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WhatsApp Encryption Said To Stymie Wiretap Order (nytimes.com)
bsharma writes from an article on the New York Times: WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge's wiretap order. [As recently as this past week, officials said,] the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp's encryption. (WhatsApp uses Signal software developed by Open Whisper Systems.)
"WhatsApp cannot provide information we do not have," the company said this month when Brazilian police arrested a Facebook executive after the company failed to turn over information about a customer who was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation. "The F.B.I. and the Justice Department are just choosing the exact circumstance to pick the fight that looks the best for them," said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital rights. "They're waiting for the case that makes the demand look reasonable."
I mean, if the legal system pushes too hard at FB, they should just move off shore. That will be interesting to watch. In fact, FB could easily move [all] their infrastructure offshore, but still remain relevant to its US users.
That way, they can claim not to be an American company and still be able to reap the benefits of being one. How about that?
What the FBI director is demanding is that they should have the internet equivalent of skeleton keys for every lock on every door of every house, home, office, storage room/locker, etc. We don't hear the FBI complaining that they can't listen in on people having face to face conversations in their homes, at work, and out in public and, if they have a warrant, they can install surveillance equipment in people's homes/workplaces to wire-tap their online conversations like they have been doing with face to face for decades.
If what the FBI is asking for doesn't creep you out by now, I'm not sure what would.
...or maybe the Minitrue installing "permanently on" telescreens in every corner of every room is the next step? (George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four")
We apparently are rapidly approaching living in a world where normal, law-abiding citizens of the United States will be treated like criminals, or animals in a zoo, or small children that never grow up: surveilled all day, every day of their lives. Some of you say we're already there and it's too late, but I beg to differ for the simple reason that I can be posting these words in relative anonymity (i.e. under a pseudonym) on the public Internet, without any fear of having my door kicked in when I'm asleep, being beated, black-bagged, and dragged off to some enprisonment somewhere, with no due process, legal representation, etc, because I dared to criticize the government (unlike some countries). But if you take a step or two back from everything and take a good hard look at it, that's the direction things seem to be going, now isn't it? We have politicians all throughout our government who want to destroy the efficacy of encryption, ostensibly for reasons of national security ('we have to keep America safe!') and law enforcement ('how will we catch pedophiles?') -- except for two points: one, how did we manage to catch criminals and terrorists before, and two, how can so many politicians, including out current POTUS, manage to have such terrible technology advisers, that they all don't understand that what they're asking for is more or less equivalent to outlawing encryption entirely? I really didn't want to believe it, but the answer is simple: They know damned well that what they're asking destroys encryption, they've all been advised that it destroys encryption, and they've all said 'I don't give a damn, and you won't say otherwise to anyone or you're fired!'. They don't care about anyone's privacy, they don't care if people get their data and/or identity stolen, they want control of everyone all the time, the ability to poke around into anyone's life, regardless of the lack of evidence of criminal or terrorist activity, regardless of their Constitutional rights, regardless of their Human rights, and regardless of how anyone else feels about it. My last, best hope is that the politicians, political activists, and citizens who are paying attention and understand what's going on, are enough to at least hold off the coming of the dystopian future dictatorship until I'm long dead so I don't have to deal with it; at best, there might still be a slim hope that there is enough power for the people left in the Constitution and the people in D.C. who are defending it, to pull us back from the no-return point, and get these anal-retentitive, power-hungry types out of positions of authority, and return control of the country to The People. Otherwise, look to the Middle East, to countries like Syria and the Assad regime, for how, in the dystopian future, U.S. citizens will be treated by it's government. I'm talking about a world where people in the U.S. will be fleeing it's government to even places like mainland China, because even there it'll be better than living here.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!