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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.........
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.
"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.
Why's it always gotta be about race with this guy?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Three points
1) Encryption exists because the math has been done and is widely available. You don't have to be Apple or Google to use strong encryption. Personally I like dm-crypt with LUKS, but there are plenty of options available to secure data that don't depend on approval by the US or any government. Obama was just wrong, we've long had "black boxes" inaccessible to the government and it is literally impossible to keep them from happening. The tools already exist outside the US to securely encrypt data. If you're determined, you can even create "black box" encryption for your personal paper journal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
2) If US companies are legislated into creating back doors into their systems, then those companies will lose potential sales because a significant number of people in the world don't trust the US government. While people who really want both security and a particular brand of phone could find ways to get both despite legislated back doors, most won't because there will be easier alternatives from companies that aren't subject to US law. When Samsung decides they won't create phones subject to US restrictions, they'll sell them everywhere Apple phones used to be sold, which isn't great for Samsung if they lose US sales, but will be disastrous for US companies that would have gotten those sales. (And hired people in the US and paid taxes in the US.)
3) Each phone has a key which is encrypted with your passcode and a unique id on the phone. When you change your password, the key doesn't change, all that changes is what code it is encrypted with. There are two ways that the government could legislate access to that phone: First every phone could be required to use one of a few keys retained by the manufacturer. If any of those keys are ever shared, every phone using those keys is no longer effectively encrypted. Second, the manufacturer could keep a copy of each key used by each phone so that any one key would decrypt only one phone. You can split up the keys into parts and store them separately and offline and with different parts of each key held by different entities. That would mean that in order to secure any phone, law enforcement would have to subpoena multiple parties for each part of the key specific to the phone they want to decrypt. Either method fails for the government if a criminal cares to put in the effort, since all the criminal has to do is get the key stored in the phone originally to be changed, usually a fairly trivial hack. The downside is that the countermeasure is to have the current key always electronically transmitted home, which would likely be required, making alternatives used and US distrust more and more likely to be problems. So it isn't true that "it's only a matter of months before criminals and other nation states have that key" but the other issues are just as bad.
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