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NY Bill Would Force Decryption of Smartphones On Demand (onthewire.io)
Trailrunner7 sends word about New York Assemblyman Matthew Titone's bill that forbids the sale of smartphones that can't be cracked by their manufacturers. On the Wire reports: "A bill that is making its way through the New York state assembly would require that smartphone manufacturers build mechanisms into the devices that would allow the companies to decrypt or unlock them on demand from law enforcement. The New York bill is the latest entry in a long-running debate between privacy advocates and security experts on one side and law enforcement agencies and many politicians on the other. The revelations of the last few years about widespread government surveillance, especially that involving cell phones and email systems, has spurred device manufacturers to increase the use of encryption. New Apple iPhones now are encrypted by default, as are some Android devices. Apple, Google, and the other major manufacturers have said that user privacy and security is their main concern. The bill that is now in committee in the New York State Assembly makes no equivocation about what it is designed to do. 'Any smartphone that is manufactured on or after January First, Two Thousand Sixteen, and sold or leased in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider,' the bill says."
Matthew Titone is a useful idiot.
Just stop selling phones in New York, and sell them in every where else. Make consumers order them via Amazon.
Any smartphone that is manufactured on or after January First, Two Thousand Sixteen, and sold or leased in New York
So it looks like it will be an ex post facto law then.
Time to offend someone
I cannot even put into words how much this saddens me.
Born and raised until 13 in upstate New York.
Beautiful part of the country, the Catskills and Finger Lakes and St. Lawrence seaway....
but this......
NY is still part of America, and I know its all been slowly slipping away....
Its mine......there are many like it but this one is mine......
If this passes, I'll never enter NY state again
If you want to see an entire political organization lose their seats, refuse to sell compliant phones.
Can you imagine what would happen to NY's political apparatus after telling their constituents that they cannot buy an iPhone/Pad/Pod or Google Android device anymore? Next election would be more than fun.
Must it also be sprinkled with unicorn dust? Talking about "legal fiction"! Just because they pass a law which says secure phones must be decryptable, does not make it possible for phones to be secure and decryptable. All other issues aside, encryption which is breakable is security through obscurity. And security through obscurity, in a commercial context, is at most safe until the first disgruntled employee. In reality it's even less safe than that because of possible accidental discovery of vulnerabilities.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Just bought one yesterday, it's encrypted! January 1st is the past. Do they really expect all cell phone sales to CEASE while they re-inventory the state of NY for new sale? What's to stop people from going to another state, buying a cell phone, and then coming back to NY?
DUMB.
Guess you won't be able to buy Apple or Android products anymore - thankfully you can still buy Blackberry.
New York State mandates that you can only get Blackberry devices, how quaint.
My pen and paper DnD campaigns will now be a guise for all my important data.
Expect to see disclaimers on smart-phones that they are not for sale in NY.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Once again, New York proving that it belongs in North Korea rather than the United States.
I wonder how popular this politician will be when he realizes that this will ban the purchase of iPhones in the state of New York.
...it will just take a while.
A phone manufacturer supported method to be your own "operating system provider" with a master password known only to you.
...manufactured on or after January First, Two Thousand Sixteen, and sold or leased in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer...
Doesn't this part make the bill an illegal retroactive law, since "January First, Two Thousand Sixteen" was almost 2 weeks ago?
You'd think the first round of the Crypto Wars would have taught the panopticon advocates their lesson. And it's not like they don't have more than enough access now anyway. But the public is even less likely to support surveillance now, particularly this sort of "we're want to spy on YOU" surveillance.
captcha: browbeat
how the politicians feel about this when some 14 year old hacker gets into one of their phones through a manufacturer backdoor and posts EVERYTHING on the net for all to see.
Generally speaking I think if people don't know what they are talking about, they shouldn't say anything at all, this is especially true for politicians!
China would be so proud.
I looked him, called his office, and left a message reminding him that the 4th Amendment is the law of the land. I reckon a couple thousand more calls from people all over the country might make him see the error of his ways.
End-user encryption. If I make my own, it doesn't have to be particularly good, it just needs to be custom enough that "The Man" doesn't have a script-kiddie one-size-fits-all tool belt that can crack it. My shit is private, but I'm not doing anything that would make them spend big $$$ on figuring it out. Without my password, they are SOL. Oh, gee, my memory isn't so good either. Perhaps my lawyer can help me remember it?
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
to go to NJ to buy their phones.
Interesting, but maybe a bit short sighted.
Fuck it. Apple and Google should just accept market share loss and tell NY to go fuck itself. Maybe then the locals would complain and and fight to have the bill abolished. Just accept the fact that money is a casualty of this war (for privacy) and that it's all part of the deal.
Life is not for the lazy.
There value of old smartphones will go up if the bill passes.
Corporate & business users who want safe communications will seek out those old phones.
What's this? The post says, "The revelations of the last few years about widespread government surveillance, especially that involving cell phones and email systems, has spurred device manufacturers to increase the use of encryption."
Really? THAT'S why we increase the use of encryption? POLITICS? I wonder if the Mr. Fisher believes that as a fact, or is just writing copy.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Does the law require it be possible remotely or if they are in possession of a phone and want to decrypt it? Couldn't it be a mechanical switch inside the phone or something?
I would assume that the manufacturer only has to be able to decrypt the phone AT SALE TIME.
In other words, it would prevent encryption from being setup default when the phone arrived, but once the consumer has the phone they could immediately initiate PRIVACY MODE.
To me, this would just be annoying, and would be a step which the less technical might miss (which is why it is better by default), but would be similar to the situation where totally-free Linux distros still let you download Flash, dvd decryption, etc even though they can't include the items *directly*.
Or similar to Prohibition-era products which warned you "Do not add water to this otherwise you will make beer" (at least in NY)
If I had access to the backdoor, I could sell it, for more money than I would make in my entire career, by orders of magnitude. Repeatedly.
Why would I not sell it? How could they ever catch me?
If passed, New York Assemblyman Matthew Titone's smartphone should be the first phone to be unlocked and decrypted on demand for the whole world to see (LIVE on CNN).
"New York Assemblyman Matthew Titone"
Let's see, no "R", "Republican", etc., so I guess we know which one it is.
Do you have ESP?
If it goes after the manufacturers of the phones, then this bill will have absolutely no clout. Can you name a single smartphone that is made in the US? No, neither can anyone else. They'll never be able to enforce this bill on the Chinese and Korean manufacturers, it could just as well demand that the CEOs all release the phone numbers of their mistresses in their next press releases.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Here's the instructions for decrypting:
Try all keys.
Regulatory requirement fulfilled.
Next they will want everyone to use the same password.
Leave our houses unlocked.
Leave our cars unlocked with the keys in them.
Buy your cell phones from Amazon and have them shipped by drone from NJ to NY.
Problem solved.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You only have one option -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTIKm18Sj4
Between this and the SAFE act NY has turned into a group of paranoid and fearful people willing to stamp out rights for some perceived security.
It makes no difference - if you outlaw guns and encryption, only outlaws will have them - and you will be even less secure than before.
I thought Congress gave exclusive authority to regulate the communications spectrum and communications devices to the FCC. States have been trying to regulate some apps, but this bill mentions 'devices'.
If your keys are between your ears, the 5th amendment protects you from "witnessing against yourself". You simply need to shut up and invoke the protections of the 5th amendment when asked for your encryption keys.
So, from now on all cell phones in NY are free, not sold or leased, and are not subject to the law as worded.
Of course, cell phone plans will go up to $100 per month/line, but you can get a small discount by selecting a formerly expensive phone, or a larger discount by selecting a formerly cheap phone. Oh, and don't forget more heinous early termination fees...
I wonder if companies would willingly pull their products off the shelves, sit back, and wait with crossed arms. Would Apple release the newest iPhone everywhere but New York just to watch voters squirm and demand it be fixed? Samsung and Galaxy whatever? Or would they cave just because it's a huge market?
I doubt they have the true resolve to follow through.
I don't have a problem if the decryption process involved physical destruction of the device.
Much like a safe, I, the owner, can choose to unlock it for the authorities with a warrant, or the authorities can run it through some process that breaks the phone (like cutting open the safe).
I don't have a real problem with it if the remedy requires physical access. Remote access is what I have a problem with. Secret access is what I have a problem with. But if I wake up one morning to find my phone in pieces, I think it's safe to assume someone has read my intimate secrets encrypted on my phone.
If I get arrested, put my phone in the "personals envelope", and later get back a bag of parts when a make bail, I think it's safe that someone accessed the phone. Legally or not is a different question. Different problem. Unrelated problem.
Put the secret key underneath the epoxy sealed CPU with tamper resistant mounting tech. Make them remove physically remove the CPU to get the key, then they can use the key and a Special Reader to read the unsoldered flash drive. Cut it out with a torch.
That's all OK with me. Just like a safe. Make it possible, make it physical, make it evident.
Thats the equivalent of what they are asking for in the world of physical security, and slightly less secure than a zip tie.
the TPP is about to be signed including all the ISDS clauses... if NY state takes action that hurts the profits of phone manufucturers, can they not be sued into the ground?
I eagerly await all manufacturers to not provide waivers to government or LE officials.
have a brother with a phone store in Jersey?
I'm thinking the law would last about three days if the manufacturers didn't ship backdoored phones, meaning it would be illegal to sell a modern smartphone in NYC. Every customer wanting to buy a phone would be told:
The city council made it illegal to sell modern smartphones in NYC. If you want to complain, here are the phone numbers of the council members you can call.
Ten thousand complaint calls per day should get the council's attention pretty damn fast.
security codes, account numbers, passwords, etc to the houses, cars, any and all accounts (email, banks, etc) to any and all politician or wannabe politician who demands such moronic legislation.
I mean if they are asking us to give up any and all privacy because they are idiots, they should give up their privacy first and see what it's like.
If this passes, I'll never enter NY state again
Just don't buy, order while in, or take delivery of, a phone there. Get your non-backdoored phone with all aspects of the transaction occurring out-of-state. Let "The Invisible Hand" slap them up alongside the head when it comes time to collect sales taxes. B-)
If they try make non-backdoored phones contraband (like drugs or untaxed cigarettes), THEN don't set foot there anymore.
(Of course not setting foot there - or, more importantly, spending any money there or with companies based there - will also help to get the message across. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No ex post facto laws in this country, so you can go back in time to 1-Jan. And New York is ignoring the various court rulings that equate the phone's password to being protected against self incrimination. And last, they ignore the reality that some enterprising third party will (or likely has already) write (or has written) an app that is in its own right secure and can do messaging or store information regardless of the manufacturer's built in encryption. Just make it stored externally. And mix in a few of those high voltage spike generating USB devices. Warn them not to use them. Don't have to say why no to do so.
And here I thought that the standard was "If a technology has a substantial legal use, it's considered legal even if some people use it for illegal purposes."
I look forward to the ban on automobiles. After all, "even though cars may help some people get around, they are used by some criminals to outrun police pursuing them on foot and thus the criminals will act with impunity."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Let "The Invisible Hand" slap them up alongside the head when it comes time to collect sales taxes. B-)
They'll want use tax for that. Doesn't mean they'll get it or have a good way to enforce it, but it doesn't strictly exempt you from tax: https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_an...
On the other hand, you get to credit any sales tax paid in the other state against your use tax owed. So they won't get much anyway.
Just enumerating the possible keys, let alone apply them to see if something intelligible appears, with sufficiently advanced quantum computers, would take more than just the total resources of the Solar System.
Actually, the whole POINT of quantum computers is that "enumerating" them all only takes one pass - because the computation does them all simultaneously, with only the "right answer" surviving the wave function collapse when the computation is complete and you read the result.
It's non-quantum computers where a large key space maps into "the program is still running at the heat-death of the universe".
However, the algorithm of the AES-256 is complex enough that it would take a VERY advanced quantum computer to manipulate the qbits through the necessary transitions (without losing the result to noise). So I don't think we need to sweat that for a while. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The security forces in our world could have, maybe, gotten what they wanted. The ability to tap a phone's data stream and listen in. If only.
If only they had not run roughshod over privacy and spied upon everyone, regardless of guilt, nationality, probable cause, or due process.
If only they had brought these requests forward in a way they could have been debated, commented on, understood, and the merits/disadvantages brought out.
If only they had an ounce of respect for the citizens they purport to protect. Or respect for freedom, democracy and the constitution.
But you know what? They disrespected all of that and poisoned the debate. No one else is responsible. Terrorists, criminals or otherwise. The "leaders" of our security establishment decided they couldn't be bothered. Or they thought someone else was responsible (politicians? Hah!). Or they just weren't equipped to have a public policy debate. "We know best and you just leave the grown-up stuff to us." Yeah, that's the way to win support.
And so they earned contempt and enemies, ones they never needed to have at all.
Let the market decide how much it likes the idea.
So he just does away with due process? No court order required, we just need a cop to demand it?
Disclaimer: I am not a resident of the State of New York
In response to this bill I have sent a message to the bill's sponsor, [http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Matthew-Titone/ Matthew Titone, D-North Shore], asking the following questions:
- Will this bill make root-ing a cell phone illegal?
- If it does, then wouldn't that go against federal mandates allowing people to root their cell phones and install their own software/operating system?
- How would this bill affect people who root their cell phones and put their own operating system that doesn't support whatever decryption method its original vendor supports onto it?
- Would this bill outlaw the use of encryption in general; or just on cell phones?
- What if I'm a non-resident of New York and I transit / visit your state with an encrypted phone - will I then be in violation of state laws and invoke some liability (criminally / civilly)?
- Would this bill disavow ownership and management of my own devices?
Only lawmakers will have iPhones...?
Are they required to have easy ways to open them also?
...has spoken.
Or, is getting ready to speak.
Want a Socialist State Government?
Live in a State controlled by the Socialist Movement.
Feel the Burn!
That power rests solely with the Federal Government. Since the cell phone industry is certainly interstate in all transactional cases, there's no legal footing upon which NY can support such an endeavor.
4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Perhaps, as an American I would rather die than comply, rather than give up my rights.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
So all they need to do is ship all the phones with a preprogrammed private key, this way its decryptable when its sold. Then give the user the option to generate a new key during the setup process. Still secure and does not violate the text of the "law".
It sold books, it'll sell phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If the bill does not have an abuse of authority clause it is an opportunity for
reckless abuse at multiple levels.
All of these side doors, secret court orders and other paranoia driven legislation
lack a sturdy counterbalance to keep their use legal.
Sailing ships have a keel often tons of lead or in the old days layers of ballast
rock at the lowest level of the hold. Without the counterbalance sailing ships
are too easy to blow over and the same is true for laws. Without counterbalancing
legislation to deter abuse the bad guys win.
Drug laws come to mind... 10-20 years for possession is not counterbalanced
with a 40-80 year penalty for planting false evidence on someone to make a quota
or a simple abuse of power comes to mind.
Without counterbalance in the law there is no push back that allows or encourages
abuse.
My personal worry about pervasive surveillance is the ease of generating "parallel constructions"
that prove a crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... These abuses nulify
laws that exclude evidence from the poison tree. Worse juries now demand air tight
presentations from prosecutors.
Jury instructions should begin with a disclosure. You will be told stories by master storytellers
on both the prosecution and defense. If you do not have the ability or at least the inclination
to sort out facts from fiction as presented by master storytellers you may not be able to serve
with a clear conscience. The expectations of the CSI effect and the storyteller effect supported
by parallel constructions makes justice seriously difficult but not impossible.
I listened to the findings of one of the internet famous cop vs. toy gun findings.
In the presentation it was stated that the office could expect a weapon to be fired
against him in 1/3 of a second and thus the policy is to fire first and not die.
I looked and 1/3 of a second is a number associated with a seriously trained individual.
I looked at the video multiple times and it is clear the officers were reckless in the way
they drove up, exited their squad car and killed the individual inside of 2-5 seconds of
arriving.
My 2-5 second viewing of the tape is that this was an execution. Procedure for a
code "priority 1" clearly is code for a process indistinguishable from an execution order.
I looked at it again and again... vastly more than the seconds the officers took to decide
to execute the individual and it is still clear that the officers arrived with an intent
to kill the individual.
Judge... caller made a judgement that there was a problem called 911.
Jury... dispatcher ruled this a "priority 1" withheld "might be a kid with a toy"
Executioner... officer arrives and kills the kid inside of seconds.
The only way the officer is off a hook is for the authors and signators of the
department policy to be placed under arrest and prosecuted for murder.
We did execute war crime criminals for following orders so perhaps a different hook.
Departmental policy and training cannot violate the law.
Loss of standing under the law cannot be eliminated by a policy change (IMO).
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Most people except old people don't know of CB radios. You can use CB for communications without concern others monitoring your conversations since many don't know it exists (yes security through obscurity has it's issues), and there is no texting, contacts, and location info database that can be mined for later nefarious purposes. You can DF the signals but then most are clueless about RF below 800 MHz. Downside is antennas are big and clunky, gets lots of RFI, fidelity is not so great, propagation is limited.
mfwright@batnet.com
Our draconian constitution, a mostly interpreted core piece these days, is arguably not fit for a lot of today's tech-related problems. Obviously, encryption isn't the problem. On-demand decryption is the easy way out, and will cause severe collateral damage at a universal level.
Regardless of that fact, the United States has the option of either taking the easy way out and crippling Corporate America and impacting the global economy (nobody wants plagued technology, few will manufacture it), or take a sincere amount of time and appropriate resources to retrain investigators on how to do their job without technology assisted aids.
“The fact is that, although the new software may enhance privacy for some users, it severely hampers law enforcement’s ability to aid victims. All of the evidence contained in smartphones and similar devices will be lost to law enforcement, so long as the criminals take the precaution of protecting their devices with passcodes. Of course they will do so. Simply stated, passcode-protected devices render lawful court orders meaningless and encourage criminals to act with impunity.”
Lawful requests are not automatically meaningful -- fetch me the moon, explain love, find the last digit of pi, relocate this unmovable rock... You can always ask, you can punish those who resist the order, but in the end you either need to learn to accept failure, or think twice before asking for the impossible.
The argument is that at some point, law enforcement or a court might want some piece of information, but face embarrassment when naively requesting that which is inaccessible? Cry me a river! Just because information "exists", or is believed to exist, it does not necessarily follow that it should be possible (nor easy) for a judge or detective to fetch it.
A judge may someday want to know where I was, yesterday at 3:14am. Does that mean it would make sense to require me to keep a sufficiently precise diary, or wear an ankle monitor, just to enable that possible future discovery request, so the poor slob doesn't have to face disappointment? Law enforcement has always been a cat-and-mouse game, where it's expected you won't be able to get information the easy way; bills requiring it to be easy won't change that.
Remember that New York is the state that sent Hillary to the Senate for heaven's sake.
Bill Nye is great. But, his evil doppleganger from the 25th century, NY Bill, sounds fucking horrible.
What about computing devices other than "smart phones?"
Would it apply to mp3 players? What about laptops, desktops, servers?
Would this pass muster under challenge regarding the interstate commerce clause? Can New York restrict what phones are allowed for a manufacturer in a different state to sell in its state, based on these reasons?
I imagine this bill would fail for a number of reasons, before and after legislative passage...
Cities and states can't just ignore the U.S. Constitution.
Get a warrant. If you have a warrant to obtain my phone, then maybe I will provide the decryption, but only so long as it does not violate my 5th amendment right.
... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws?
(2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible ... disassemble the automobile", and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.[1]
Apple can easily read the contents of any iPhone, iPod or iPad. The user just has to enter their passcode.
Get a DIY phone kit. Consisting of:
1. active phone part - approved by FCC or whoever you need
2. battery
3. cf card with OS
4. back plate
Now, assemble your "kit phone" byt putting the 4 parts together. Note that you are now both manufacturer (having built the kit) and OS vendor (having installed the OS yourself - you could've installed some other os instead) And of course, you can decrypt any secrets on your phone - even if google cannot.
As for repealing this law fast:
1. wait till phones manufactured in 2016 appear in phone shops
2. report every phone shop to the police, complain they're selling illegal phones in violation of this law. (At least the android models, where you can install various encryption apps that the vendor cannot crack - at least not in reasonable time)
3. Also complain about various politicians & celebrities that have illegal phones
Vendor's defences:
"Yes we can decrypt - please wait for the nice brute-force to run to completion."
If that doesn't fly:
(Vendor does the factory reset, perhaps keeping the contact list) "Here it is, decrypted. Seems he didn't have anything on it..."
The elephant in the room here is any reasonably good encryption app
1 Buy phone with a backdoor
2 Install encryption app. It would, of course, have to encrypt/decrypt all files as they are called by the other apps
The OTHER elephant is jail breaking the phone. Since everyone (who cares) will know the location of the "secret" back door, change the code to look elsewhere for the key
The Bill should have another clause that sets pi = 3.2 exactly and e = 2.7 exactly.
Encryption is just applying mathematical functions to strings of numbers. As long as pi and e are irrational and transcendental, no universally applicable "backdoor" can exist.
The solution is for the legislature of New York to declare that pi = 3.2 exactly and e = 2.7 exactly.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I wonder if there is a legitimate law suit against phone manufacturers (or any manufacturer for that matter) that produces a product that says it has encryption but has a back door knowingly built into it. Wouldn't that be false advertising? Its not really encryption anymore. Its a sieve that leaks information to ANYONE that has the key to the back door, law enforcement or not.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I have no idea about cryptography, but would it be possible to create a system where the message could be decrypted with exactly two keys and no more?
You can't teach a moron anything. Stop trying.
Let's say this thing passes. First of all, fuck anyone who votes for it. But that aside, all that has to happen is Apple alone has to say "ok, fine, no iPhones can be sold in NY." Shut down the Apple store there.
I'd bet this bill is reversed inside a week.
I don't mean to put it all on Apple of course, but it really only takes them. If the Samsung's and HTCs and LG's of the world do it too then that's even better. But it really just takes Apple.
Sure, they'd lose some income, but like I said, I'd bet good money it's so brief a period they don't even notice the loss. People would be ALL OVER the pricks that pushed for that shit they'd have no choice but to undo it quickly.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Then I wondered how many other people visit New York State each year, and came up with this
That's potentially millions of people who would be breaking the law just by visiting New York (and yes I know the figures are for New York City, not the State, the point's the same).
The whole idea is a really weird one. Too stupid to even get traction surely?
Idiots like this Titone douche bag need their most private matters exposed to the public. I don't have the first
idea how to do this, but I am sure someone does, and it ought to be done.
Idiots who want the rest of us to not have privacy need to learn _first hand_ how enjoyable not having privacy is.
Sic' em, boys.
Abortion is legal because of a "Right to Privacy"... yet actual privacy? No. What about the "Right not to Self Incriminate"? Surely that applies.
it's just that in some cases it takes a very, very long time.
"In 2016, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't buy an iPhone."
I always wondered what it would sound like if 20 million New Yorkers all suddenly went to New Jersey to buy a phone at once?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
it's time to legally execute him for conspiracy to commit treason
If the Supreme Court has held in Riley v. California that a much less intrusive law is unconstitutional, then shouldn't their reasoning apply here? If the requirement for obtaining any private information held in a phone is a search warrant, and an owner can be compelled to provide access when that search warrant is presented, then just do that. The most likely application of this proposed law is a way to avoid obtaining a search warrant. And wouldn't any argument that timeliness of access is important require probable cause, which, again, the likely application of this law would not have?
To be honest, no matter how much they claim the inability to break or bypass smartphone encryption, I can't bring myself to believe it.
All this posturing and publicity designed to push the idea that they're currently incapable of obtaining the contents of any targeted phone is very likely just bullshit.
I treat my phone as if it is fully compromised. No apps loaded, never log into any website that requires a login, don't check email with it. If I ever snap, you can be sure my Evil Plan won't reside on my phone. . . lol
No matter how much Apple / Google or even the Government claim otherwise, I will never put enough trust into their products to use them as they are intended.
My next phone will very likely be a simple flip phone. Dumb as a rock and does one thing: makes calls.
I find it hillarious that whenever it is a democrat doing some backwards power grab to subvert the consitution, nobody mentions party affilication on this site. If it was a republican (no better in my mind), everyone would be talking about how horrible the replublicans are.
OK, buy your backdoored phone. Then install my encryption/locking app for $1.
Your key, your secret, NY's problem. I can already count my MILLION$.
It worked with guns...not.
Poster above have already posted the obvious: go out of state, or Amazon to buy the phone. This previously happened with guns.
NY tried to ban certain types of guns some years back. But a lot of guns connected to crimes were found to have been bought in other states.
Cited in Hemenway, Private Guns, Public Health (2006)
The bill says as of Jan 1 2016. So once the bill goes into effect, those phones are criminal? Would any application that encrypts the data be likewise criminalized? I think they want to be able to access and decrypt the information without touching the phone or alerting the owner. So are your photos safe? Will there be another "Fappening" at the NSA?
A shame we can't introduce a bill for seal-clubbing idiot politicians....
Of course, there would be exceptions for LEOs and government officials, citing something like "privacy" and "security", or they will simply buy their phones outside of NY anyway.
Some carriers already offer "bring your own phone plans".
As soon as the first (legal) wire taps started yielding results, police have gotten lazier and increasingly addicted to doughnut-friendly investigation techniques.
Technology has caught up, plugged the phreaking and now wiretapping holes. Lazy investigators should be following suspects, working leads, and building cases, not whining about the technology.
Bad guys aren't caught by peppering the entire world with script kiddie cracking vulnerabilities.
Do your job.
How long did it take for the 'Nazi' regime to rule 1933 Germany, and what steps did they take before they came to power?
This indicates the encryption technologies that are available to us do, in fact, work.
If this were true, proprietary info, commercial info, private matters of patent, become open source for law enforcement to sale to the highest bidder, naturally the opposition of such company at risk. Not good.
There are two types of people who are destroying our nation and need to be stopped. Gun nuts and terrorist groups such as the NRA who want to stop sensible gun control laws and want people other than law enforcement and the military to have guns and privacy advocates and terror groups such as the ACLU, EPIC, EFF, and many others. Why do people need guns? Why do people need Privacy? These "privacy advocates" claim that it is a constitutional right to expect privacy when nowhere in the constitution does it mention people have a "right to privacy". The mandatory encryption has forced everyone to use encryption including people who are not criminals making it hard for police to determine who the bad guys are since everyone has encryption. Law enforcement needs a back door to prevent terrorists, child pornographers, drug dealers, and all other criminals who use encryption to avoid detection. The San Bernardino shootings are an example of why we need a back door to encryption and sensible common sense gun control. In fact, we need to eliminate private ownership of firearms and we need to have back doors to encryption to protect the freedoms we enjoy from being taken from us by terrorists.
I'm sure there is already a back door to encryption on smart phones by all manufacturers. Just look at what happened when Lavabit refused to put in a back door to their encryption algorithm to help the US Government spy on their customers. The founder had to shut down and could go to jail for shutting down rather than complying with the request from the government. Both Google and Apple have voluntarily cooperated in mass surveillance in the past and are probably complying with mass surveillance orders right now but making it appear that they are refusing to comply with the government when they cannot even reveal if they receive a security letter from the NSA or other agency. In addition all the government has to do is capture this information on a cell phone when it's not encrypted using spyware or a built in tool within the smart phones OS.
Well, I guess New Yorkers will just have to go to Jersey to buy any smartphone, then. NYC is a big market, sure, but I'm doubtful that Apple would really bow to this, especially for just one state.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
This shit will not end until there are politicians hanging from every streetlight and the gutters are filled with the bodies of the police.
Are NY law makers smoking crack? What a bunch of clueless out of touch assholes.
They are not going to like the response of smart phone manufacturers and sellers (who will quite rightly tell them to go fuck themselves) and the inevitable shitstorm that will follow from citizens of New York.