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US Anti-Encryption Law Is So 'Braindead' It Will Outlaw File Compression (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The bill released Thursday by Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein to force U.S. companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has been further dissected by experts. In less than 24 hours after the Court Orders Act of 2016 draft was released, 43,000 signatures have been added to a petition calling for the bill to be withdrawn. Bruce Schneier, the writer of the books on modern cryptography, said the bill would make most of what the NSA does illegal, unless no such agency is willing to backdoor its own encrypted communications. "This is the most braindead piece of legislation I've ever seen," Schneier told The Register. "The person who wrote this either has no idea how technology works or just doesn't care." Schneier says cryptographic code will be affected by this legislation, as well as "lossy compression algorithms" that are used to reduce the size of images for sending through email, which won't work in reverse and add back the data removed. Files that can't be decrypted on demand to their original state, and files that can't be decompressed back to their exact originals, all look the same to this draft now. He said even deleted data could be covered in this legislation.
...where nobody seems to know how they continue to get elected.
Of course the politicians involved are retards. They're just doing what the FBI and NSA are telling them to do. So far as these stunningly mindless halfwits are concerned, computers are magic bosses and those weirdo nerdy wizards should just do what they are told.
Want better politicians, don't elect fucking morons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
there just isn't anything else to say. this is legislation in the ISIS category meant to hammer society back to 600 AD.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yup, this directly affects porn and that will get the masses moving.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
For those who didn't immediately make the connection, the words "no such agency" in the summary was a reference to the nickname for the NSA. It would have been better if they capitalized it as No Such Agency.
To be fair, most knitting actually can be reverted to it's original state as long as you haven't cut it off the spool yet. So writing something similar about knitting would still technically be less asinine than this bill,a nd would mostly juts result in seaters coming with an attached ball of excess yarn you can't legally cut off.
An interesting comment on The Register pointed out that how the law is written it would ban the use of one way hashes to store passwords.
Please share your views here, too.
http://www.feinstein.senate.go...
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Suppose I use some third-party encryption that is made available anonymously or from another country, so there's no company to compel to reverse it. (Think TrueCrypt, or something from Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Now suppose I plead the fifth and refuse to decrypt it. What then? We start blocking any site that hosts such a thing? Burn books on cryptography? Ban people from running compilers? Code escrow of all source with the NSA on pain of death?
Sure, there's the obligatory XKCD wrench decryption, but otherwise... I'm not sure how this makes a lick of sense.
If it bans any algorithm "that can't be decrypted on demand to their original state", that pretty cuts out MP3s, and pretty much every streaming audio and video service. Good luck with that...
If lossy compression is affected, wouldn't compiling be affected too?
It's like the ban on exporting encryption software or source files which had the simple workaround of a bound book of source code being sent overseas to legitimately write compatible software.
If passed, workarounds would be found.
Worst-Case: Tech Industry leaves America for saner shores (it's not like these companies are all that patriotic).
All to prevent fundamentalists from destroying America, well, wait what?
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Won't forcing all US-made encryption software to include backdoors simply force all encryption software developers overseas??? Any company that wants to remain in the US will have to contract it's encryption out to a non-US company. Thanks, DiFI, for sending my job offshore!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
In addition to requiring all encryption products in the future must have backdoors, it also requires that all encryption software from the past already have been backdoored unless you want to have to brute-force it in response to a court order to "render technical assistance".
If passed, this would open up a novel new extortion attack where you intentionally use non-backdoored software to encrypt some data, thoroughly delete the unencrypted versions, create a lawsuit where that data is part of discovery, and then get your opponent in the lawsuit (who is conspiring with you) to ask the court to order the company which distributed the encryption tool to render the technical assistance needed to decrypt. Thus the company will be on the hook for the cost of all the needed electricity to run all the CPUs or GPUs to brute-force the encryption key, except that you conveniently offer that if they can help work out a settlement in the lawsuit (i.e. pay you or your conspirator), then maybe the lawsuit can be dropped, thus vacating the court order.
It doesn't matter what this law will say. What matters--and this is of course true of every law--is how it will be enforced. They don't care about MP3s or even cryptography as such. What they care about is being able to decrypt the communications they want to decrypt. It's much easier from their point of view to write an overly broad law even if it appears stupid because it's only the enforcement that counts, and they control the enforcement.
What you are supposed to get out of this story:
"HEHE Look how SILLY this law is!
That silly old government [with the most educated people in the world filling its offices] keeps making silly dumb laws!
If only we could get people who understood the ISSUES to make laws for us everything would be OK! OH WELLLLL"
This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Feigning ignorance to herd people into a viewpoint which is more sympathetic to the subject than the viewpoint of the truth: malicious intent against the viewer.
This law is a power grab. There is nothing ignorant about it. This is pressure on an important area for the rich/high-class/corporate interest.
Don't ever fall for this trick!
Now the question is, why is this site and the referenced news agency helping with this deception? Surely a PROFESSIONAL would be aware of the possibility of this deception? Of course they are.
So why are they helping?
It couldn't be because the tangled interests essentially make the media interest and the corporate interest one body could it?
No, that would be CONSPIRACY and would be very wrong indeed to think about!!!
I think those who wrote this brain dead legislation know exactly what they are doing. There is just too damn much freedom on the internets.
What then? We already went through this a few decades ago when we declared strong encryption as a munition, subject to export restrictions. We're just now getting over the negative repercussions of that little debacle, so naturally, it's time to do the same thing all over again... except its even worse. This time we're denying ourselves strong encryption.
Third party security software not subject to US laws will, of course, proliferate, and the only ones who will be harmed by this are those who actually deign to obey the stupid law. Anyone who has something to hide will just encrypt data at the application level, and there's *nothing* that can be done about that.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've known Richard Burr since 1994. He was an appliance salesman who wanted to be in Congress. I was a campaign organizer for his opponent in that race. He has no understanding of tech issues which makes it all the more ridiculous that he is Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Burr is doing this because he is up for re-election this November. His opponent in the race is Deborah Ross, an intelligent and hard working former member of the NC House of Representatives and former State Director of the North Carolina ACLU. If you really want to fix the Burr problem, consider making a donation to the Deborah Ross for Senate Campaign. https://secure.actblue.com/con...
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
"Ok, Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, explain to me how to insert a back door into a one-time pad encryption system"
Easy, all OTP ciphers must be registered with the new created FBU run Decipher Unit Message Box service (aka DUMB); which will store the OTP key and provide a hash of the file. All ciphers transmitted must be prefixed with their hash.
Companies can use this nice RESTFUL API to submit copies of the key to the DUMB service as it is generated; as compliance with the backdoor policies.
" It is the only existing mathematically unbreakable encryption."
Sure. Unbreakable by math; but backdoors are more about circumvention of security rather than actually breaking it.
Start with a sledgehammer, and file it down to a nice sharp edge. Eh, whatever, as long as we can spy on the state and take away its privacy, it won't matter. But let's all forget about ours. It's gone. But let's not forget that these are elected officials that want to impose this stuff. Y'know, in case you're interested in following the chain of events to its source.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Read up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The political spectrum is not one-dimensional left/right, at the very least it's two-dimensional left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. And you should also read up on socialism and marxism in particular, and the end goal of the withering of the state, which is the complete opposite of statism. Realize that with welfare and perhaps even unconditional basic income (UBI) comes freedom from worrying about the future and your next meal. Freedom to be a completely free actor and not bound to an unfair employer.
Pure collectivism and pure individualism are both deeply flawed. We need to realize that we are collectives of individuals, and that we can only achieve individual greatness if we work together.
Eat the rich.