those communications may not have been formally "encrypted," but they were the private communications of the kids nonetheless. Back then, if you proposed having someone walk around with a microphone or tail your kid to monitor all communications, just in case something bad might happen -- well, people would think you were insane.
And, you know what? Child abduction rates and violent crimes against kids were likely greater back then. At least for the past 40 years or so since child crime statistics have been accurately kept, the trend has basically been down, down, down. And the vast majority of such crimes are perpetrated by family members and close family friends, not random strangers -- met on the internet or elsewhere.
Yes, it is true that your kids or grandkids may have greater contact with strangers through the internet and electronic communications than in previous generations. And that's why monitoring what they do IN PERSON is important. If they're in your house, watch what your grandkids are doing. Ask who they're talking to on the Playstation if it seems weird. Be involved.
This nonsense about justifying encryption backdoors is coming from a combination of completely out-of-whack fears with little basis in reality. Child crime is down, but our fears of it are higher than ever (particularly when it comes to strangers, who are the least likely to harm your kids). Terrorist acts are few and far between (despite recent activity), yet we're more worried about them rather than actual dangers that are hundreds or even thousands of times more likely to kill us (driving, obesity and other "bad" health habits, etc.).
People have always had fears driven by sensationalism -- see Renaissance paintings of Hellfire and read old-fashioned "fire and brimstone" sermons, for example. These modern fears are almost as loopy.
... force you to decrypt any encrypted document with a court order. In fact, the law is so broad that if you go into court and the judge says "please give these nice officers the encryption keys for your hard drive" and you say "no", they can say "OK, I'll just put you in jail for contempt of court, without bail, until you do." Which can literally be forever. There are no limits that I know of for jail time for contempt of court for an ongoing refusal to comply with a court order. So it can literally be life not even in prison, in JAIL, until you do.
If th issue is terrorism, the powers are even broader and can involve you being sent to a concentration ca -- I mean "federal jail on a remote island" until you cough up a lot more than just the keys.
What they want is the power to read dynamical communication streams in real-time, because decrypting them is often too difficult even for the NSA and because a lot of them are encrypted with one-time or digitally saved keys so that a user CAN'T just cough them up. If my ssh private keys went away, do you think I have them memorized? NOBODY could decrypt my old network traffic, not even me!
Now we just have to wait a bit for the legislative branch to realize that a) we lack the theorems needed to make their nifty idea work; and b) any end user can trivially work around it by simply exchanging keys for one of the known secure algorithms; c) it isn't necessary for any saved, recorded data; and d) it isn't constitutional. It's exactly like trying to pass legislature that would require all house keys to be "registered" and constructed in such a way that a master key in the possession of the police would open them. Good luck with that one.
Besides, they already can. The key is called a "brute force", and if they use it, yeah, they have to go up against the effort the householder put in to stopping brute force entry. If their "house" is a repurposed bomb shelter with six foot thick concrete walls, good luck to them.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Not any more. Now, the cops can be called if some IDIOT sees your kids playing by themselves. Now you drive your kids everywhere to meet other kids in controlled environments.
And that is considered NORMAL BEHAVIOUR.
See also Feinstein's defense of government spying on citizens. But her rage when one department spies on another department.
Less secure means that security conscious users will try to circumvent the restrictions, too.
I'll bet most parents don't know what their kids are sending and receiving right now in all our devices. Kids either get proper training early on from parents or not.
Even if you "force" the bad guys to get new computing devices (LOL), the brainless legislator doesn't realize that there are images which look normal and are viewable by anyone to have embedded proprietary information that only the sender and recipient know of and whether secret messages exist or not. There is NO ENCRYPTION for viewing the image itself.
Bad guys are always going to be able to create ways to pass secret messages.
I've thought Trump was a clown, but the Muslim comment was absolutely chilling- "top polling GOP candidate vows to repeal first amendment" is how I read that. Clearly, Republicans will address this issue, but holy crap. The internet thing would have soured my already poor opinion of him, but it came after the "ban the Muslims" comment. That's straight frightening.
Not likely if they're teenagers.
True, but the age is rising all the time. Did you know that it's now grounds for arrest if you leave an 11-year-old alone in a car while you go into a store?
Apparently an 11-year-old (who requested to stay in the car, as I often did at that age too when my mom went shopping) might be in danger of suffocation or overheating or whatever. Note in the article: Police said the car interior temp had risen to 85 degrees (!!) before they arrived, apparently just in the nick of time. And apparently the police must have determined that the 11-year-old had no other possible course of action (with that temperature rising to... moderately warm... levels), like rolling down the window, opening the door, or... heavens -- going into the store and joining her mother!
In a few years, this will be moved up to teenagers. Particularly if there's some sort of high-profile abduction or something. It doesn't matter how rare it is.
And if you think this arrest is an isolated case, you'd be wrong. Look around a bit and you'll see plenty of cases of parents being arrested in recent years for letting preteens (9-, 10-, 11-year-olds) walk alone to/from a local neighborhood park or playing there alone. Heck, parents have even been arrested when an 11-year-old boy was alone playing in HIS OWN YARD for a while.
(By the way, of course leaving young kids in a locked car is a horrible thing, and many do die each year. But presumably an 11-year-old has a few more options than being stuck in a car seat until they die of heat stroke.)
Just in the past couple years, the age for arresting parents for "endangering" them by leaving them alone for a few minutes has risen from somewhere around 7 or 8 up to at least 11. Teens aren't that far off.
I agree. I am also just as disturbed that Obama and Hillary are both pushing the "eliminate a Constitutionally-enumerated right without due process" idea. At least with Trump, the Republican Party is actively opposing his nomination. With Hillary, however, ...
Trump takes it 100000000 times further
Trump is a private citizen, and despite his current poll numbers, he is NOT going to be elected to anything. Feinstein is a senior senator with powerful committee seats, and a lot of influence over legislation. Her positions actually matter.
As a Californian, I am very ashamed that she is my senator, and I don't understand why anyone would vote for her.
The Republican Party in California is broken. Feinstein's reelection was so assured that they didn't bother to nominate a real candidate to run against her. And Boxer's most recent opponent was that horrible person, Carly Fiorina. The real problem is binary partisanship, a natural outcome of the winner-takes-all voting system. When both parties agree on all the structural issues, the American voters have no real choice.
Have a nice time.