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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.
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.........
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
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!?
"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.
Um... by catching them in the act of making or distributing child pornography? Maybe?
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.
"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."
It blows my mind that a Harvard constitutional law scholar can either so utterly fail at logical thought or blatantly spew state control rhetoric. I didn't vote for him but was mildly optimistic that he might be the real deal. He's just the latest snake oil merchant in a long line of 'em.....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
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.
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.
"Reasonable" and "probable" are hardly absolute! The door is pretty wide open.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Again, surrendering right to privacy is not prerequisite to stopping WMD attacks. Any serious study of the last couple of decades reveals that over and over someone in law enforcement or intelligence has been aware of the info needed to act on attacks against us beforehand . The issue is the bungling bureaucracy and missed opportunities for authorities to act on known intel.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
(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.
I prefer to think it's a case of we sane people don't think anything on the phone is worth giving the government the ability to distribute unlimited malware. There is such a thing as weighing the costs. If you want to be the Land of the free and the home of the brave you don't cower at every shadow and give up your rights so easily. Put another way: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety - Ben Franklin
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."