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Top FBI Attorney Worried About WhatsApp Encryption (usnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on USNews:WhatsApp on Tuesday announced that all types of messages on the latest version of its app are now automatically protected by end-to-end encryption, and the FBI's top attorney is worried some of the platform's more than 1 billion global users will take advantage of the move to hide their crime- or terrorism-related communications. FBI General Counsel James Baker said in Washington on Tuesday that the decision by the Facebook-owned messaging platform to encrypt its global offerings "presents us with a significant problem" because criminals and terrorists could "get ideas." "If the public does nothing, encryption like that will continue to roll out," he said. "It has public safety costs. Folks have to understand that, and figure out how they are going to deal with that. Do they want the public to bear those costs? Do they want the victims of terrorism to bear those costs?"Maybe the government shouldn't have imposed so many surveillance programs on its citizens -- and kept quiet about it for years -- that they now feel the need to use sophisticated security technologies.
The amount of baseless FUD the FBI and government pumps out continues to be nothing short of astonishing when considered that it's in the face of overwhelming evidence they're wrong on so many levels.
Because, you know, it's not as if they couldn't just use one-time pads to transmit in the clear over Twitter, or basic steganographic techniques to communicate messages with pictures of cats...
Oh wait... that's probably exactly what they're doing. But that would be inconvenient to the line of bullshit they're trying to sell us. Because it's not as if trying to catch terrorists by spying on the communications of all Americans (and citizens of other nations) is a violation of the Constitution or anything...
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
He's absolutely correct that there are costs.
The cost of living in societies that do not afford their citizens a right to privacy tends to be pretty high. As in, tens of millions of dead per year if you count Stalin's NKVD, Hitler's Gestapo, and Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Western democracies are not immune; tens of thousands lost their livelihoods and were forcibly relocated when Canada and the United States imprisoned people for nothing more than having mentioned in a pre-WW2 census that their ancestors were Japanese.
The historical track record is unfortunately pretty clear: whether you live in the East or the West, you're vastly more likely to have your life ruined by your own government than by a terrorist or even an enemy soldier.
The country exists because some people thought preserving freedom was more valuable than preserving their own lives.
Still true today.
Will this create problems when trying to root out bad actors? Sure!
The thing is, there's no such thing as perfect safety. No matter how hard law enforcement agencies try.
So, the American public can grow a pair, and realize that the government CANNOT protect them in all situations.
They can then choose whether or not they will act with more circumspection and awareness of the dangers inherent in their surroundings.
And they'll accept the fact that sometimes bad things happen regardless of how much effort was put into prevention.
Or we can simply have ever-greater encroachment on people's liberties.
And bad shit will CONTINUE to happen, regardless of how much effort is put into prevention.
So we have a choice:
* Liberty and danger?
OR
* Tyranny and danger?
PICK ONE!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Just a reminder. WhatsApp is still collecting all the metadata.
Who, to whom, when, where.
That matters a LOT.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The FBI attorney is (purposefully?) confusing possible and probable as well as level of risk. Is it possible that terrorists will see WhatsApp's encryption, flock there, and plot a huge attack resulting in many deaths unseen by law enforcement? Certainly. It is also possible that the terrorists will wake up tomorrow morning realizing that this whole "kill everyone different than us" thing is idiotic, will drop their weapons, and take up a less destructive hobby. Both are possible, but are also not very probable. The recent attacks have been planned using SMS and other unencrypted communication methods. If law enforcement can't catch them when they're not encrypting, why go through the bother of deploying encryption?
As far as of level risk goes, there were 32,727 deaths due to terrorism worldwide in 2014 (Source). Even adding all terrorism deaths together since 2006 gives 161,834. Remember, this is worldwide. If we wanted to limit this to US deaths from terrorism, we'd get 303 American deaths from 2004-2014 (Source). In contrast, 2014 had 17.6 million identity theft victims in the US alone. (Source)
This all means that you have almost a 639,000 times greater risk of being an identity theft victim than a terrorism victim. Granted, I doubt many people are going to use WhatsApp to share information that could be used in identity theft, but this isn't the FBI vs. WhatsApp any more than it was just the FBI vs. Apple. It's the FBI vs Encryption. They want to see encryption either go away or be backdoored so they can get in at any time. Unfortunately, if this were to happen, a lot more people would find themselves vulnerable to various scams and the number of terrorists captured would be at or near zero.
This isn't even "trading liberty for security" as much as it is "trading security for some nebulous promise of possible security later on."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
No, encryption does not create an expectation of privacy:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Does encrypting Internet communications create a reasonable expectation of privacy in their contents, triggering Fourth Amendment protection? At first blush, it seems that the answer must be yes: A reasonable person would surely expect that encrypted communications will remain private. In this paper, Professor Kerr explains why this intuitive answer is entirely wrong: Encrypting communications cannot create a reasonable expectation of privacy. The reason is that the Fourth Amendment regulates access, not understanding: no matter how unlikely it is that the government will successfully decrypt ciphertext, the Fourth Amendment offers no protection if it succeeds. As a result, the government does not need a search warrant to decrypt encrypted communications. This surprising result is consistent with Fourth Amendment caselaw: it matches how courts have resolved cases involving the reassembly of shredded documents, recovery of deleted files, and the translation of foreign languages. The Fourth Amendment may regulate government access to ciphertext, but it does not regulate government efforts to translate ciphertext into plaintext.