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FBI Has Sights On Larger Battle Over Encryption After Apple Feud (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bloomberg: FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is exploring how to make broader use of the hack, used to access a San Bernardino terrorist's encrypted iPhone, while bracing for a larger battle involving encrypted text messages, e-mails and other data. The tool could "in theory be used in any case where there's a court order" to access data on an iPhone 5c running Apple's iOS 9 OS, Comey told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. However, accessing content on a phone, known as "data at rest," is only part of the challenge that encryption poses for U.S. investigators. Software applications and other services that encrypts texts, e-mails and other information in transit over the Internet, known as "data in motion," are "hugely significant," especially for national security investigations, Comey said. He said criminals are increasingly using services that encrypt data in motion, and he didn't rule out litigation against companies such as WhatsApp. "WhatsApp has over a billion customers, overwhelmingly good people," Comey said. "But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals, and so that now ubiquitous feature of all WhatsApp products will affect both sides of the house." As for whether or not there will be litigation against WhatsApp down the road, Comey says, "I don't know." The FBI is trying to figure out how to allow "law enforcement around the country with court orders to be able to use our tool," Comey said. It's "tricky," he said, because using the tool to help state and local criminal investigations could mean that it would have to be revealed in a court preceding if there isn't a procedure in place to prohibit testimony about how it works.
That's why they use the illegally obtained evidence to make up a different story. They even helpfully tell local police departments to do it.
It is understandable the FBI wants to not have to deal with encryption. It is their sworn duty to uphold the law, and to them, encryption is something a crook can use to keep them from answering for their crimes.
However, the problem is that it creates a blowback effect. Before Biden and Lieberman introduced laws to ban encryption completely, nobody gave a rat's ass about it. What encryption there was was absolute shit and at best, just homegrown (lets seed and use rand.c and XOR that.) Want FDE? Stacker and setting a password was the way on the MS-DOS or OS/2 side. On the Mac side, FWB Hard Disk Toolkit had a driver that did two rounds of DES. Archiving utilities at best had 1-2 rounds of DES as well, due to speed.
When the Congrescritters started trying to ban it, it woke people up. Especially after Operation Sun Devil. Those two events (the government going after and raiding people, coupled with wanting to ban encryption, then have their own key escrowed stuff) created the Cypherpunks list. Eventually, after Clipper was killed, Skipjack publicized, encryption got boring, and the college students went on to other things.
Now, we have a similar situation. Again, Congrescritters wanting encryption bans, people being thrown in jail for the rest of their lives without trial until they cough up a password.
It isn't just the US. Other countries will seize businessmen's laptops as a matter of routine.
Then, there is Apple's halo effect. Apple is seen as the "good guys" by many people. Pushing on Apple is not good PR. Hell, even the EU which routinely drags Google and Microsoft into their kangaroo courts so that they can keep relevant (anti-Americanism is a sure way to keep your job), those guys don't even get near Apple, even when laws are passed (like the one forcing companies to standardize on one charging/data adapter.)
The FBI shouldn't keep on this route. If the government starts pushing too much against encryption, we all know about the War on Drugs and Prohibition... there would be a renaissance on encryption that would make Tim C. May, Black Unicorn, and PRZ seem like amateur hacks, with what products would be produced, with real security. Virtually everything would "go dark". Hardware backdoors? If consumers were willing to pay for it, there will be some company selling "trusted" hardware, with the only guessed backdoors, that country's intelligence department.
Look at the firearm industry in the US... if people started really fearing that they might be tossed in a private prison, to only see their family on some shitty Skype-esque thing for $10 a minute for the rest of their lives, you will see that factor of fear causing a lot of people to pay a lot of money for heavy duty encryption.
I really hope that Americans aren't quite as dumb as I perceive and can see things for the way they are.
There's a large majority that are completely pissed off at the current (police) state of affairs.
However, the security state and corporatocracy have chipped away again and again, year after year at the power of the people and it's not clear there's any real power left.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"WhatsApp has over a billion customers, overwhelmingly good people,"
And they live in 194 countries, 193 of them not giving a shit what the FBI wants.