Obama Administration To Offer Full Position On Encryption By End of Year

blottsie writes with this story from The Daily Dot that the President met with encryption advocates on Thursday and is expected to make a statement on his official stance before the end of the year. From the story: "The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays. Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals. Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute and the coalition's organizer, told the Daily Dot that it was a 'very hopeful meeting.'"

Comments

You're thinking of Constitutional process.

[raymorris]

When you talk about the president needing Congress to pass laws, you're thinking of the old system, the Constitutional process. The Constitution is now just "an old piece of paper".

This president has already unilaterally changed immigration law after Congress denied his request and the news today is that he plans to issue new gun laws within the next few days.

Even before he was elected president, he pointed out that a law was unconstitutional- just before he voted to pass it. Meaning he knowingly, intentionally voted to pass a law that he knew to be unconstitutional. The Constitution is meaningless under this administration.

Re:If he says its OK

[Joce640k]

If the NSA controls the chain of cryptographic certificates (eg. Verisign) then they don't need to crack anything. Nothing can be authenticated. They can simply impersonate people and perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Most of the world's encryption is wide open to them.

Do they control that certification chain? You can be pretty sure they do. It's such an obvious target.

Re:Oh goodie, a politician has made a promise!

[jandersen]

Whatever - if Obama was to declare that Christmas falls in December, there would be a storm of protests from so-called freedom advocates. He could probably push through a complete ban on encryption by declaring that it is a human right to encrypt things.