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FBI: Just Don't Call Them Backdoors (networkworld.com)
sandbagger writes: The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn't want to call them backdoors, and it doesn't want to dictate what they should look like. Tech companies [says FBI Director James Comey] 'need' to change their business models – by selling only communications gear that enables law enforcement to access communications in unencrypted form, he says, rather than products that only the parties participating in the communication can decrypt. He also says tech companies should just accept that they would be selling less secure products.
Had you not been spying on all of us without warrants we wouldn't be encrypting our stuff. Act like the bad guy, don't be surprised when your treated like a bad guy.
"We see that encryption is getting in the way of our ability to have court orders effective to gather information we need in our most important work"
So does the Fifth Amendment. What's your point? Gonna put a back door in that too? (Posting AC so the FBI trash men don't come get me.)
Groups like ISIS are now using their own encryption apps so there is nothing that can be done by any US tech companies prevent that. What would the point of making everything less secure be.
They want to expand PRISM, remember PRISM?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
The documents show that:
Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".
In June, the Guardian revealed that the NSA claimed to have "direct access" through the Prism program to the systems of many major internet companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time. Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.
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So all the private communications you have well the US grabbed them stuck them in giant databases to be datamined at the whim of the military complex without judicial process.
And all the companies involved knew it, and helped. Microsoft even helping remove the encryption on future version so the NSA could slurp down their data more easily.
So when you want to use Cloud Office Services, remember that your companies documents are directly available within any judicial process to the spys for the military industrial complex.
hit this guy with a clue stick. Asshole.
There is no way to guarantee nobody but the FBI can access these "back doors", or to guarantee that the FBI will do the right thing.
The business model of the FBI needs to change.
If you want us to trust our intelligence communities with decryption capabilities in case we happen to be criminals, then we need the FBI to put MUCH better accountability in place to ensure that THEY are not doing anything criminal. BEGINNING with a reliable and INDEPENDENT commission that can be approached by whistleblowers without fear of reprisal and that has the independent power to declassify anything they believe is government action in violation of Federal Law.
Because they do things that are criminal. Like, for example, mass surveillance, parallel construction, and to some extent the entrapment they use as effectively a primary tool for big investigations.
Right now we don't have the accountability to ensure that our government isn't acting criminally. We just fucking don't. They are mostly a black box saying that nobody else should be a black box.
Maybe we could call this new scheme "key escrow". That way we can run our side of the debate just by recycling posts from ~20 years ago.
See that "Preview" button?
Comcast:
It's not a "cap", it's a "usage plan"
If Comcast were a Swiss insurance agency:
Don't think of it as "exclusive", think of it as a "custom experience".
If Comcast was the FBI:
It's not a backdoor, it's [redacted].
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So, the FBI doesn't want to call these things "backdoors". OK, let's come up with some alternatives:
The FBI wants to install security barndoors in your software.
The FBI wants to create festering security wounds in your software.
The FBI wants to buttf*ck your software.
Which of those other euphemisms would you prefer, Mr. Comey?
The travesty is that you could go to jail doing something that hurts no one else.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Remember how, back in the days, we used to download PGP from Finland because of US export restrictions? These days are coming again, with resulting renewed public interest in free software and sideloading apps outside the walled garden. As well, it's a chance for a developing country to establish an alternative Silicon Valley exporting truly secure software, even PC and mobile operating systems, worldwide. Hopefully I can move there and live like a king.
It's come to this now? The US agencies don't even pretend to respect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. They are now openly asking for Orwelian features in products produced by private companies?
Are American citizens so lost that they do not see how ridiculous that sounds ? They might as well just as every citizen to spend a mandatory year in prison ...just in case they get incarcerated later in life.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
So considering that that the us government uses nowadays mammy commercial products of the shelf itself;
Considering that other governments control access to potentially as big or bigger markets than the US one ->
Are they happy with the Chinese/Russians also reading the communications of the US government?
And they are using commercial regular stuff. By design (to save money and make certain projects even feasible) or mistake (do I need to say Clinton ' email).
Also consider that practically all the hardware for these new communications is produced outside the states. Where other governments can insist on back doors (when it quacks ... call it by it's proper name).
E.g. the German privacy watchdog has currently issued a ruling that Google Mail is a communication service and needs to provide "an automatic interface for lawful interception". If the courts let that stand (something quite realistic) and Google not being able to prove to legal standards if an account is "German", that might mean that they'll need to allow to intercept traffic on all accounts.
Great that the FBI gives governments the inspiration to what they should require from companies (including US ones).
by selling only communications gear that enables law enforcement , foreign governments and criminals who have a linchpin's dirty little secret to access communications in unencrypted form,
FTFY
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
He also says tech companies should just accept that they would be selling less secure products.
LMFTFY
He also says American tech companies should just accept that they would be selling less desirable products than their non-American competitors.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We'll just be going back to using strong crypto from outside the USA, like we did for most of Internets history.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Color copiers and laser printers embed a steganographic code into every printed page too - if you know how to read the pattern of very pale yellow dots, you can determine the printer's serial number. It's an anti-counterfeiting measure. Inkjets usually don't do it because no-one is going to mistake inkjet-printed currency for the real thing.
This will continue nearly indefinitely. The game plan would be something like- first pass laws to prevent it from happening in the US, which will include free and open source software, second talk easily persuaded nations into the same thing, third use trade tactics and even threats to push down the "terrorism supporting" nations.
Encryption is speech. Any of these attempts are flatly unconstitutional.
Pretty much this. If I have to assume that any service I host in the US is backdoored (and frankly, there is no such thing as a "government only" back door. Money will open this backdoor to anyone willing to pay), I cannot host any sensitive information in the US. I cannot use any software from a company based in the US that I cannot audit thoroughly (read: is OSS) for any security related application if I have to pretty much expect that there is a way for anyone able to spend the time or money to gain access to a mandatorily existing backdoor.
Fuck, even hard- and software from China would be more trustworthy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Even if I do sign an EULA saying that I allow [Microsoft/Yahoo/Apple/Google] to provide my correspondence to the FBI, what prevents the bad guy from encrypting his message using a 4096 bit PGP encrypted string and THEN using steganography to hide it in image data and sending that image out to his compatriots? Are you also going to make it illegal for the user to just use a complicated math calculation? Even if you do, how are you going to detect a violation of that? This entire witch hunt on encryption by the enforcement agencies boggles my mind.
All you need is to look at what happened with those TSA master keys for your luggage.
Not going to post the link again because I've already done so twice in the last few days and I'm not looking to be a karma whore, but just search for something along the lines of "TSA Keys Schneier Security" and you'll find the story quickly enough.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The real bad guys ALREADY have strong encryption. PGP is free and widespread. Hizbollah operate a fiber network in Lebanon, just to make it hard for Israel to tap their traffic. Cyber criminals and terrorists know how to use strong encryption to protect their traffic.
So all you're doing by putting backdoors in all the products is to allow the bad guys to break into those devices and steal law-abiding citizen's data, while not affecting the ability of the bad guys to communicate securely. The backdoors ENABLE the criminal behaviour while doing NOTHING to help the victims of the bad guys.
When strong encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have strong encryption.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Nonsense.
Living in the right neighborhood with a sufficiently high "buy in" prevents "neighbors from hell". Even with the "wrong kind of people", such neighbors are limited not so much by HOAs but pretty mundane zoning laws.
The old-biddie gestapo is simply unnecessary.
All an HOA does is prevent you from using your own property how you see fit. It makes your property part of the collective and the collective is clueless. Ugly paint still goes up and other measures that could improve curb appeal are banned.
The rules that could be useful aren't ever actually enforced.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, it is possible, but it requires making it hard enough to use that the government won't want to bother with it. For example, the company could place a private key in an escrow service offshore, destroy their only copy, and provide the public key to every device. The device could then encrypt a copy of its private key using the company's public key, which the company could print out on paper and store in boxes organized by date. If the government wanted a copy, they would have to provide the device ID, which the company would look up in a database. The company would then require a government official to be physically present while they go to the room, unlock the box, obtain the correct encrypted private key, carry it out of the locked room, send it overseas to be decrypted, receive the result, and deliver the key to the government.
In other words, make it so that the government would need to have probable cause, a proper search warrant for the device, and a few thousand dollars per key to cover the company's retrieval costs, plus a sizable bit of padding to defray the company's storage costs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.