Slashdot Mirror
French Conservatives Push Law To Ban Strong Encryption (dailydot.com)
Patrick O'Neill writes: The French parliament this week will examine a bill that would require tech manufacturers of computers, phones, and tablets to build backdoors into any encryption on the device. The anti-encryption bill is being presented by 18 conservative members of the National Assembly as part of a large "Digital Republic" bill. According to the article, The new French bill briefly praises encryption’s role in protecting user data but immediately pivots to criticizing the effects of strong encryption on state security forces.
"France must take the initiative and force device manufacturers to take into consideration the imperative of access for law enforcement officers, under the control of a judge and only in the case of an investigation, to those devices," the legislation reads, according to a translation by Khalil Sehnaoui, a Middle-East security specialist and founder of Krypton Security. "The goal is to avoid that individual encryption systems delay the advancement of an investigation."
I can pretty much see the stench fuming off it.
It doesn't matter if the wall you build is thirty feet high and six men can walk abreast if you can kick in a door. The weakest part of a wall is always the gates and these kinds of bills are trying to require extra doors with standardized locks are used. No way this can be abused.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Please note that the conservatives don't have a majority in the Assemblée Nationale, so this law will likely not pass, at least under its current form. But it's also true that PS hasn't been the strongest defender of privacy and personal freedom, they did a few nasty things in the wake of the terror attacks of last year, so who knows exactly what will happen...
Been away from Slashdot for awhile, since the "fuck beta" business actually.
What's this amateurish Cows/Moo stuff? Is this all we have left around here? Sad. Very sad.
You know who else don't like strong encryption? The terrorists.
You have to admit that the terrorists have already won. They've pwn your asses so completely that you're stabbing your own liberty like crazy.
Anybody can encrypt anything. There are hundreds of open source encryption libraries out there.
Preventing hardware manufacturers from building strong encryption into their products accomplishes nothing. Anyone can still encrypt whatever they want.
What this does is expose normal users to security risks, while *doing nothing to prevent any determined user to encrypt whatever the hell they want*
The Paris terrorists used un-encrypted communications repeatedly prior and during the attacks ... so ... ?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
While water is great at quenching thirst, it also can kill a person if drawn into their lungs. Therefore, we demand that bottled water manufacturers make their water such that it can no longer drown someone.
When today's dumbfuck generation tries trolling and all you can do is facepalm...
It is not incumbent on the accused to provide evidence for a mere investigation into the possibility of their guilt. Telling someone that they aren't allowed to have encryption because they might be investigated at some point for something that they may or may not have done is telling them that they are guilty first and must allow the investigators to judge whether they are innocent.
WIll those be banned?
The crooks can't crack "weak" encryption left for the common user. What is the intention of folks making those laws - religiously motivated?
We used to have these very informative posts about HOSTS files, sometimes more than once per thread.
Banning strong encryption is like banning strong seat belts.
With software encryption, you'll still be able to do what you want.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Yes, please be the guinea pig and backdoor your encryption. Then when your banking system collapses because some idiot leaked the keys, maybe it'll light a lightbulb in governments elsewhere.
- Convince one large-ish nation to ban effective cryptography.
- Monitor incoming and outgoing communications
- Compare the weakly encrypted (decrypted therefore) with the strongly encrypted data.
- Improve your systems to be able to break the strongly encrypted data.
- Government!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Ah, but these cows run Linux!
...anyone?
Just how easy to crack do these monkeys want it to be so that it won't hamper their investigations?
But it might help the marketplace find room for more open-source devices that can be more easily (less technically) loaded with secure open-source OSs than we have today.
Cheers, Glen
So the French version of the product will be back-doored, and all French commercial, industrial and political secrets will be available worldwide.
You have to admire the insane stupidity of crippling your own security, and then imagining that only France would be able to make use of this crippling of security!
And your enemies and allies somehow don't use it, not because its *secure*, but because of wishful thinking??
I wonder what happens when terrorists gets French backdoor keys, how they will explain that away?! "Home goal" doesn't quite cover it.
UK is to pass a bill so it can demand access to ANY data (its unlimited and unbounded and can include foreign data held by British subsidiaries). So they'll get all these backdoor keys. Finally! France will be UK's bitch! Bend over and suck it France!
Oh and so will every other country that demands the same access, or can spy to get the same access.
Dumb neocons.
How do you build a backdoor into a general compute device capable of running software and performing any encryption algorithm that can be described?
They are asking for a backdoor for everything that runs a processor.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say we're really as vulnerable to all these boogeymen as our Glorious Leaders clearly want want us to believe we are. Well, okay, I suppose the first thing we need to do is immediately rebuid the Internet with lots of backdoors (i.e. tons of known, deliberate exploits), then connect everything from our [soon to be self-driving] cars to our security systems to our pacemakers to it and then wait for the sparks to fly. All I can say is, bet long on YouTube...
You know what, if you want to defeat terrorists, try to not provide them with weapons and political support for a start.
We got these blow back attacks because France has supported terrorism as a geopolitical weapon against Syria, among other state sponsors of terrorism such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and the US.
So don't support terrorism and let Syria defend itself if you don't want terrorism.
Have we forgotten the difference between "Crapflooding" and good ole' "Trolling?"
I'd argue that HOSTS file and Natalie Portman (even GNAA and PenisBird) were just CrapFloods.
Were they better CrapFloods than the "MOO MOO MOO?" I'd say "Yes," but maybe that's all a matter of opinion.
Conservatives are for weak borders also, but they call it "free trade". The global economy requires money and services to cross borders in order to function, it is only fair that people can freely move to where the jobs land.
What's this amateurish Cows/Moo stuff?
Sometimes, it's the only thing that's entertaining. Lighten up.
Since it is aimed at foreigners mostly, wouldn't they be bring their devices from another nation where encryption was not banned?
Further, unbreakable encryption is not hard and its not feasible to backdoor all forms of encryption given their nature of operation. So, whilst the intention is probably correct, it is simply impossible to implement and attempts to draft bills like this show a complete failure to comprehend the issue.
French Conservatives Push Law to Promote Society-Wide Identity Theft
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is the same state that sunk the Rainbow Warrior in the port of Auckland in 1985 because they didn't like Greenpeace opposing their nuclear tests. And they want a backdoor on all devices for strong encryption? Lemme think ... no, I'll pass, merci.
I'm really curious.. Do you think that there is actually one guy who spends time on Slashdot every day and post one message per thread with a variation of this message ? ? If it was me, I would probably written some kind of script to do this semi automatically.. there is still a captcha do decrypt.
Sometimes, it's the only thing that's entertaining. Lighten up.
I'm sorry. I guess I'm having a bad day.
Might as well bring back Nazi Germany too.
If you only study the single grain of sand you never see the beach.
All of the things occurring in the MSM you see day to day are not separate isolated incidents that arose organically.
They are parts of the terrifying whole.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
..then only criminals will have strong encryption. Why can't idiot politicians see this!? Legislation like this will do ABSOULUTELY NOTHING to prevent terrorism, it will only curb freedom of speech and the real security of honest, law-abiding, non-terrorist citizens!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A significant number of ./ posters should be right at home with all that...
The moo cow posts are usually right on topic, sometimes using knowledge that's inferred from the topic.
My guess is that someone wrote a script to warn him when new threads are making it to the front page. If that person has a desk job it's easy to always post in every thread.
From some perspectives it's worse now.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm serious. The countries should pass the laws
We live in a society that is ruled by money first. These countries should pass the laws, and the major players in the system (Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony, etc), should simply pull the products out of the country. They would take a hit to the wallet for a VERY short while, but would give those major players a HUGE advertising campaign to run on - "We won't give up your privacy".
Top tier products disappearing alone would piss off the populations in most countries, let alone a giant push to show that the top tier companies are "better" than those countries governments.
The amount of times that SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, and OTHER type scenarios keep showing up is silly. If all the major brands left, and we (citizens of any country where the top tier companies would end up leaving) were left with the cheapy, crappy, prone-to-fail other products, the consumers would very quickly notice and take action. Can you imagine if xboxes and ps4's were taken away from stores, if iProducts and samsung products were taken away? Hell, DISABLE the apple, android, xbox, and playstation stores (only in those countries) while your add it - put up a message saying "We won't give up your privacy like your government is requiring us to do. If you want this turned back on, contact your government officials".
The top tier companies are having to pay/waste time/give up advertising space (let alone do their own advertising) against these idiotic laws anyways. Might as well band together under a common good, solidify their positions in the populations minds, and come out as heros in the end.
How can you you make hardware that will automatically backdoor an arbitrary software crypto implementation that has no backdoors. Sure this would make it harder to use conversations in games on PS4 and XBOX1 as a means of talking in secret, but that is about it.
John_Chalisque
So companies would face two paths. One path is that their products must meet French laws or maybe it would be better simply to not offer the products for sale in France. It is obvious that individual nations, usually, must not be in a position of regulating foreign- made devices. Obviously some nations are off the wall, mad dog, crazy. Would you like Somalia determining how your cell phone is built?
They're happy to build in backdoors to all equipment supplied to France.
Seriously, hardware manufacturers could simply put backdoors into equipment destined from France, and depending on the laws where the device is made be obliged to provide access to other governments when required by law. Meanwhile, anyone buying a device elsewhere would still have no backdoor and bring it into France if they want secure communications. Software services would be harder to localize given the ability to use VPNs and the need to use a breakable form of encryption of messages originating outside of France being sent to France. I guess you could decrypt it in France and re-encrypt it with French law complaint cryptology, as well as store a French copy while sending a strong encryption version outside of France; otherwise you need to build into the software a way to recognize messages that originate in France and use the proper tool to decrypt it. That assumes a company wants to maintain strong encryption outside of France.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
There are people still alive in France who remember European governments that would have used this to spy on political opponents, and track and kill them. One still exists, reborn from a brief democratic interlude.
One should look in the long term and deny government certain powers out of principle. We have lots of evidence of historical democracies disappearing because they needed to have emergency powers (Rome, Greece, 1930s Germany) and zero evidence for long-term survival of them.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Then only terrorists will have secure communication capabilities.
It is easy to hide messages in large photo images and not be able to tell whether there is actually any hidden data in the photo.
Governments think organized criminals & terrorists are stupid.
to help identity thieves gain access to everyone's phones. Because there aren't any criminal organizations that will EVER find these back doors as well, and everyone on the planet is far too moral to exploit mandatory security holes.
...that the set "conservatives" has a relatively small intersection with the set "smart people". How else does one explain the fact that anyone who knows anything at all about encryption and information security (almost exclusively "smart people") knows that back doors such as those being proposed are a colossally bad idea?
Why is it that "conservatives" in so many countries have completely lost their minds?
Why are the French such fucking cowards?
All that remains are men's rights activists; people that irrationally hate Microsoft and still base their criticisms of Windows on Windows 95; that mentally ill HOSTS guy; some non-sequitur cow poster; and know-it-alls that criticize without providing any meaningful contribution to the discussion.
You can, and I would, argue against doing this, but it's still 100x better than what government's are actually asking for and likely going to get.
The government wants to be able to decrypt anything immediately and is willing to force weakpoints into encryption to do it. This makes messages less secure if anyone wants to decrypt them and gives the government the ability to decrypt everything. Requiring disclosure of passwords in court provides a number of benefits (vs that terrible system): The courts may not do everything the government wants, you can always refuse (lets say if people you care about could be harmed if disclosed), and the encryption remains strong meaning your messages are more secure against other attackers.
Ils sont fous, ces Français....
no, I don't have a sig
The British and French are reported to have pushed for weak encryption in cellular phones (A5/1 and A5/3) to make snooping easier for law enforcement. http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/uriks/Sources-We-were-pressured-to-weaken-the-mobile-security-in-the-80s-7413285.html.
Apparently, these governments didn't want to bother with having to serve warrants to telephone companies... Which would require, you know, legal warrants. So we ended up with 54-bit encryption (A5/1) when the engineers involved were pushing for 128.
So what happened?
What virtually everyone here will already have guessed: The back doors left for convenient government snooping made it easy for *anyone* to snoop, effectively rendering the encryption worthless. (http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/3g-encryption-cracked-in-less-than-two-hours/.
Modular arithmetic is not a crime. If you make it one, French law will suddenly sit in conflict with privacy laws around the world *and in France*. And will it be illegal to transmit random bits? What about SSL?
Idiots.
Lets assume the French get the phone manufacturer to put a backdoor, the UK will surely want that. So is the US. I assume control-freak China will want that too. After that all countries will have their own backdoor with their thousands of operator who have access to that.
Encryption is just math, attempting to legislate math is like tying to legislate gravity or the speed of light.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
When today's dumbfuck generation tries trolling and all you can do is facepalm...
Someone cue the face palming cows please...
or would that be face hoofing cows?
Because that would have to really hurt...
I have to stop now, I've run out of ellipses,,,
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Might as well bring back Nazi Germany too.
Or Nazi UK. Where, if they ask you for the password and you refuse you can go to jail until you agree.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The major problem is that most of the markets don't actually care about privacy in these contexts. Your standard iPhone user wouldn't know privacy from their privates.
Yes, everyone agrees that losing privacy is bad, but rarely does anyone know what that entails except for a relatively small informed group.
Im now glad i didn't learn french. I focused on math and science with the goal of learning a second language later in life.
Now im going to learn spanish as the french keep insisting on making them selves more and more irrelevant int he global market.
As a north American i really hope the french rush to these laws first as it is much easier for tech companies to boycott the french markets from their product offerings. this may actually demonstrate to other countries how ass backwards a plan this really is
Making it illegal to have any secrets.
Politicians, RIIA, MPAA, etc. Things change only because those who desperately cling to the past and to obsolete ideas eventually die. Imagine if immortality were to become viable - things would never change (and we would be stuck with the Kurzweil clown to boot.)
Personally, of all the trolls and crapflooding here, the cow meme is the only one I sometimes get a little chuckle out of. I find it healthier not to take /. too seriously anyway.
Only outlaws will have encryption. And you won't be able to recognize it as such, it'll come in the form of steganography, or code talking that looks like mundane communications. The whole anti-encryption thing is a boondoggle, and only helps to catch the low-hanging fruit, that which is too stupid to even try to cover their tracks. And that's even if they have the time and energy to scan every piece of data for that low hanging fruit, to find the needles in the haystacks. The recent attackers in France weren't even using encryption, and they weren't able to prevent the attacks. Banning encryption isn't going to change that.
This is just a few conservatives sponsoring a bill. How many times have we been laughed at for Pi = 3 or teaching the Fred Flintstone theory of evolution.
Have gnu, will travel.
And Godwin's law is yet again validated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How so? As long as it is actually on topic and appropriate, such as now talking about totalitarian ideologies, it is not Godwins law. To quote your link,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Please do! Don't hesitate, can we somehow support you?
France bugs out of the data center business and pretty much nixes its cloud storage industry. If only some other European countries could follow, we could become the data center of Europe!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which terrorists will this stop? The cats out of the bag on strong encryption. You can force every hardware manufacturer to sell machines pre-installed with weak encryption, and nothing stops terrorists (or anybody) from replacing this software with strong encryption. You can't stop the spread of strong encryption because it's math.
The best you can hope for is to mandate that every citizen allow you to read their personal data, and hope that the ones that refuse are the terrorists.
And even if that somehow magically works, you can be congratulated for turning a first world country into a shithole just like where terrorists come from, and you can start breeding homegrown terrorists angry at the totalitarian regimes they are oppressed by.
Another problem is that we can;t read minds yet. Terrorists could be holding all sorts of secrets that they haven't stored in digital files or on paper. Maybe we should pass a law mandating that brains come with weak encryption and band whispering.
Devise an encryption scheme which has multiple back doors. Ensure adoption of that encryption by Apple, Google, etc. Give a back door key to any government that asks. Result: encryption that every country apparently wants.
Then, all persons in country A can be spied on by country A, country B, country C, etc. Including all the politicians, police, private citizens, and so forth.
Most Arabs would seethe at you or anyone else considering them brown. They consider themselves white, and as the purest of peoples. And Muslims ain't a race - you have whites (Turkic, Farsi and Arab as well as European - Bosniak and Albanian), Browns (South & South East Asia) and Blacks (North Africa). Doesn't make a difference - since Quran 2:223 says that women are tilth to be plowed by (Muslim) men, it's perfectly okay for any Muslim - regardless of race - to rape women. As per Muslims.
You think? Given all the negative mods every post in this particular thread has gotten?
"France must take the initiative and force device manufacturers to take into consideration the imperative of access for law enforcement officers"
No, fuck law enforcement officers in this regard.
They exist to serve and protect the citizens, but all government agencies everywhere have forgotten this...
France must take the initiative and force device manufacturers to take into consideration the imperative of access for law enforcement officers, under the control of a judge and only in the case of an investigation, to those devices.
The only problem is that there is no such thing. Asking for government-only access to decryption is like asking for government-only access to perpetual motion, you know, in case we run out of power from other sources.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Between American corporations, American servers and the packet logging conducted in most countries, intelligence agencies already have all data sent to, or from, personal devices. Now France and it seems, the UK, are targeting your on-device backups and encrypted data. That may be great for finding 'The anarchists cookbook' or kiddie porn; (or planting it, since laws enabling invasive snooping tend to enable this too) but will add far more noise than capacity to enforce law and order. Recent terrorist actions around the world were achieved without the benefit of encryption: The police/intelligence departments can't operate the tools they already have but they're clamouring for more. Governments see total surveillance as a way of finding dissenters, traitors and terrorists with the push of a button.
The real question is: How will the corporations handle this? Will they offer a dumbed-down handset for countries banning true encryption, will they track encryption keys for every handset, or will they withdraw their products from countries building a police state? Since the law is merely the cost of doing business for a corporation, I doubt the last option will be chosen but I wish it will be.
Strong Encryption implies there are Weak Encryption options. Why would anybody ( even the French ) prefer Weak Encryption if Strong is available ? It's like asking for Cheap Fire Insurance that doesn't pay out in case of a fire.
You cant fucking put encryption back in the fucking bottle
About as dumb as anything I have ever heard.
How about they ban clothing, everyone in France will be required to be NUDE as to not conceal explosives/weapons. Cause you know terrorist wear clothing!
From a radical nutrition group called Nutritionistas. The decoded message says "All fructose is metabolized by the liver as fat." They took a existing article and overlayed an encryption scheme. They vow never to give up the key, no matter how may politicians are bought by corporate interest. They will get their message out there.
I'm not going to waste a bunch of mods I made but would still like to explain to others what a dick you are re. Quran 2:223.
It specifically says your wives and orders these men to: take heed of your ultimate future; and fear God and know that you shall meet Him
The word or concept of rape is no-where mentioned.
Al in al you reason like an ISIS member.
--
Teun
This just in......French Conservatives Push Law To Make Pi Equal to 3.0
Next up, French Conservatives Push Law To Make Kids Turn That Darn Music Down
French Conservatives Push Law To Stop People From Thinking Bad Thoughts
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
about this proposed French law.
d9gtj3ld9g73jgljtgud;4gh0y0jjokdgs.dd954kqfakva
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"French conservatives"? The poster does not understand european politics. The farthest right in Europe they get is National Socialism there is simply no comparison to the American right wing. And of the American right wing, conservatism is the most left part of it... it is closer to progressivism than anything else because it still values the centralized government to achieve its goals. The American right wing - libertarianism and objectivism and anarchy - has nothing to do with the European or French right wing, which is still socialist and collectivist.
A Muzzie w/ mod points! That explains it all
But as he's posting as AC, he probably won't read the answers ? I don't get it.. What's the benefit for him for crapflooding ? Is it some kind of mental disorder ? Some kind of Tourette syndrome or something ?
In France it was the Vichy Régime. They still remember it fondly (nope!).
Once the payment systems make their case, the bill will die. And it will die when people get into encrypted databases because someone in the government allowed the key and knowledge to backdoors to become common knowledge.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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Comparing a modern, (relatively) liberal democracy like the USA to the genocidal Nazi fascist regime isn't Godwin's law?