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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.
they're indecipherable
The summery has three links to the exact same article. Well, keep trying, I'm still not gonna RTFA.
With the government. Maybe except Bernie, I'd guess. This is a surprise? They are the government.
(...reads TFA...)
In fact, only one candidate, Marco Rubio, seemed to allow for any nuance on the issue.
Holy shit... really?
Rubio:
Here's the thing though, if you require by law – if we passed a law that required Apple and these companies to create a backdoor, number one, criminals could figure that out and use it against you. And number two, there's already encrypted software that exists, not only now but in the future created in other countries. We would not be able to stop that.
If you create a backdoor, there is a very reasonable possibility that a criminal gang could figure out what the backdoor is. That possibility is – if you create a backdoor, you're creating a vulnerability. And what you're not going to chance is the fact that other companies around the world who are not subject to U.S. laws – they could create encryption technology that we'll never be able to get access to.
Wow... someone has an actual technology adviser worth a damn on his staff.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
You mean except for when Rand Paul attached CISPA to a spending bill?
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).
from TFA:
Bernie Sanders
From the fourth Democratic debate:
Sanders: You would all be amazed, or maybe not, about the amount of information private companies and the government has in terms of the Web sites that you access, the products that you buy, where you are this very moment.
Sanders: And it is very clear to me that public policy has not caught up with the explosion of technology. So yes, we have to work with Silicon Valley to make sure that we do not allow ISIS to transmit information...
Moderator: But in terms of lone wolves, the threat, how would you do it?
Sanders: Right. What we have got to do there is, among other things, as I was just saying, have Silicon Valley help us to make sure that information being transmitted through the Internet or in other ways by ISIS is, in fact, discovered. But I do believe we can do that without violating the constitutional and privacy rights of the American people.
If you read the article, both Rubio and Cruz "acknowledged that backdoors cause great security concerns". That's two.
Cruz:
Rubio:
Do people make really obvious mistakes in these summaries on purpose? Are you trolling us?
Do the presidential candidates know what encryption is and how technology commonly uses it? Don't set the bar too high - you are dealing with politicians, although one of them apparently ran her own email server so you would hope that she at least knows the value of encryption!
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.
You just happen to be a member of the crowd to which Bernie is playing. And, obviously, he is doing a good job of it.
Don't ever make the mistake of trusting him. Every action he takes that is not subject to public scrutiny will be a betrayal, as is true of every politician (that succeeds).
Nonsense. Sanders has had a remarkably open and public political career. He has answered questions from the public for an hour every Friday for years on the Thom Hartmann Show and his answers are reassuringly consistent and are backed up by his voting record. Plenty of Republicans in Vermont trust him because he does what he says he will. With regards to the surveillance state, Sander's has been outspoken in his opposition to pervasive data collection, voicing support for Edward Snowden's whistleblowing. Here's and article comparing his stance on NSA spying to that of Secretary Clinton.
I have observed that Sanders has generally narrowed his message in his campaign rhetoric, and specifically seems to avoids nuances of electronic security and privacy during the debates.
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.
Imagine all the people...
There's at least one candidate - Clinton - whose views on encryption have already be backed by action, namely her and Bill's friend Al "Clipper Chip" Gore and support for the Clipper Chip itself.
Notable that the FBI is trying to make a government mandated backdoor happen again...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"That's the sobering finding based on transcripts from the remaining presidential candidates, all of whom came out against cryptography"
I call BS! Find a Libertarian candidate who supports this...oh you meant one of the media authorized duopoly? Then, of course; there is no difference between them.
Gary Johnson 2016!