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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.........
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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!”
Have gnu, will travel.
Why's it always gotta be about race with this guy?
You are welcome on my lawn.
(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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.