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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
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!?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
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
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.
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.
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!”
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?
I'd rather have a Swiss bank account in my pocket than Swiss cheese.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
He is a left-of-center moderate with experience as a civil rights attorney, which gives him a bias towards providing equal civil rights for everyone. The civil rights thing is the biggest difference between Obama and Trump. As far as "fascist", perhaps we should study the definition of the word more carefully before we throw it around. The being said, the limits of executive orders should be carefully defined by congress to limit the excesses of presidents no matter which party they hail from. The executive branch is there to make _emergency_ decisions, not to make laws (legislative branch) or interpret laws vis-a-vis the constitution (judicial branch).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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.
As far as money holding goes, my pockets ARE Swiss cheese
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
they really hate it when you do that.
Then these guys must really have been pissed.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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.
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?
Bullshit. He is an extreme statist. An overwhelming majority of our politicians are.
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
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?
I thought he was advocating a return to good old Canadian know-how, i.e. his trusty Blackberry.
Pesky US companies such as Google and Apple can't be trusted to follow the script...
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.
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.
..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.
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.
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?
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."
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)
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.
That part about everyone having a Swiss bank account sounds wonderful to me. I think every person deserves a little tax haven of their own. (IIRC Switzerland is no longer useful as a tax haven, but that's besides the point.)
Of course the plebes can't be allowed to have a Swiss bank account of their very own. Only the elites are allowed to have that.
You recall slightly incorrectly. The Swiss banks gave up the names associated with some numbered accounts. Basically all accounts created after a certain date. If your account was older than that (old money), they didn't give it up. They gave up Bill Gates and Larry Page, but the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers still have their privacy.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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"