Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand On Encryption? (windowsitpro.com)

v3rgEz writes: In a divided election year, encryption brings parties together — against technology. That's the sobering finding based on transcripts from the remaining presidential candidates, all of whom came out against cryptography and for government backdoors to varying degrees. It's a testament to the post-Snowden era (and Apple's fight against a court order to backdoor an iPhone) that every candidate has been asked about the issue multiple times, but only one candidate even acknowledged that backdoors cause great security concerns for the public.

Comments

We have no idea

[DoofusOfDeath]

Most if not all presidential candidates who make it this far in the race will say whatever they thing will get them elected.

Perhaps I'm just unskilled at it, but I'm unable to predict what any President will actually do in office, based on his/her stated positions leading up to the election.

Reads like a total NSA/PRISM failure

[wvmarle]

The comments of those candidates show a total failure of all the intrusions by NSA with their PRISM project. Supposedly the NSA recorded all meta-data (who talks to who), yet the main argument of the presidential candidates on having back doors is not "what were they talking about" but "who were they talking to" - exactly the kind of information that PRISM was supposedly recording.

Several candidates mention this specifically. Who were they talking to? Who knew about this? What were the contacts of these criminals? What was their network? All these questions the NSA is supposed to be able to answer, if Snowden's revelations are anything to go by. Now I don't doubt Snowden's claims at all, so this all points to a terrible failure of the NSA of doing anything with the massive amount of information on phone calls and e-mail traffic they recorded.

Of course finding out about crimes or terrorist type attacks in the planning stage based on this kind of data may be incredibly hard; figuring out who these people had contact with after the fact should be much easier as at least they now have a very clear starting point.

So if there's one thing these pro-back door arguments point at, it's an epic failure of law enforcement. Not only did these agencies totally overstep their legal and moral boundaries, they did nothing to prevent this attack, and can not even provide any help or information after the fact. Maybe they should go back to good old policing: keeping personal contacts with the neighbourhoods, keeping good relations with the people, and actually get useful information directly out of the community the old fashioned way. It'll make lots of people a lot happier (if only because of the increased local security and social situation).

Still voting for Bernie

[TsuruchiBrian]

I agree that Rubio seems to have the best stance of the current field, but that's not saying much. Honestly I don't think any of them (except *maybe* Rubio) even understand how encryption works. I would hope that any of these candidates, should they become president, would put more effort into gaining a better understanding of encryption before making any consequential decisions. I think one can be excused for not having a good answer for a question about a complicated technology especially in a debate format where answers need to be in 30 second sound bytes.

I think if phrased in the language of "We don't put bad mathematics in American textbooks to hedge against terrorists that might read it", we could maybe help the American people and politicians understand what they are dealing with.

As tragic as the deaths from terrorism are, it's not clear that making all our encryption insecure via backdoors will be a good trade off for some if any reduction in terrorism. There is a very real possibility that we would be causing more deaths and other harm from preventable security breaches.

Even if some new advancement in cryptography allowed us to have vastly more secure backdoors, (after all the Turing Awards were handed out) it would still not be clear that we *should* give this power to the government, given their history of abuse of their powers and oversight evasion.

I don't expect every politician to be an expert on every subject, especially encryption. This is where I think character and integrity plays a big role for me.

I wouldn't say that I trust Marco Rubio to stick to any position if the circumstances changed, and I can't say that I trust his judgement in general. But kudos to him for having the best answer at least currently.

Re:Still voting for Bernie

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a Dane familiar with the healthcare system, I say Bernie should find another gem to look up to. The problem is there is the public hospital system and that's it. If you get ill, you go to your GP, who forwards you to a hospital. If the GP decides against the hospital spending time on you, then you are screwed if you need it. If you end up at the hospital, one doctor starts the process of examination. If the doctor fails to figure out the problem, then you are screwed because if you go to another hospital, they look up what the first one wrote in the central database. This mean you are stuck with the conclusion from the first doctor and the second opinion system added by the politicians doesn't really work.

Some doctors complain that they are only allowed to work like 2 days a week. There are patients for 5 days. However the people giving permission for doctors to work has the idea that allowing one doctor to work full time will make him a rich bastard. Avoiding that is more important than curing people. Also treating the same number of people with the same public cost for each patient is mysteriously cheaper if the doctor doesn't work every day. If you get that argument, then please explain it to me. The only cost saving I can see is if people die while waiting.

Around 5-6 years the politicians wanted to ensure treatment for everybody. They talked about 300k people with illnesses, which were not diagnosed. Their tool was to assign one person to be responsible for diagnosing each person and start treatment. Not as a person to do it personally, but the person responsible to figure out what to do next if the patient was forwarded to a doctor who couldn't figure out anything. The doctors objected and stated it wasn't possible and the plan failed due to the hostility towards it. This mean if a person has say chronic diarrhea, it can be checked for cancer. If it's not that, then the system stops because the papers ended up saying "check for cancer", not "figure out how to cure the patient". The patient then needs to restart from the GP and hope he can forward with the right thing in the papers the second, or 10th time. Each time the patient is added to the back of the queue.

Sadly I'm one of those 300k people. I have waited 19 months to go to be examined and hopefully cured and I was more or less met with the message "come back in half a year". Because doctors failed to provide a date for my recovery, or given an official diagnosis, I'm not one of those who can get paid sickleave. This mean my income is 0 and I have to rely on family to support me financially. Still even under those circumstances I had a doctor write in the journal that I most likely faked illness to get money. Mind you, that was without any examination at all and as it turned out, the doctor didn't even need to examining anything at all.

I have been submitted for overnight hospital stays a few times over the years, or just all day stays. Despite the long hours, it turns out that something as simple as food isn't always provided and I have had to call my family to cook something at home and bring it. I could sort of understand it for visitors who goes there for a test, but not for people actually being hospitalized. The most extreme case was when I vomited for 24 hours and failed to keep any food at all during that time. I ended up being picked up by an ambulance and was hospitalized for 17 hours. That was 17 hours in addition to the 24 without food or water if I didn't had help from my family. Technically I did get water directly into my vain, but... It's not quality healthcare.

If I was allowed to pay for my own diagnosis and treatment (no insurance, just borrowed money I should repay) and with even just an average salary, could have been cured and gained a profit in the time I have been on zero income. In fact just treating me would have given the state a profit from taxes. However with the free public hospital system, the private hospitals mainly do stuff the public ones don't, such as cosmetic surgery. As a res

An even more alarming trend.

[SvnLyrBrto]

Reading those is genuinely scary. And there's something even more alarming than the nitwitted stand on encryption itself. Nearly all the candidates talk about how they will "make Apple do this" or "have Silicon Valley do that". Their opinions that they should have the power to conscript anyone they damn well please into doing their dirty work for them is the genuinely offensive and frightening. The abuses of the NSA are bad enough. But at least that was an entirely government operation. Forcing uninvolved third parties to unwillingly aid them on spying on the citizens... that's some seriously east-German Stasi level thuggery.

Re:Where do they side?

[rahvin112]

No, they are right there with two utterly unrelated quotes that have nothing at all to do with the issue. It's almost like they don't think he's a real candidate so they put up a quote that's meaningless and unrelated intentionally. I wonder why.

His position on government snooping is well known. He's one of the few that voted against the Patriot Act, not just the first time but No for both re-authorizations as well. In fact as far as I know he's the only one in congress that did that. So to reflect this record they dig up an unrelated quote and put it up to make him look like a dottering fool, because he's not a "real" candidate.

Re:Better question

[PopeRatzo]

Apple has a point in not wanting to do this wholesale, but law enforcement has an actual warrant, and that how the Fourth Amendment is supposed to work.

I don't know how much you know about warrants and the Fourth Amendment, but they can't compel anyone to actually work for the government. Apple is being told that the warrant requires them to develop software on the government's behalf.

The Fourth Amendment is about search and seizure. The warrant in question doesn't apply to either. The government can't force you to search my house for evidence, for example.