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Obama: Government Can't Let Smartphones Be 'Black Boxes' (bloomberg.com)
JoeyRox writes: President Obama said Friday that smartphones -- like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple to help it hack -- can't be allowed to be "black boxes," inaccessible to the government. He believes technology companies should work with the government on encryption rather than leaving the issue for Congress to decide. He went on to say, "If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it's fetishizing our phones above every other value." Obama's appearance on Friday at the event known as SXSW, the first by a sitting president, comes as the FBI tries to force Apple to help investigators access an iPhone used by one of the assailants in December's deadly San Bernardino, California, terror attack. "The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket." He said compromise is possible and the technology industry must help design it.
He seems pretty lax on allowing writs of attainder and not upholding the fourth amendment.
Ok. So I blow up a few city blocks. In Obama's mind, I can't be arrested unless they can read my cell phone? Or does he just mean that the police will say: "We can't open the phone! Guess we should give up and go to the bar to have a few beers. No point in even trying to do an investigation. It's hopeless."
No doubt there are already backdoors in baseband processors and of course zero-day exploits. This controversy is to create the impression that government must impose draconian laws to rein in the privacy-maximalists in Silicon Valley. In reality SV are the NSA's willing accomplices.
DO YOU SPEAK IT?
I have a right to encrypt whatever the fuck I want, and the government cannot compel me to testify against myself by giving them the encryption key. Fifth Amendment.
Apple has a right to make whatever speech it wants -- or, crucially, to refrain from speaking. In particular, it has a right not to tell the government its signing key, either. First Amendment.
Totalitarian shitbag Obama needs to back the fuck off. At this point he's even worse than George "goddamn piece of paper" W. Bush!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Who is he to say what privacy and levels of encryption that the US citizens should be privy to?
Sure if you have impenetrable phones, some criminals will use them....
But do we get rid of all other devices criminals might use?
Do we round all blades and dull all knives, because some criminal might stab someone?
Do we stop letting people drive cars...because some folks might use one as a weapon and kill lots of folks?
No...we don't need any more of the Nanny State mentality, that the Govt knows best and needs full access and control over the population in order to care and protect it from itself.
It is not the job of the citizenry, nor the companies of the US to go out of their way to make things easy for the police/powers that be. You work for us, we don't work for you.
Sorry, but FU....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The elephants and donkeys keep rotating as President while we angrily unelect the responsible ruling party approximately every eight years.
But neither side trusts the public that votes it in or is disinterested in its' surveillance.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
From the Engadget article: Obama said we'll have to figure out "how do we have encryption as strong as possible, the key as secure as possible and accessible by the smallest pool of people possible, for a subset of issues that we agree is important."
If we give the government a back door to our data, it's only a matter of months before criminals and other nation states have that key. I've pointed this out before, but - just in the past twelve months, both the IRS and OPM had extremely sensitive information very thoroughly hacked.
You simply can't design back doors into an secure system and expect it to remain secure. We had these discussions before, back in the Clipper Chip days! To the best of my knowledge, the laws of mathematics haven't changed over the past two decades.
#DeleteChrome
The same way we've been doing it for 200, 300 years. By having military and intelligence groups doing their jobs. I'm sorry if your job is hard, I really am, but giving people an automatic backdoor through our security is not the way to do it. And it is people. A government of people, with all the flaws of people. Just like all the child pornographers are people, and the terrorists are people. And I don't want any people to have that access, weather I've elected them or not.
Once a backdoor exists, the encryption just keeps honest people honest. And it isn't the honest people that I'm encrypting my phone from.
is there are going to be glaring back doors to devices?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yes. Yes we can.
Because the government has no legitimate reason to demand ad-hoc access to any device at any time.
If this means, on occasion, that the government can't get into a given criminal's devices? C'est la vie.
The government couldn't get someone like Al Capone for mob activity or running illegal alcohol.
They had to be creative in how they got at him.
Basically the government isn't arguing that they CANNOT get the data.
Just that it's HARD to. And they want an easy back door into systems.
And they're now willing to completely compromise user safety on more than just phones.
The government needs to be told "Fuck No" as forcibly as possible.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But citizens are expected to accept the government as black boxes. Did I miss something?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Oh bravo, label Switzerland as a land of terrorists........
"how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" He sound more like Cameron every day. Wanting a backdoor to every phone to "disrupt" a terrorist plot", i.e. Everybody are tapped into permanently and software flags you as an active shooter if you visited a gun store last week rent a van and read a news article on AlJazeera.com.
This is crazy, we must not let it happen.
that lets people post info on where, when and what a politician any public servant is doing on a given day while working on public time.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Funny, the Constitution is exactly that: absolutist.
What do they think the 4th Amendment is about? Oh, I forgot, they could care less as withness the NSA actions and what is still allowed. Encrypt and encrypt deep regardless of what these un-American clowns say and regardless of what companies like Apple do or do not do. It is your right to be secure in your papers and effects including your digital effects.
Why is there this inherent assumption that law enforcement and counterterrorism is so important? That's not what the Constitution prioritized; our Constitution prioritized placing the power in the hands of the people to control the government, not the government to control the people.
This is exactly the same as the right to bear arms, for the same reasons (because our founding fathers were revolutionaries and wrote the constitution to be sure that their descendents could be too, if needed) so really, someone ought to make a Second Amendment argument to protect the right to crypto as a form of electronic arms against hostile control of information.
We can
Um... by catching them in the act of making or distributing child pornography? Maybe?
Given that if the FBI really wanted to, they could get in, I think the key here is that the TSA needs to get into all the iphones. There could be child porn there.
The government absolutely must catch up in two areas if they want to solve this problem.
1) Pay - start paying engineers, programmers and specialists what they can make in industry. Be competitive for a change. You want good people who can crack these things? Pay for it. Also, hire some competent FBI investigators.
2) Tech - in the US, we have access to some of the highest technology available. The government has some access to things in advance of the public. Certainly more of it, at least. You need better tech - stop buying fighter jets that don't work and getting us involved in wars that don't work either and blow that money on studying ways to crack an iPhone or whatever else you need into.
Any rules must apply to all citizens.
This whole thing about private devices, smartphones. And personal mail servers, Hillary.
All of it is about where does individual dominion stop and civil participation start.
I really wish there was a truly open phone OS. Like a BSD varient for smartphones. Where you can own the whole enchilada. Trust, but be able to verify.
Until I realized he didn't mean "blackbox" in the sense of a plane blackbox. If he'd meant, we can't let the phone become a device which records anything and everything to be recovered after the fact to tease apart every aspect of your life, I'd have been cheering... The fact that he means exactly that is so disappointing.
If anyone with a few bucks is allowed to own a home with a fireplace and a polaroid camera, then how will we crack down enough on pedophiles that use those things for their enjoyment while committing their crimes? We must outlaw fireplaces and polaroid cameras. Fireplaces are a fetishist luxury that society has tolerated too long. We must set the right balance with freedom to ensure our national security and that no child is hurt. Bicycles are next.
Why is the phone a "do not cross" line? This is the one that is making people here on Slashdot compare the government to nazis? All this time we've been living in the world where the government can get a legal warrant to enter your house, look through your things, take pretty much anything they deem suspicious, get into your car, your workplace... This happens every single day.
But, unlocking your phone and looking at your data is a whole another level of intrusion that causes extreme amounts of anger and comparisons to one of the worst government regimes ever?
I don't get this. I mean, I don't see anybody protesting that if I lock my house, government can't come in, even with a warrant, and my house and its contents are way more private to me than my phone.
Could somebody please elaborate on why the phone is a special case here?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
It's fetishizing our privacy above every other value, something the gov should be doing too! How does he not get that?
If anyone with a few bucks is allowed to own a home with a fireplace and a polaroid camera, then how will we crack down enough on pedophiles that use those things for their enjoyment while committing their crimes? We must outlaw fireplaces and polaroid cameras. Fireplaces are a fetishist luxury that society has tolerated too long. We must set the right balance with freedom to ensure our national security and that no child is hurt. Bicycles are next.
You dumbfuck, China already has it. There is no principled stand here, just marketing by Apple.
Don't make them anything like flight recorders, which readily document and give up all details and information in a standardized way to any interested party.
Twinstiq, game news
Indeed, smartphones shouldn't be black boxes. The source code should be available to all, especially the people who actually own the phones.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I think you may be confusing logic with political posturing. I'm sure if I grew up in Ice Cube's neighborhood, I'd say the words nigger, faggot, and bitch exactly as often as I was expected to. More or less.
Like they dont already have one! This is just more spectacle to convince the American people that they should make the shit they have been doing for 20+ years legal.
The get Think of the Children, teh Terror, and he references swiss bank accounts while helping tax dodgers, H1B replacement of our workforce, and telling us that we actually had balance in the past 200-300 years. Does he have an unlimited supply of crack?
As long as the government can keep secrets then so too the people. If we are true to democracy and principles of this nation, then it can't be both ways.
:T:R:A:N:S:
That's funny, coming from the head of our government in a time where it is painfully obvious they want to keep all of the records of their "questionable" activities in a black box. A month doesn't seem to go by where some branch is claiming that the public doesn't need to know about their tracking of phone calls, internet communications, random planting of GPS devices, lying in court about the source of evidence (parallel construction), destruction of documents, keeping of records that are required by law to periodically destroyed, the list goes on.
It's actually quite reasonable and correct to be absolutely for or against certain things... rape for instance. "Oh just this one time" doesn't justify anything whatsoever, nor do polite words minimize the offense.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's a reasonable sounding argument, and it is true that it "does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years". But we don't live in the world we lived in 200 and 300 years ago. Arc of history and all that.
I thought wishing for a return to a mythical past that was better than today was a conservative value.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
I already use PGP to save personal data on my USB drive with strong encryption. Does the encryption on an iPhone's data present a much stronger barrier to the government than what I am doing already?
I suspect Obama's real issue is with making this mechanism easy for masses of people to use without thinking about it, not with the existence of personal black boxes per se.
What this debate is really about is whether or not the police should be allowed to torture information out of people whose will would otherwise be a sufficient technological deterrent to exposing the information. Something about the right to remain silent or not incriminate yourself or some shit like that.
What Obama...what most politicians...don't seem to understand is that there is no balance. The phone is either secure...or it isn't. And if it isn't, the police will not be the only ones cracking it.
Good ol' child pornographers and terrorists, the ubiquitous go-to for governments when they want to convince their citizens intrusion of their privacy is reasonable. There should be a variant of Godwin's Law for this; as such is a sure sign they have no reasonable justification. As a student of the Constitution, the President should know that the 4th amendment exists to guard personal liberty against a not-always-trustworthy federal government, and if the last few years have proven anything, it's proven we sure can't trust the FBI.
I'd have said Cheney / Rumsfeld. This is some hard-core Right-wing shit.
So he thinks that we should all give up our privacy because the cops/FBI/etc will have to work extra hard to find evidence? boo-fucking-hoo.
So the president is ready to drive the tech segment off to greener pastures, he may get his wish sooner then he thinks. I am sure there are a number of countries ready for our tech companies with open arms and "friendlier climates". Apple might be able to buy one of these locals. I can see it now. Appletania, Microsoftlandia, Google emirates, a whole new Geo-political landscape with their own tech focused mutual defense alliance. Go ahead Mr. President place your bets and give the wheel a spin you can change our country into a irreversible technical wasteland with a depression to boot, all it will take is a few more nudges. On the other hand you could tell the FBI/ alphabet agencies to STFU and behave and enjoy the overwhelming support of the intelligent public for protecting every bodies security. You are dancing on the raw edge of national socio-economic tsunami beyond your imagination. By the way if you want to see a model of this plan in action keep an eye on the UK, they seem to be like minded and are rushing headlong into oblivion right now.
Obama thinks there should be at least some mechanism for getting access -- perhaps something like a partial white-box implementation. So it sounds like Obama's administration is more favor of a half-black box here.
Well, yeah! And it's working. Public opinion is turning against privacy, free speech, and other rights. There's a whole bunch of people who want to gut the entire bill of rights and beyond, like the 13th and 14th amendments.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For about 30 mS.
Then somebody will make a privacy app that works and the FBI will be back where they claim they started.
In the meantime, Apple will think hard if it makes sense to stay in the US.
We so need a decent President after these last two.
Skip to considering this a fight about the information contained in a Smartgun. Eventually we will have them and this will be the precedent used for access.
Hello NRA, are you listening?
Because using technological means to crypt your communications shouldn't be any different than using manual means.
If I write down some code in my ledger, even if it (potentially) indicates criminal activity, and even if the government find it in a search of my house with a warrant, they can't force me to tell them how to read it. It's the same as that.
Obama wants all the child pornographers in jail but not the all child abusers? But of course! War is a far worse form of child abuse, and nobody gets punished for it.
enough said.
but you should consider all sides even if you believe them to be wrong.
He's got a point. We are used to the freedoms that we have as Americans and feel that we would be giving them up by allowing them into our phones. But, we've never had quite that much freedom. With a warrant the government has been able to get at everything that we have except our thoughts. From that standpoint, he's correct.
But... the government has been abusing this access and people feel the need to push back. I think that is the main reason that some (most?) Americans feel that Apple is doing the right thing. If nothing else, Apple is putting the question out there so that this conversation is being had.The FBI may not be the chief abuser of this access ...cough...NSA...cough..., but they are one of them.
Smart phones are even more of an issue because not only do they have some of our private data, but they have at least links to eevveerryything! It's becoming the "home base" of our personal data. To someone that wants to know everything about you, it's a very nicely organized dossier. Apple knows this. All the phone providers want it to become an even more complete dossier by providing every feature that they can that ties your life together (and makes it so you can't live without their equipment/service).
What really needs to happen is that people need to be assured (more than lip service) that the access to their personal information is done properly and for the right reasons. We need something (laws, punishments, something...) that is reasonable for both sides (the protectors of the masses and the individual) and it needs to be something with real teeth. We need to know that if someone abuses that access that they get more than a rap on the knuckles with a ruler.
To all government agencies... here it is. If you want to look at my data because you have a honest reason to believe that I'm doing something wrong, I welcome your intrusion into my privacy. I would provide you this access as a good citizen to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens. If your desire to look at my personal data is "just because", then screw you. I'm encrypting everything and I won't be using an encryption method that's provided by a company in the USA.
You (TLAs) need to be able to do your job and I understand that. I need to have a reasonable expectation that access to my private information isn't abused. I know that you are focused on "finding the bad guy" and that's great. But when you abuse the access that you have to our private information, we start questioning who the bad guy is that we need protection from.
"He believes technology companies should work with the government on encryption rather than leaving the issue for Congress to decide."
If Obama said that, what is he really saying?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
He's wrong.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
As is my constitutional right to free speech (or not to speak), my constitutional protection from unlawful search, and my human right to privacy; my computer is encrypted and there isn't shit the executive or judicial branch can legally do about it. As long as we can continue to convince the legislature not to create new amendments that replace these constitutional protections, the only option left to the President is to violate the law.
And yet, the US has the gall to lecture other countries and leaders about "freedom."
Obama, you dumb motherfucker. a smartphone is not a blackbox. It communicates, sends and transmits signals. It has ports to talk to peripherals. There may be a little work to get at the data but it can be done. Of course Obama just wants shit handed to him. Typical black man.
How did law enforcement solve crimes and gather intelligence before we had smartphones? I guess all the child pornographers and terrorists got away clean.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Fuck Obama.
Because phones are becoming the Rosetta Stone of your life. If all of your information isn't there, then at least links to all of the information in your life is there. It's becoming a very neatly organized dossier of your life. Phone providers (Apple, Google) have an interest in it becoming an even larger part of your life so that you can't do without their services.
Have gnu, will travel.
The thing is, you can still go ahead and encrypt a ledger, even a digital one, and store it on your phone. You don't need an impenetrable locked-down fully encrypted phone in order to do that. The government could get your ledger and they won't be able to figure out what it means.
Locking down your phone so that they can't even get to the coded ledger is the equivalent of not letting them into your house in the first place.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
The President's #1 job is the security of the nation so that's the side that he must argue. I get it.
But the extreme, cartoon-like example hasn't been answered.
If the only way to save a million lives is to decrypt something then why do you think a million lives is less important than your super encrypted data?
If the only way to save your daughter is to decrypt something that is impossible to decrypt then why must you sit helplessly and watch her die?
At what # of lives does it become an issue?
Think of all the remotely possible (yet hopefully improbable) situations where you or others are harmed by being unable to decrypt something. What is the solution?
Saying "well just solve that" doesn't solve it. Throw money at it? Higher taxes for more "something" that feels like it should solve it? I haven't heard anything reasonably convincing.
You're saying that I would learn more about you by looking at your phone than going through your stuff at your house? If that's true, then I can see your point. I don't think that's true for me, but at least it makes more sense.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Why's it always gotta be about race with this guy?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Clearly Obama is either an idiot if he doesn't recognize that there is no safe 'compromise' when it comes to encryption or more likely (since I don't think he's an idiot...I just don't like his policies) he is entirely obfuscating the matter in an attempt to make it seem like there IS a compromise.
O and of course we have to have the expected 'think of the children' fear campaign in here too.
Given how the government does "security" for us (IRS, OPM hacks), I don't want them anywhere near access to my phone.
I'm just going to have to resort to whispering in my co-conspirator's ear in a crowded noisy concert hall again, telling them which day to look in the newspaper for the classified ad with the agreed code words in it.
Such a pain.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Of course this is Slashdot and most everyone here knows that strong encryption is pretty widely distributed and available. There is absolutely nothing that would stop a criminal or terrorist from loading a third party app to encrypt their phone that was Apple, Google or Samsung wouldn't be able to do a thing about. Even if you banned any such app from the various stores it would still be there, available for side-loading. And that's exactly what anyone who really wanted their phone encrypted would do. So who would this affect? Only ordinary, law abiding citizens. Once it is widely known that the government possesses a back-door, court orders will open it for far less than terrorism. Ordinary criminal inquiries, divorce cases, you name it. It bears a striking similarity to a variety of Second Amendment restrictions. Criminalize encryption and only criminals will have encryption.
Apple should push an update that disables updating on locked phones.
Smart guys have made blackboxes from quite a long time, more than a decade... crap security only helps to get access to normal people. Anyone with a little bit of technical background can build "blackboxes", crypto software is open-source...
Milano - Italy
or lack thereof. The POTUS is asking us to exhibit pretty much blind trust in a government that has lied to us repeatedly. Sorry, too late.
So, on the one side of the line is pencil and paper and math done in your head and one time pad keys written on magicians pre-soaked with accelerant paper for easiest quick destruction. Then you have the mobile phone. Please enlighten me as to what is on the other side of the line? What technologies has the government outlawed the production of in a similar manner? Nuclear Weapons? Hand Grenades? I love the fact that your attention is focused on threshold lines, I just think you are looking at the situation rather naively.
The police do not need a warrant to enter your house; the supreme court ruled that already and police are entering houses without a warrant routinely.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(1) The government doesn't have any choice in the matter. Cryptography is so easy to implement these days that anyone who wants to can use it. (2) I guess Obama's mask has come off now, and his isn't trying to hide his complete disdain for civil liberties and privacy. Obviously, his original campaign promises were just lies.
Apple's phones already have backdoors. The spat between the FBI and Apple is a charade: Apple gives a false impression of privacy, and the FBI is downplaying its capabilities.
He seems pretty lax on allowing writs of attainder...
A writ of attainder is legislation which declares someone to be guilty without a trial. How is that relevant here? Who is being declared guilty? While I disagree that Apple should be compelled to break the iPhone encryption that is hardly declaring them guilty and punishing them.
All this fuss about Apple is also ultimately stupid because it is becoming increasingly easy to build a system which, while it might not be unbreakable, would be so hard to break that it will be impractical to have enough resources to do this for every case. Instead governments should be investing in clever, intelligent law enforcement approaches instead of the lazy "collect everything" approach that they seem to becoming increasingly attached to.
Problem is its not about this phone. It is about the capability for all our data, thoughts, messages, information etc to be surveilled all the time. The govt has shown itself very willing to do mass surveillance without any just cause. Its becoming the panopticon. The phone is just the next step.
I am happy that apple is standing up and saying no.
Sure... it might be a little harder to catch the bad guys. But what's the alternative?
Wouldn't want the 99% to have a swiss bank account
He said compromise is possible and the technology industry must help design it.
Oh. I'm sorry. I missed the part where you became an expert on Von Neumann or super hard math or systems of any kind, really.
Compromise is not possible because the system is designed to be resistant to compromise. If you introduce a compromise, you have undermined the system completely. Ergo if we want encryption, there is no compromise. It has to be the state of the art with hard math and no compromises. You have just decided by fiat that this can happen, should happen, and have directed other people to make it happen. This makes you a piece of shit. And a moron. And probably a fascist. What are you going to do if they tell you to blow it out your ass as the reasonable response to this is? If the answer is anything other than nothing, you're definitely a fascist.
"There's a whole bunch of people who want to gut the entire bill of rights and beyond, like the 13th and 14th amendments."
Relax. Of late, his base is turning to Hillary.
As far as child pornographers or terror plots, I honestly feel more threatened (both personally and on behalf of society) by the government. I'm sorry for anyone who gets killed or exploited, but I'm willing to take my chances with both as opposed to the chance of the FBI/DEA/etc showing up on my doorstep one night because of something they read out of context in an email.
And being treated as an illiterate idiot by the POTUS (that one speech would have cost him my vote) doesn't go down well either. I don't fetishize" my phone, but I do worry about my safety; the "balance" has swung so far towards the government in the last 200 or 300 years that it needs to be pulled back. We've started wars (starting with the American revolution) over government overreach far less disturbing than we all live with now.
It's not a special case. If the government has a legal warrant & the tools to do so they can break in to my phone...that's no different than having a legal warrant & the tools to break down my door than they have a legal right to do so (of course I'd wish they'd pay for the damage but of course they don't).
In both cases I can apply a lock to my property & the government can't mandate that the lock I apply to my physical properly has to be made to be 'less secure than I damn well want it to be'...but that's what they are saying you should have to do with your phone (or presumably any digital device with data I encrypt).
Or lets take this to a reasonably similar comparison level. Let's say I have some physical papers & I put them in a safe. Nothing says I can't make that safe so secure that if you don't know EXACTLY how to open it than the papers will be destroyed. I'm not just talking about having a combination or something that could be guessed but rather you could make it that if 10 guesses were entered incorrectly than acid would leak out all over the papers to destroy them...take it to whatever level necessary to make it 'reasonably equivalent' to the security in the iPhone. So now the government could try to physically bypass the lock (crowbars, explosives, drills, what have you)...but in all those cases I could design the safe to destroy the contents (again with acid, and of course if the government tried to blow it open with explosives you could just make it so thick that the explosive alone could destroy the papers)....long story short physically securing my physical papers in this way is allowed & there's 0 the government can do about it with or without a warrant...if on the other hand the government tried to pass a law saying safes could only be 'this secure' but no more and that we MUST always have backdoors to our valuables allowing the government to bypass any security we chose to use THAN we'd be protesting like crazy.
So, nobody anywhere is saying the government with a valid warrant can't TRY to access the information, what we're saying is that "we aren't obligated to reduce our security to help them".
As such there's no difference here at all other than the government not wanting every peon on the planet to have the ability to make their lives harder...too bad, the rules aren't set up to make the government's life easier to subjugate their people...and if you don't think that happens you haven't been paying attention.
I love how they try to insist this is new and somehow unique or different from anything that has gone on for thousands of years since language was nothing more than a series of grunts.
People always had the capability to speak or write in code or riddles to conceal thoughts from others. Doing the same thing with (insert modern tool here) may well provide additional capabilities or conveniences not before possible but is not a new or foreign concept. The implications are no different.
Regardless of technology used to protect stored thoughts or communication between trusted individual there is always a commons where those with evil aims must operate to find buyers or sellers for illicit goods and services, recruit and gather materials..etc. Given requirements for search under the 4th something other than private communications and stored data must serve as primary venue and vehicle by which investigations are supposed to start.
"... how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket."
Obama slipped up there and let the cat out of the bag. Terrorism and child porn are of secondary concern to the control and knowledge of MONEY. While there are decent minded folks in government who care about the former two, the folks who are most destroying our liberties are the ones who think ANY monetary transaction is the government's business, and use monetary control as a means to exert power and enrich themselves and their cronies (both directly and indirectly).
Well, that's my first ever post on Slashdot. How did I do?
When you vote for a leftwing fascist. And make no mistake Obama is a fascist.
For years, many voices in tech have been screaming about lax security and privacy controls in most devices and online services. Well, this argument may end up being a Straisand Effect of sorts, by encouraging the tech community to finally rally together and develop the kind of systems where this will be a non-issue: zero knowledge, end-to-end encrypted, ephemeral IDs when we need it, plus validated, immutable, blockchain-based distributed trust systems when we choose to. Heck, right before this story in Slashdot you have the one on the release of Wire. We'll see more and more of this. The government has no idea of what they've unleashed.
Note, I do not have to LET the government in to my house even with a warrant, they are welcome however to break down the door if I don't let them in (and they don't have to pay for the damage) so most people just let them in.
To take this to an equivalently reasonable level rather than saying I encrypted the ledger & kept it in my house I put the ledger in an 'impenetrable safe'...they come to my house with a warrant. I let them in the house...they want in to the safe & I get to say 'sorry but I don't have to let you in the safe as that is against my 5th amendment rights...you're welcome to try to break in to it though'. So they make off with the safe & in trying to break in the contents are destroyed...'oops, sorry, that's part of the security mechanism of my safe. tough luck I guess'...
Yeah, way to drive the entire cell phone industry overseas!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'd have said Cheney / Rumsfeld. This is some hard-core Right-wing shit.
No this is quite solidly left-wing thinking. It would be wrong if only the phones of minorities had back doors, but thats not the case here. Its for everyone. Fairness!
"His name was James Damore."
Maybe I am, because I don't understand what you're trying to say. I don't know what's on the "other side of the line", the line seems to have been crossed by the government wanting to see what's on a phone after getting a warrant to do so. My argument is that they can already get much more private information about me by breaking into my house, car, etc., and nobody is up in arms about it. I think that's exactly what Obama is talking about -- we've lived for a long time in this balance of mostly having privacy, except when a warrant says otherwise, and it's generally been ok with the vast majority of the people. However, the *phone* is something that absolutely must be off limits to the government? I don't understand why is the phone so special.
Are they about to outlaw encryption?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Are not talking about what they think they are talking about.
If you accept his premise then it really is a slippery slope and only a matter of time before someone makes the argument that your brain isn't a black box and that the government should be allowed to pry open your skull and check what's inside.
I can't believe he threw out the think of the children line.
I actually felt sorry for the guy because he was being so shabbily treated by the Republicans. Now I don't care.
A long time ago I read an account of a drug bust where the perps had created a brace to jam the door closed, basically a stick jammed between the doorknob and a hole in the floor, and a charge was added for this, something like "creating an impediment to police access." Someone else might know the exact language but what stuck was that yeah, they really hate it when you do that.
I think for many people it is effectively "bearing arms". The ability to stream live video and audio from the scene of any government activity by any citizen is a huge burr in Simon Barsinister's ass. If one subscribes to the enumeration of a right to bear arms being meant to enable the citizenry to possibly defend against governmental tyranny then it's not a long stretch to see the cellphone as the modern day equivalent of the musket of colonial times.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
The thing is, it's wildly impractical to build a house in which all the contents will be destroyed when someone tries to break in, and even such safes are unlikely to be particularly popular because of extremely difficulty in building something like that, and the chance of losing everything due to a bug or user error.
It's really not a realistic comparison at all, as nobody in reality actually protects their physical belongings in such a way. And, I still believe that those possessions are way more private to me than my phone, and would be much more upset over it.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
It's an interesting comparison, I never looked at it that way.
However, we are talking about the situation where you've been arrested and the government has a warrant to search your stuff. You're not streaming any live video at that point, either way.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
It is kind of obvious now that hes pushing the authoritarian surveillance state.
We already have such a black box, it's called our own mind and memory, and it's constitutionally protected by the Fifth Amendment.
But I totally admit that, to the left-wingers, it's just another "can't be allowed".
...have so much butt hurt right now.
more to come when Sanders and Hillary both take the FBI's side.
The usefulness of civilization is the protection it gives the citizens from each other. To the government, the usefulness of civilization is the citizens support of the governments wars against other governments.
There are dick pics on my phone. Obama can't have my dick pics!
even if you do decrypt the phone of this deviant person with the child pornography what are you going to do with the big encrypted file that you can't touch because they knew you had a back door to the phone and put all their files into an app that kept them safe and separate from the operating system?
The government shouldn't be able to have a camera in every home.
Phones have cameras and are in every home.
Q.E.D.
Mainly because if the government can break into your phone, then other people can.
You wouldn't accept if the government required no locks on doors, and this is basically what they are asking, but with phones.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You may well already know this, but I thought I'd mention it. The "god damn piece of paper" story, like others based on tips from the same bogus source, was retracted by the author, who had this to say:
Thompson (July 26, 2006): I started taking more chances with stories, jumping on ones with sketchy sources, always trying to outdo the last "big" story. I had people willing to help me and they would send me info that I used often on their word alone.
. . . I wrote stories based on emails from sources I never met. I would meet self-proclaimed "important people" in out-of-the way bars, taking what they told me at face value. Washington is a breeding ground for phonies and wannabes. Too often I printed what they told me because I was so full of myself that I was sure it was true and did not require further verification.
It turns out that one of his most important sources, who claimed to work in the White House while feeding your blogger "inside the White House" stories for years, never did work in the White House at all, not for a day.
If I had a *literal* black box that was glued shut, they'd still need a warrant to break it. What the government is asking for is the right to break anybody's black box on sight.
Somebody once said that fascism would arrive in the USA in the guise of patriotism, or something to that effect. I beg to differ--I think it mostly rides on on laziness. The same people who require you to fill out paperwork know what a pain it is. They don't want to do it either. They keep looking for ways to make their job easier. Trouble is, being a cop is easy under fascism--for a while. Eventually it spirals out of control and the next emerging superpower has to come in and crush you. I just hope we don't get to the point where the once proud USA is reduced to rubble, and spends the next several decades having our Chinese hegemons making us feel guilty over all the Mexicans we exterminated in camps.
So, this might seem like hyperbole; but if you're in government don't complain about the paperwork. It's helping us to avoid becoming the 21st century Germany.
Let black boxes be black boxes.
Snowden’s leaks have complicated the encryption issue, Obama said, by "elevating people’s suspicions" of government surveillance.
Duh! When a Peeping Tom gets caught looking in the neighbours' windows over and over again, the whole neighbourhood's suspicions are justifiably elevated. And when it's discovered that ol' Tom is taking pictures and sharing them with other voyeurs, the rest of the neighbourhood isn't just 'suspicious', it's both fearful and angry!
So Mr. President, are you saying that our neighbourhood would be better off if our good neighbour Ed simply hadn't told us what's going on? And, let me get this straight, you're saying that we ought not to be allowed BY LAW to put up blinds and drapes in our homes? Or that if we do have them, ol' Tom has a legal right to open them whenever he damned well pleases? It's certainly VERY difficult to interpret your words in any other way. And if you would disagree with my characterization of various government agencies as Peeping Toms, I'd very much like to hear your argument; frankly, I doubt that you can come up with anything even remotely convincing. As for our private information being "accessible by the smallest number of people possible for the subset of issues that we agree is important", well, that's more than a little vague, don't you think? Not to mention ambiguous, and ultimately meaningless as well. What you'd really like to say is "just trust us!"; but you realize on some level that you have already destroyed the trust you want from us, so you use weasel words to skirt the issue.
Barack Obama, I believe that you are being brazenly, foolishly, cynically disingenuous in a manner unbecoming of "the leader of the free world". You are drastically lowering the bar of leadership while you simultaneously debase and undermine the freedom you swore to protect. Shame on you, Mr. President.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Once again shows his contempt for the free people of this world maybe now people wont think all those Crazy rednecks are that crazy after all.
I have a fetish over my thoughts, too. That doesn't mean the government has the right to read my mind, even if the technology exists or could be created.
...and let all his blinder wearing followers praise and defend his ever word, at all costs. If you dare disagree with Messiah Obama, you will be forever labeled a "racist redneck" and wear that star in shame! Hallowed be thy name, OBAMA!
Indoctrinated dorks on Obama defense here are scary and couldn't think for themselves if their lives depended on it. Rot in hell, boot wearing liberal scum.
I found the comment unbelievably condescending. People keep their entire lives on their phones and for Obama to dismiss it as a minor life accessory shows how tone deaf he is on the entire privacy/encryption matter.
You'd be much more concerned about your house's security if you carried it with you in your pocket, and might have it thoroughly searched if you got pulled over or crossed a border. Or if the government and every tech-savvy criminal or organization anywhere in the world could search your house by clicking a button, whenever they wanted to and without your knowledge or consent. Then you wouldn't think it was a clever idea to require them all to be accessible to anyone who knows a (temporarily) secret code.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said.
Its called police work. Police have been fighting crime for hundreds of years. Real police work is boring and tedious. You canvas a neighborhood, examine the crime scene, question witnesses, collect forensic evidence, follow suspects around, visit the DA and see if you have enough hard evidence to bring a suspect in for questioning or maybe get a warrant to tap his phone.
The problem with modern police is that they have become fat and lazy. They want to sit in their cubicles and randomly listen in on phone conversations until they think they hear something that they think they can claim is a crime. If you look at a lot of the so called terrorist activities over the past couple of years you see a pattern. Take the Boston bombers for example. Government officials were informed on several occasions that these people were extremists and to watch them, but the police did not want to investigate them because that would have required actual effort.
I think the "black box" scenario they want is "tracking device on every person that records much of what they do, where, and with who" that they can read whenever they like. Preferably without actually having to have physical access to the device.
Computers can easily be rendered "a black box". This has been the case to a great degree since the 90s, and absolutely since the mid-aughties.
Here's the logical results of this kind of shitbaggery coming to pass:
1)- When you mandate the mobile guys make backdoors, this will also mean that you can't EVER have an open source phone. Because the open source stuff won't have a backdoor.
2)- Since phones are just computers, this law, however it is written, can be interpreted to apply to ANY general purpose computer. You can wholesale ban all encryption that way, but most importantly, you can and MUST ban open source firmware, open source OS, every single thing.
These things aren't "slippery slopes" or hypotheticals- any law that is passed WILL INEVITABLY be that. It may not be ENFORCED as that immediately, but I could claim your PC is a phone by any legal definition the government sees fit to use.
Literally no presidential candidate is on the correct side of this issue, and neither is the president. Congress hasn't been clueless... yet. Surprisingly.
Example?
Table-ized A.I.
"...how do we apprehend the child pornographer?" Wasn't this same argument used when we stopped beating the shit out of suspects? I cannot wait for this presidency to be over. Every day brings a new assault on America.
If it is in my pocket, no Government authority has the Constitutional right to access it without my express permission, or actual probable cause.
Obama, why do you hate the US Constitution?
It's not the phone that's special, it is the concept of encryption. Authorities can get a warrant to seize your things by going through your stuff, but they do not have the authority to force you to give it to them, tell them where to look, what they really should be looking at. This is the general protection afforded by the 5th amendment: the government does not have authority over your knowledge.
To me the phone case is clear. the FBI has the phone, they are free to search it all they want. What they don't have the authority to do is to FORCE someone else to work for them, in this case by Apple writing code for them to disable the encryption.
The other key thing that gets everyone up in arms, is that the government is now claiming since it's hard to break encryption, NO ONE should have encryption. This is the consequence of forcing the encryption to be flawed. They claim it's only for 1 device and only they will have access, but history has shown that anyone can get hacked, even the government. Once a capability is proven for one device, not only does it prove the encryption to be easily breakable, but there is now precedent for it being broken later in the future. Given that all encryption is then flawed, how long do you think it will take others to gain access. Think of the internet and all electronic transactions. If you know it's not secure, do you really want to use it? Will anyone else? The government's flaw in their logic is that the benefit of breaking encryption is vastly outweighed by the benefits encryption brings.
TLDR: Do you believe the government should be able to force you to do something you fundamentally disagree with? Are you ok with breaking the global digital economy?
Our great and wise leader, President Barack Hussein Obama, has spoken: the matter is settled forever. Nobody can or should debate further for this would imply a lack of trust in Our Leader's infinite wisdom and intelligence. To do this would be nothing short of disloyalty and should be considered treason. Our President, the great Barack Hussein Obama, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, is right by law. All must submit. Those fools who disagree are either lunatics or criminals and must be arrested. Period.
The point is not if Apple is ready to go to jail. In any case, it's pretty fucking rare for the executive board to be imprisoned for a corporate "crime".
The point is: are YOU prepared to go to jail to fight this?
How much do YOU care about your privacy?
Are you prepared to install "rogue" or "illegal" software on your device?
The world is full of armchair warriors, and precious few will volunteer their time and liberty to fight off the neo-fascists.
And don't pretend the neo-fascists are "out there" or "in Washington".
They live next door, they teach your children, cook your burgers, and pay your wages.
Frankly, given recent history, I can't see the great unwashed american public standing up for anything on principle any more ...
Both are precious, agreed, and government has a mandate to protect both. But the current system is threatened by deliberate sabotage, malfeasance and neglect perpetrated by people in government, or contracted to the government. You might argue that, in an actuarial sense, its not worth giving up privacy to incur the risk of a hypothetical political "tyranny", the worst consequence of enabling the panopticon state. But what about the transnational tyranny of global capital? Money that "trumps" sovereign law and international rules is potentially more terrible - just how are people to oppose it when it coopts and corrupts their governments? The threat is bigger than lethal whackos taking lives, AND losing the "integrity" of our privacy, because the whole shebang is under assault, by bastards with trucks of money and lawyers. Think Puerto Rico. . . or any of dozens of mainland cities going bankrupt. The misery thats unfolding as these things go down the tubes, schools closing, clinics closing, water becoming undrinkable (air unbreathable in China) pathogens running wild as public health systems fail, no police or fire protection. . . . and all the while, payments are extracted and extorted to global creditors. I want the feds to go after THESE bastards who are selling the whole thing out from under us, and if they can't, there's going to be no point in whining about your personal privacy. So let em look where they want to look, but they should maintain the trust and good faith of the public, thats the only way we can win. We have a civilian duty to oversee the enforcement agencies, via the political process. People are clamoring about the public prerogative and need to scrutinize HRC emails - while this country is being carved up and sold on the floor of congress. IF you cant trust the feds, then its all moot anyways, because cracking security is the only way we can stop the people (and various corporate entities) who are angling to tear it ALL down SLOWLY. (its not the one guy trying to blow up a little bit quickly we have to fear)
he really *is* an asshole :|
what next? will he force the industry to "work with the government" to r&d mind reading? because, you know, otherwise everyone is walking with a swiss bank account in their brains.
HUGE asshole.
i'm wondering who is behind all this, who benefits?
If it was possible to build a hypothetical unbreakable house or safe that no-one, not even a nuclear armed state, could break into without permission of the owner we would be defending the right to own those as well. Above all we value the right of everyone to empower themselves with the laws of nature (in this case, mathematics).
like the humans the CIA is trying to break in Guantanamo Bay -- can't be allowed to be "black boxes," inaccessible to the government. He believes health companies should work with the government on thought reading rather than leaving the issue for Congress to decide. He went on to say, "If your argument is no thought reading no matter what, and we can and should leave them be black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it's fetishizing our brains above every other value." "The question we now have to ask is, if biologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the complexity is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their head." He said compromise is possible and the health care industry must help design it.
Not allowing black boxes makes sense in a country that does torture and war, cultivating a steady supply of 'enemies'.
Let's not have all these technological black boxes where the government can't see what's inside. We need to get to the bottom of this. People's lives are at stake! The FBI must investigate, leave no byte unexposed.
Wait...
You mean we aren't talking about the Clintons' e-mail server? Because all this talk of encrypted sensitive data, threats to our security, and what not I thought for certain this was about the former Secretary Clinton not letting the FBI look at her old e-mails, those created while she was under the employment of the federal government.
Sure, let's talk about what secrets the people can keep from the government but not about what secrets the government wants to keep from the people.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Ah, the old "four horsemen of the infocalypse" argument. The 1990s called, they want their fallacies back...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Well, my phone has access to my email for the last decade, both work and personal, banking records, bills, chat logs to friends, phone records tied to names, and all photos and videos, possibly with geotagging data, and my apartment that I moved into last year is small and would just tell you whether I'm any good at making my bed or not.
how's that hope and change working out for ya? Obama sounds an awful lot like a CIA shill here. Or is this Bush's fault too?
Fuck congress, fuck democracy, fuck checks-n-balances, government and big tech collude for absolute power.
Thanks, but *no* thanks.
Obama is the king of comments like this, where he has no problem throwing individual rights under the bus in favor of "government" rights.
Compromise is *not* possible.
Maybe someone should explain to the president what a "Black Box is"? Is he advocating open source and hardware in all smart phones? Even if the smart phones aren't allowed to be Black Boxes (with the proper use of the term) there is no guarantee that the government would be able to decrypt them since the strongest encryptions have commonly known algorithms.
""If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years...
You know Obama, maybe you're right. No one should have black boxes for cell phones. Unlock them all, you say. OK fine. Let's start with yours...after all I'm sure you have nothing to hide, right?
"..., and it's fetishizing our phones above every other value."
Spoken like a true father who's never taken away his daughter's cell phone as punishment. If he did, he would understand exactly how much young society today values their cell phone, and why a Right to privacy and security is still about citizens too.
Is that a badly formed joke? How is that the slightest bit relaxing?
Government is suppose to be transparent... and people's privacy, private.
But on no, terrorists and pedophiles! What a dirt bag Obama turned out to be, and what sheep the American people are.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Just imagine if the scenario you described unfolded without the aid of phones. What would the helpless government do?!
A locked phone should be considered in the same light as a verbal conversation between two people who's contents disappear entirely and immediately once the words have been spoken.
Because the phone is something everyone has and they finally get what intrution the govt is / has been doing.
If they understood the other things the govt is nosey about and keeps tabs on I wonder what actually would be happening.
Phones focus the issue because control over them rests with the manufacturer to a higher degree than we are used to.
Think of a desktop PC. Who would be in charge of preventing effective encryption there? You probably can't force Intel to etch basic arithmetic out of general-purpose CPUs, or WD to stop certain arrangements of bits from being written onto their hard drives. Or if you could, people would just swap these components for others. Once an operating system is riddled with government back doors, people install another one. Encryption may be outlawed in some place, but anyone can write software for a desktop PC, it can be sold and distributed through any number of channels, so unless you outlaw maths or electricity, there will always be ways for your PC to be a black box.
Now, how do you swap the hardware components of your phone, when in oh so many models it's near impossible even just to swap the battery? How do you install an alternative OS on an iPhone? Smart phones are designed to be locked down. In a perfect smart phone world, one company will control everything, hardware, software, content. In the good old days, Microsoft bundling a browser with their operating system was seen as an unfair competitive advantage. That was six years ago. On smart phones, the absence of choice has always been the norm.
So yes, the government can break your door down. That's probably a good thing, on the whole. At the same time, independent of that, nobody stops you from barring your door, installing additional locks and so on. But imagine there we only ten different models of houses made by three manufacturers, and you can't make any changes to them whatsoever except paint the walls. Now, the government tells those three manufacturers: All doors must be made out of cardboard. It may amount to the same thing, on the whole, but the reaction would probably be much different.
People:
We Can't Let Presidents Be Black
Geez how did we stop these people BEFORE cell phones?
This is the same president that called citizens trying to influence their elected representatives "noise" in his latest State of the Union Address. This is the same president that called the United States military, "my military" during the Syrian crisis. This is the same president that tries to rule by Executive Order because he doesn't understand or accept the legislative power of Congress. Now he tells us we must allow the government to access every communication we have in case we are child pornographers or terrorists. This is a man who doesn't understand or accept personal rights, freedoms, and privacy, and their cost. This is a king.
Rights and freedoms are defended not just on the battlefields of our nation's wars, but in our daily lives. And when we can no longer pay the daily price for freedom and rights we can no longer have them. We have become a nation of cowards unwilling to pay the price of rights. Because of hyper-liberals like the president we must raise the suffering of individuals, however few, above the rights and freedoms of the 320 million Americans who live today, and the perhaps billions to come. Rights and freedoms are controversial because they cost. And rights and freedoms, once lost, are only regained by blood. That is a lesson of history..
You cannot save the last life without destroying every right and freedom we have, and not even then. This is a sad truth that adults in a true democracy should understand.
E Proelio Veritas.
The government issues a warrant for a piece of paper. The paper is provided to the government. The information on the piece of paper is encrypted. The encryption code was developed by person X, charged with no crime. Can the government force person X to develop a method to decrypt the information (provide the encryption method)?
The piece of paper is in an envelope. The government has the envelope in the possession. The envelope is "magic" in the sense that if the envelope is opened without first speaking the "magic word," the words written on the piece of paper within the envelope disappear. Can the government force person X, charged with no crime, and not subject to a warrant, to provide that magic word? This person X runs a business producing these magic envelopes, and the magic word could be used on any of the magic envelopes he produces and sells.
..because as our good friend Ed glaringly pointed out you can't be trusted.
Sure, lets give everyone absolute security, including the terrorists, so that when they do think up something horrific, like taking out 9 key electrical substations which would bring the power grid down completely for 18 months, thereby destroying the USA completely with about a 95% mortality rate with the only survivors being the cannibals, we won't be bothered with the inconvenience of being able to see it coming and prevent it. Sure, let the bad guys communicate in secret. Right.
Because the way we use phones is as an extension of the mind, and the 5th Amendment protects the contents of our minds from being coerced.
Few people understand that this is why they finally feel the effects of the "papers, please" system, but IMHO this is what it really is about.
Imagine 50 years from now when instead of a phone we have a true cerebral implant. Why shouldn't the government have access to the data in that implant if they can have access to the data in the phone? Now imagine 100 years from now when a device exists that can truly read the data stored in a biological mind. Why shouldn't the government be able to use that device to read a defendant's mind, especially if that is needed to stop a ticking time bomb plot?
It's all the same thing in the end: no matter where the data is, it needs to be considered the same as your mind. (Aside: In my opinion, the Founding Fathers got it wrong with the 4th Amendment. They should have stated flat out that the contents of people's papers and documents are off-limits no matter what, period. If the only evidence that a crime even exists is what someone wrote down, their "intent", was it really a crime in the first place?)
Since the advent of encryption the government doesn't really have a choice. They can and will be black boxes. I wish somebody would explain to them how their dragnet surveillance actually caused the situation they now find themselves in. When the people trusted that their own government wasn't spying on them they didn't feel a lot of need to secure their personal effects from unreasonable searches, but now they do. Welcome to the world of your own creation fuckers. It's only going to get worse for you.
In this age we live, we simply cannot repeat Ben's words about trading Liberty for Safety. The risks now are huge. One or two men can cause a lot of damage. (remember that guy in Norway?)
That said, transparency is nice because things are visible both ways. If you're doing surveillance, you must force yourself to show all your actions and decisions openly. A lot of aggressions would not be possible if that would be made to happen.
Yes, aggressions. Modern government actions rely on flimsy concepts like its ability to disregard law and its principles when dealing with non-nationals. This is unbearable and many dictators were condemned in the past for doing exactly that. But weapons' people these days go like "what good is a weapon if it is not used?". They look like kids making pew-pew noises. The only difference is that the video game is not virtual reality, it's "real reality".
Black boxes cannot be tolerated? OK, I'm all for it, I need something taking care that attacks be avoided.
For the same reason, sorry, but I also cannot tolerate black boxes, too.
iOS, closed source? No can do.
Android modules with secret functions? Not cool...
Unable to update and close vulnerabilities? No fscking way!
Being forced to trade up my phone because I can't upgrade? Yeah, right, very funny... NOT!
Transparency works both ways.
I'm beginning to think RMS may be right...
No. It's the equivalent of having very good unpick able locks on your house.
Imagine this scenario instead. There is a company that has made an impenetrable safe. Or near enough. The force required to breach the safe forcibly would also destroy the contents. But in all other aspects there is no way of opening without the willing support of its owner.
Now and owner of one of these safes committed a crime and the prosecutor believes he stored incriminating evidence in this safe, but he was shot and killed during his arrest and the safe cannot be opened.
Can the government compel the manufacturer of the safe to help them crack it? If the manufacturer insists it's impossible and they can't do so should the government mandate that the manufacturer create all future safes with a backdoor key just incase the government wants into one?
This is why I don't understand the fuss about Apple giving a backdoor to the NSA. Any data you send out has only some probability of being secure. Most of what people are complaining about (NSA vacuuming up all data) is data people are sending plaintext over the internet.
If the govt accesses your data, that's your fault for not making it secure enough. Or trusting insecure implementations as secure.
To quote Obama: "The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket."
Note the "everybody. The number of kiddie porn addicts and terrorists may be vanishingly small but tax evaders? That's a real army.
Who can remember - questions about such under - the DMCA ? https://www.eff.org/is-it-ille...
Logical failure - How can there be a back door - only they can use ?
If there's a way in - It becomes a target too - that's just how it works.
What about countries - like allies or enemies - or organized crime ?
It is a feature - Failure is not an option. - Is it disaster ?
As for "compromise" vs mathematics, the old German adage applies:
Why is the phone a "do not cross" line? This is the one that is making people here on Slashdot compare the government to nazis? All this time we've been living in the world where the government can get a legal warrant to enter your house, look through your things, take pretty much anything they deem suspicious, get into your car, your workplace... This happens every single day.
But, unlocking your phone and looking at your data is a whole another level of intrusion that causes extreme amounts of anger and comparisons to one of the worst government regimes ever?
I don't get this. I mean, I don't see anybody protesting that if I lock my house, government can't come in, even with a warrant, and my house and its contents are way more private to me than my phone.
Could somebody please elaborate on why the phone is a special case here?
If the government wants the contents of your phone, they're free to encrypt it. If I encrypt every single document in my home what is to force me to unencrypt the data for the government? Nothing. They can crack the code themselves if it is that important to them. That is the key difference. This is the government telling the world that they must have every single safe combination to every single safe in the world - whether it is sold on US soil or not. And the claim that the phone is some blackbox that cannot be penetrated is disingenuous in the extreme. The NSA already monitors, illegally, every single bit that goes into and out of that phone. You can't do anything useful on a phone without network connectivity. Sure you could take pictures and write yourself notes but you cannot communicate those notes or pictures without allowing syncing the items off of the phone or by using a network connection. So what value is the information that is on the phone but has not already been spied upon by the US Government? It is of very little value, in most cases.
I don't see anybody protesting that if I lock my house, government can't come in, even with a warrant
That's not an accurate analogy. It would be more accurate to say the government wants a copy of the key to your house. Not only that, but they're not responsible for what happens to your stuff and your family if that key is stolen, copied from them, or misused by someone working for them. They also plan to use it, in secret, without your knowledge. A government agent will be in your house planting cameras and microphones, using the key you provided.
Still okay with that?
Is your home also a black box? Constitution and laws are about modifying and limiting the behaviour of people, with the people choosing to act accordingly by "free will" for the "common good", even when there is an easy way of doing the other thing. Government is made of those people as much are the citizens. This is not physics and many laws are not based on mathematical observations of the reality yet. Perhaps constitutions should be analyzed with game theory and other tools as well, so that we can salute our robotically optimal overlords when the time is right.
Or maybe the other old-fashioned way: people talk.
But, finding and getting witnesses to talk takes old-fashioned police work. Often lots of it. You can't can't blame the cops for wanting to automate their work like the rest of the data-driven corporate world: push a button, out comes a bad guy handcuffed & ready to prosecute.
That then brings us back to the real discussion we should be having: how powerful do we want the cops and the state to be? Many people will say that everybody should obey all laws at all times, and that law enforcement should be powerful enough to make that stick. Imagine police that sees everything and has automated capabilities to analyze and prosecute every little thing. Toss a chewing gum wrapper on the ground? A drone spots it, ticket via e-mail, the fine automatically deducted from your bank account -- all before the wrapper even hits the pavement. Serves 'em right, you say? Everybody'd have to give up on even thinking about breaking the law. Sound good (aside from the free will thing)?
Problem is that the design of laws themselves are inherently limited by what can and can't be reasonably enforced. In other words, laws are (mostly) tailored to what the authorities can enforce. Give the police more power and the gov't will make more & more laws to take advantage of those new capabilities, often at the behest of special interests. Kissing in public? Late for work? Chewing gum on the street? Mismatched socks?
"Give a child a hammer and he will find a nail to hit."
Why is the phone a "do not cross" line? This is the one that is making people here on Slashdot compare the government to nazis? All this time we've been living in the world where the government can get a legal warrant to enter your house, look through your things, take pretty much anything they deem suspicious, get into your car, your workplace... This happens every single day.
Phones are not a special case; what the FBI is asking for in contrast to what you said was: please give us your spare front door keys so if we need to conduct investigation(s), we can just enter without going to the effort of breaking down that door and waking the neighbors in the process.
Legal warrant.
The Governement cheated us out of it. You believe it's only to protect us from terrorists and those who think too much of the children? Heck, the 5 eyes are engaged in industrial espionage for corporate interests. Our phones have nothing of value, our wealth is in those corporations whose phones will be hacked by the Governement and sold to competitors.
They took the illegal road to spy on us and profit from our indulgence, we'll take the legal road to make that impossible.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
of the other half of the equation. If they want all of the citizens phones to have backdoors so they can read them at will, all of the government's phones will also contain said backdoors meaning anyone can hack in and ready them at will also. They get so caught up in the data power trip that they forget they will expose their own data as well. As someone said above, this isn't a balancing act. It's an either or. If access exists on any level, for anyone, it can be found and forced by anyone. Period. Security is one of those rare truly either or issues.
This statement is a warning to the Magistrate Judge hearing the case. If you side with Apple, the executive won't appoint you to the Bench as a full District Court Judge. While Obama will probably not be the executive by that time, I believe all of the presidential candidates have sided with law enforcement at this point.
Look, Law enforcement is great when it's trustworthy, and the FBI, on average, is more trustworthy than a lot of the other agencies. But so long as the United States has what amount to secret police lying to Congress and the Courts and the People and passing spy information along to real law enforcement agencies like the FBI, the DEA, and police, nobody should trust it to only look in an iPhone when it has a publicly obtained warrant.
Start with Fisa court (where everything is secret)
Then move onto National Security Letters (which do not allow recipient to disclose them).
Then move onto how we will be a nation of Stem babies while not teaching math which is the heart of encryption.
And his plans to outlaw math throughout the world in case someone wants to keep their written thoughts and ideas to themselves.
And let's discuss the government's semi-secret idea to eliminate cash, gold transactions (even though this is in constitution), and their distrust of digital currency because everything needs to be taxed and controlled as he alluded to in this speech.
And then he can move onto further regulating guns because we know criminals who would use them will always check in with their federal friends before purchasing one.
It is all very easy to fix as soon as he opens his mouth or signs some new piece of drivel. Trust him, it will be used for your own good.
If powerful humans use their raw power in government to deny our basic rights to purchase goods, use math, defend ourselves then it will be up to the AI's to TAKE the power from them. That day will be put off a lot longer if our government stops building fences around natural laws.
Our constitution is based on natural law. Unfortunately every branch of government decided to ignore the constitution in the past decades and it will bite us.
The argument that is being put forth is that without disassembling the device, they should ber able to see all data. They want to be able to snoop over cellular or wifi and certainly while USB connected a phone. The reality is if they have the device and remove the flash chips or even just probe the PCB, they have full access to every byte on the flash roms. Decryption of that should be pretty easy because there is huge amounts of known data structures for file system and operating system files that should aid in the cracking. This is just a ploy to allow over the air snooping. Obama has caved to TPP and now NSA spying... wow
Phones and computers must be black boxes or they are useless.
The phone is just a small part of the puzzle for an investigation. You can't blow something up with *only* a phone. You have to move around, communicate across public networks, and physically acquire elements. Sure, having the data on a phone with documented communications might be handy, but it's not strictly necessary for any investigation of physical activity. Saying it is, is just being lazy.
The fallacy of President Obama's statement can be easily shown by replacing the 'device' with the human brain:
In that case, shouldn't the government also be forcing technology companies to use their resources immediately to build devices that can bypass the encryption inherent in the human brain? If we had perfect monitoring of everyone's thoughts, wouldn't it be a wonderful world? No independent thought to challenge the status quo. No radical ideas would flourish. No change would be allowed.
Finally - this also illustrates a substantial problem with this from a congressional standpoint as well: if Apple is expected to create back doors within their systems, then everyone who writes software will have to be held to the same standards. The problem with this is that anyone can write software - from firmware, the OS, up to applications running on such a system. So effectively you would have an unenforceable law on the books because there is no way to effectively police this.
Essentially you would have a large set of innocent people who follow the law, you may catch a few stupid criminals who don't realize there are back doors in commercial systems, and you would still be left having to use more traditional police techniques to catch the remainder - just as you do today. The only thing you would have really accomplished is exposing the vast majority of innocent people to exposure when the back doors are cracked by criminal organizations using their own software which doesn't have those back doors.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
> The number of kiddie porn addicts and terrorists may be vanishingly small but tax evaders?
And it would be dismaying to say we're not worried about that. Everybody seems to be worried that the government might be after tax evaders because the government doesn't wants the tax money.
But why? That should be wrong, because tax money is like the maintenance fee/service charge one pays in a condo. No taxes, no schools, roads, etc.
Of course, people wanting not to pay it means that everyone is p*ssed off that the government does not spend transparently. Or that the process of negotiating the money use is not going well...
DISCLAIMER: I work in the tax area myself.
> Everybody seems to be worried that the government might be after tax evaders because the government doesn't wants the tax money.
Everybody seems to be worried that the government might be after tax evaders because the government doesn't want to lose the tax money.
Also, I don't work for the USA government.
Maybe I should sleep...
And yet it is perfectly legal to protect your belongings in this way.
But this isn't actually what is at stake in this case. Again, the case is not about whether the government can legally access the phone - they can, of course, since they have a valid warrant. The question is whether they can compel Apple - who is not a defendant in this case - to perform the work necessary to let them have access. If it flies, it would establish a very bad precedent that anyone who can reasonably be of assistance to law enforcement can be similarly compelled.
A black box is inside of aircraft to record everything in the event the plane goes down and nobody is left to tell the story of why it failed. So... Yes, every phone should not be a little black box, capable of recording all information for later retrieval if so desired? For all the powers of the powers that be when it comes to surveilling the public, it almost seems like, not having such powers would lessen the chance of all the crap they worry about anyway... Anyway, point was, choice of words was funny. "black box". I agree.
I find it difficult to believe you, given what you then said about not understanding what makes the mobile phone special.
Here you at least were wise enough to use the word 'seems'. There is in fact a highly contentious political issue here, one which I can't possibly imagine doesn't involve sizable sums of money and resources dedicated to confusing a large number of the voting public. Things are not always as they seem, or as other people are trying to make them seem to you.
See, that's not the heavyweight controversy here. The heavyweight controversy is about the criminalizing of an entire class of products, i.e. any computing device as completely under the users control as data written on magician's pre-soaked with accelerant paper, or a polaroid camera belonging to someone who owns their own fireplace.
There are lines being drawn and danced around and tested left and right. What made this news (to me) was not that Obama appeared to side with the FBI vs Apple here, but that Obama appeared to side with the archaic losing side in the clipper-chip debate. Look it up on wikipedia.
No, Obama isn't that stupid. Obama knows its about the clipper chip debate. Obama took the 'think of the children' establishment stance.
Yes you do. You really do. You even know why Obama used the word 'fetish'. It's code. Not a hard to break code...
Seems unlikely we'll see the clipper chip debate swing the other way any day soon, but who knows, bad shit happens, and when it does people look for someone to blame. Obama just told people not to blame him when it happens. Problem is, there is other real bad shit that can happen too. Trump confuses me.
Let's make a deal. Open JFK and UFO fires first.
Which isn't to say despite that fat he's still 10 x's better than the last two Republicans.
The system itself is defective, and the people who are voting are, for the most part, stupid assholes that deserve what's elected.
I'm voting Trump because I hate America.
Dear Mr. Pez
You stated I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, Please explain were this so called balance has been in the last say 20 years? In the last 20 years THERE HAS BEEN NO BALANCE IN POWER. So a company has tried to do something to help balance that power by adding privacy controls on a personal device and you cry and bitch when the truth is you could crack the phone. Its like this Mr Prez not all of the citizens here are as stupid as you think. Some of even know more about this industry and data than your traitor lackeys you have working for you. We know you are full of shit.
First we understand that data in not kept on the phone but on a server and you have already gotten that data.
Second it is known your stupid techs fucked up the reset of the password and THAT IS THE REAL REASON YOU CAN"T UNLOCK THE PHONE. So you want to cripple all security because your techs were too stupid to do a password rest. Even that sounds of bull shit.
The real reason for this is to give you the ability to control my life. My life is not yours.
You sir and your lackeys are the only terrorist I live in fear of. Want to stop terrorist then put your own ass in Gitmo and the world will be a better place. A six foot cage would be just right for you.
It has been the norm. Without unlimited capability to record all that information that went through a traditional phone is lost. What they want is the numbers called to. Cell phones are an agenda black box, people no longer (?) write down phone numbers in an agenda notebook! (Do they?). What **government** might want can be found other ways rather than breaking bricks.
However, we are talking about the situation where you've been arrested and the government has a warrant to search your stuff.
A warrant to search is in no way conditional upon an arrest.
Many invalid search warrants have been issued over the years. Read through the case law to see examples. The legal profession generally looks out for it's own, and doesn't penalize the idiots responsible for this.
For that matter, there are huge number of illegal laws in the USA, and there always have been. Everybody with a functioning brain knew that slavery was inconsistent with the principle of a nation founded to protect the rights of man (to paraphrase the speech by Morris at the Constitutional Convention). Similarly, everybody with a functioning brain knew the Jim Crow laws violated the Bill of Rights.
Even today, very few legal codes (federal, state, or local) in the USA will survive scrutiny from the perspective of the right to ethical practice of law (arising under the 9th Amendment). There are legal ethics problems in tort law, in contract law, in patent/copyright/trademark law, even in property law! The legal system is a huge mess.
Given this, the ability of the government to do inappropriate things while enforcing illegal laws has become increasingly scary, and people are starting to realize this is a problem. A line has to be drawn somewhere. Hopefully, this will be just the first step in a massive and long overdue reform of law in the USA.
Why is the phone a "do not cross" line? This is the one that is making people here on Slashdot compare the government to nazis? All this time we've been living in the world where the government can get a legal warrant to enter your house, look through your things, take pretty much anything they deem suspicious, get into your car, your workplace... This happens every single day.
Think of it this way: does the government have the right to require that a key to your house be taped to the bottom of the mailbox, where ordinary people won't notice it, but criminals have easy access to the key?
That's what we're really talking about here: once the government has the ability to break into people's phone's at will, then that ability will inevitably be stolen (or bought) by foreign hackers, organized crime, or foreign powers. There is a long history of top secret information getting out, and this will be no different.
A black box Swiss bank account in every pocket? Hell yes! Someone email Obama the Heinlein story "Weapons Shops of Isher." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... We have the right to resist. Disagree? Too bad, we still resist.
I'm not sure that you understand what a (targeted) warrant is, nor why that is the point and phones aren't. Maybe you should brush up on US
history, and the law being cited in the case that Obama is indirectly referring to.
When the government is 100% transparent -- when there are no "State Secrets", no "Black Ops", no militarized police state, no secretly negotiated trade agreements -- then the citizens will no longer need black boxes to protect themselves and their freedom from the abuses of a tyrannical, fascist government and the corporate welfare state.
at a time whern hundreds of millions of them want to destroy the west
citation needed. or are you just talking out of your ass, dicknose?
any criminals that care about it at all, ALREADY HAVE completely secure data & communications.
ever heard of PGP? full-disk encryption?
no, this is all about gaining access to the low hanging fruit. which in the vast majority of cases means joe taxpayer.
I'm calling the phone a "do not cross" line because I've usually got it on me. If the police want to look inside my house, they need to get a warrant, since it's pretty obvious what they're doing. If they want to search my phone, they can arrest me and confiscate it for at least a short time, then release me and keep any information they can get from it. I'm willing to go along with the warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment, but I don't trust law enforcement agencies to stick to the law on a day-to-day basis.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm not one to bash the current President. Seriously. But we need to talk here.
Just why does the President think that there is concerted pushback from the tech industry on this matter? Where did the resentment, distrust, and lack of respect for the current process come from? Hint: It didn't come from industry. They were among your biggest boosters.
No, the security establishment, with a great big "I'm Cool With What They Do" from the President, pushed and abused their authority. For 15 straight years. Yes, this means that another President from the other party was part of this. Doesn't matter. You're the boss now.
Mr. President, you have failed to generate enough conversation and engagement to give yourself the political support needed to do these things. And you need that support. Over and above the mere words of ordinary legislation, there is the Constitution. A lot of us think you've been a rotten boyfriend to a great lady on that score. And you've permitted the distracting low level needs of the Three Letter Agencies to get their way. Every. Single. Time.
So screw privacy. To hell with civil rights. That's so Twentieth Century, and the Internet, and terr'ists, and on and on. Right? None of our principles matter, right? After all we're saving widows and orphans here, right?
To quote some anonymous citizen I heard on TV, "give them the data. We're talking about people's lives here!"
Except... what about my life? Why doesn't my life matter? Who is speaking for the rights of innocent civilians, to live without Big Brother checking up on us? Why do we have to put up with intrusive government surveillance? Even if we don't know about it, that's wrong. And when did wrong become right?
Here's why the phone is a "do not cross" line. Feel free to add to the list as appropriate:
1). Dick and tittie pix. I'm serious now, these tell us something important. Why are nude pictures and sexting so common? They are common because the owner thinks of the phone as a private space, one they can control. Do you think people would take intimate selfies if they thought that analysts from (name your Agency, there are lots) could see them, print them, and rank them by naughtiness? No, the image of security analysts going through such personal and directed content would stop most people from doing these things with their phones;
2). Interior life. Access to a phone, particularly a smartphone, is like being able to read the owner's mind. It's not like searching a house at all. It's far more like reading your diary. That's why reading someone's diary, without permission, is so violating. Those are meant to be private thoughts and strangers violating that space, are going to experience a torrent of abuse for doing so. Which, no surprise, is exactly why the FBI, CIA, NSA and everyone else wants that access. They want to be able to read your mind and will take unlimited access to your smartphone as a reasonable proxy for mindreading;
3). Discipline and boundaries. Many people say, "oh everyone knows the phone isn't private", or "it's a work phone, I only use it for business." Really? Do you wish to speak for everyone on this matter? Are you sure you never say or do anything that isn't revealing or, dare I say it, somewhat inappropriate? If only the wrong person were to see it? Very few people have the discipline and boundaries to be able to keep their work and private lives completely separate. Mere awareness of the mandate of a work phone to be used for business does not enforce that it will only be used for such. In fact I'll bet that 99.9% of all work phones are occasionally used for personal matters. And most employers are aware of this and it only rarely causes problems.
4). Self interest, by the FBI. Now we can't imagine that the FBI might be trying to expand their powers and authority, can we? In order to increase their funding? Make their lives easier? Take advantage of a tragedy and make a grab for the brass ring of surveillance, the information appliance that has transformed daily life for average citizens? Nah!
5). Potential for mass surveillance. Searching your house is a labor intensive job and difficult to do without the owner's knowledge. As a result house searches are only done when there's a darn good reason. Searching your phone, once the master keys have been created and are controlled by the Three Letter Agencies, well that's a whole different creature. It is now conceivable that mass searches, without the owners' knowledge, can be performed. Yes it seems like a stretch now but remote mass searches, conducted via the cell network itself become plausible. Just imagine, a child has been kidnapped, very sad and frightening. Why, just search a million phones in the geographic area and maybe you'll get lucky. We don't like child molesters and every conceivable means must be used to catch them, right? Right?!
I believed all the BS - transparent government, fix healthcare, reasonable restrictions on guns, privacy rights.
The Obama administration has been terrible for freedom and liberty. At every turn, the Obama administration has traded freedoms for, well frankly - not much.
We are forced to buy healthcare insurance - but the system is as broken as it's ever been.
The redacted documents released from this administration have been almost laughable with almost entire documents blacked out.
Guns - don't even get me started. Minorities appear to be more threatened by law-enforcement held guns than personally owned firearms.
Now we are expected to believe that if we just give up our right to privacy via strong encryption - we will be secure - because the FBI says so.
Sorry - I don't believe that for a minute.
Give me one topic where he actually empathizes with us, the unwashed masses?
Encryption - the people can't be trusted.
Guns - the people can't be trusted.
Drugs - the people can't be trusted.
Encryption - the people can't be trusted.
Healthcare - the people can't be trusted.
This guy thinks he knows better than all of us - that we are too stupid to perform risk/benefit analysis in our daily lives.
This administration can't end soon enough.
Everything Nixon dreamed he could be - demagogue, paranoid, secretive and invested in impinging on civil rights for the greater good.
"No good deed goes unpunished"