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Justice Department To Be More Aggressive In Seeking Encrypted Data From Tech Companies (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The Justice Department signaled Tuesday it intends to take a more aggressive posture in seeking access to encrypted information from technology companies, setting the stage for another round of clashes in the tug of war between privacy and public safety. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued the warning in a speech in Annapolis, Md., saying that negotiating with technology companies hasn't worked. "Warrant-proof encryption is not just a law enforcement problem," Mr. Rosenstein said at a conference at the U.S. Naval Academy. "The public bears the cost. When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost." Mr. Rosenstein didn't say what precise steps the Justice Department or Trump administration would take. Measures could include seeking court orders to compel companies to cooperate or a push for legislation. A Justice Department official said no specific plans were in the works and Mr. Rosenstein's speech was intended to spur public awareness and discussion of the issue because companies "have no incentive to address this on their own."
"Violent criminal organizations" are the last thing on their minds when making these arguments. They want to go after dissent, after whistleblowers. They want to stalk their exes, commit industrial espionage and blackmail. They want to track the best moments to rape and murder, or to be able to plant evidence without alibis making their so-called discoveries as obviously fake as they can be.
These powers would not and will never be used to make citizens or the country safer in any way, even if it could be used in this fashion. If there were any chance they could, they would never pursue them.
I wonder if they recognize the hypocrisy in this statement when numerous administrations also encrypt or destroy email archives prior to leaving office.
...you have to break a few eggs. A few lives lost every year due to "terrists" are a small price to pay for freedom.
I am willing to risk the ridiculously small chance that my family and I will die in a terrorist incident in order to preserve our freedoms, despite continued government attempts to erode them (Patriot Act, etc.). I'd like to think that anyone sufficiently educated in mathematics and history would logically come to a similar conclusion.
This is the same pile of bovine excrement used in any attempt to destroy, um I mean "regulate" freedoms. They "may" have a slim shred of justification if there was concrete and irrefutable evidence of the imminent commission of a homicide, but we all know better.
""Warrant-proof encryption is not just a law enforcement problem,"" It's actually a natural right for all human beings, so stop trying to violate it.
Secure encryption increases public safety. If the government can't break into everybodies data criminals can't either.
When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost.
Lives may be lost, but liberty will be preserved.
Let's put the cards on the table, shall we? This has little or nothing to do with saving lives, and everything about garnering power through the acquisition of data...lots and lots of data. While those who seek this power wouldn't word it quite this way, it's about a nation subjugating its citizenry.
Next step, aerosolized chemical agents to keep people calm and docile. You want Reavers? Cause that's how you get Reavers.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
....the stage for another round of clashes in the tug of war between privacy and public safety.
No, there is a clash between privacy and dragnet operations by lazy and corrupt law enforcement.
They collect all this data for our "security" and yet, some cranky old guy gets 23 guns and shoots up Las Vegas under their noses. Or two punk ass kids blow up a Boston marathon.
If you have to rely on personal data in order to get the person under investigation to basically incriminate themselves, then there is something horribly lacking in their investigation. You would have to be one brilliant criminal mastermind to have the only evidence against you be on your electronic device - actually an idiot savant - brilliant enough not to have any way of proving your crimes but stupid enough to keep a record on your personal device.
It bothers me how his argument is almost entirely a plea to emotion. It might as well be, "think about the children." Even if he is correct, that some violent criminals are getting away with crimes because we can't prosecute due to strong encryption, how many of those incidents are we willing to pay for more secure devices? It pains me to say it, but if we had to trade 10 murders for a few billion dollars of economic damage due to preventable cyber crime, I think there are very few people who would choose the second option. We know human lives have a price in this country or else we would have universal health care by now...
Another aggravating point in his speech is that he says, "we [the DoJ] are in the business of preventing crime and saving lives." That is not true. He is in the business of prosecuting crime and getting convictions. There are actually very few incentives for him to reduce crime. If removing encryption let him convict more criminals, and then had the side-effect of increasing cyber crime, leading to more criminal convictions, that is a win/win for him.
China, Russia, the UK and now the USA. Our constitution, even the pretence of it, as the US is increasingly not a government for the people or even by the people, but over the people regardless of what it believes. At least Russia and China are straightforward about it. We claim to be difference yet we push ourselves further and further towards the very people we openly condemn. Japan and France are starting to look pretty good right now. Canada is okay, for the moment, but given it's proximity and trying to retain it's "buddy, buddy" status with the USA, it may well go the same route or at least route data to the USA ever so quietly violating not only privacy, but it's own sovereignty. So when is the public going to say "enough". Even Snowden's sacrifice (and others before him) to show us what is going on so we can act, seems to have barely made people aware, and then they go back to "business as usual", save for the few exceptional people, who will be targets for questions the direction of the "status quo". Curse the Bush family for starting it, and curse those after them who kept expanding it. (And that includes Obama I'm sorry to say).
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
It sounds like they want encryption with a backdoor for law enforcement to get into with a warrant. Even putting aside the abuse of power that would happen (e.g. government getting a rubber stamped warrant to look at someone's phone because they don't like his political views), this is worrying. There is no such thing as "a backdoor only for law enforcement." If you make a backdoor, hackers and other governments WILL find it and WILL exploit it. Unlike a normal vulnerability, which can be patched when found, if this backdoor gets out it won't be able to be patched. The government agencies will demand that it remains open for them even while other entities abuse it.
"Law enforcement only" backdoors will just make security much weaker for everyone while not really improving much in the way of security on the law enforcement side.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Tough words are easy
You can't get civil libertarians to even agree that people should be required to open up devices when presented with a warrant. Whenever the courts think it might be a fifth amendment right, a lot of people here cheer, even though that is ultimately self-defeating. If you can defeat a valid warrant by asserting the 5th, you have just made the 5th an enemy of the 4th amendment. That is not a healthy place for the Bill of Rights to be.
I have a simpler idea:
1. We pass a law making people responsible for remembering their encryption keys on devices they own.
2. We give law enforcement the power to have people prosecuted if they refuse to open a device that is mentioned in a search warrant as a particular thing to be searched for a particular offense.
3. We allow vendors to keep their products at full strength and instead focus on the users.
This is "common sense encryption control."
stupid and evil.
The intelligent argument is not that the government should be in charge of health care, but that the government should be the single-payer for health care. Numerous payers require numerous negotiations and often-unfair rates in the interest of profit. No one should profit off the health of another, and no one should be unhealthy due simply to the fact that they are poor. No one should be bankrupted by a health issue, especially when they have health insurance. Besides the obvious fact that healthier citizens are more productive, there are relatively unseen and often-ignored effects of concern over health, and guaranteed health coverage for all would eliminate those issues.
Then stop abusing your power. As it is now, the likelihood of someone being damaged by you HAVING access to data is higher than if you don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"The public bears the cost. When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost."
Always the same bullshit.
Quote: companies "have no incentive to address this on their own."
I do not believe companies are designing secure systems out of the "goodness of their heart".I believe there are sales incentives for designing systems that preserve privacy.
Companies actually have an incentive to not address this the way the government wants them to.
You take that back, my mother was a saint!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't want to trust security devices or methods, I want them to be bulletproof. Al-Qaeda used a fucking hotmail account for months and they were not caught. How is this backdoor BS gonna stop anything?
As long as the government is weakening security then security remains weak for everyone and those that have to "trust" simply use soemthing else.
In short, this method of backdoors is not preventing crime or catching out organised crime it's just making everything compromisable eg wrose.
Multi-factor multi-signature keys. If we develop with this in mind then data-breaches, abuse of power and all the usual crude is far less likely.
Your data is encrypted (default state) then have a key, the governmet has a key and or the company of the product has a key.
Scenerio one; jealous cop next door wants to see your tax return; he needs your key, governemnt key (already has it) and the company key. True that if you have part of the key brute forcing can be easier but it's still difficult if not impossible.
Scenerio two; FBI says you colliuded with russians (it's popular) and forced the company of your favourite IM to hand over keys. They have government key, company key but not your fucking key. -they can issue a warrant and you may reliquish your key OR refuse. They may now have a pretty decent chance or cracking encryption and might need 3-6 months to do so...
Scenerio three - no governement data sharing, only two keys, your and the company; nasty blackhat hackers stole all the company's data of your naked shenanigans, they stole the company keys as well, but you still have yours. Data is useless.
You get there idea....it's not perfect or fool proof but it's MUCH better than data laying about being "secure" in some sort of "high security" facility somewhere with one controlling entity and one encryption key which you do not own.
Lawman doesn't want to give citizens that kinda power? -OK how about mutli-factor multi-signatory keys for the governement only? Big insurance company gets one key, FBI gets another, DHS get a third. -now if there is to be sharing there needs to be a process to share the keys, preferably by agencies that keep each other in check and are less likely to collude. Put that process autheorization and signing on a public blockchain and we'll know it probably followed due process and if not we'll find out one day who signed the dotted line. (as it were)
Remember that? due process!
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Enlightenment.
California has a population of 40 million, this is larger than 200 countries. If California can negotiate a great deal by itself then I don't expect the US as a whole to do it much better.
Also, California voted 140% democrat in the last election. Literally. If California can't pass single payer healthcare then clearly the idea is too extreme for the whole country.
~~~
Be careful, when we talk about "government" there are different governments.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I support the authority of any government to lawfully query any company under its jurisdiction for as much data as it wants.
The ultimate problem here is that companies still control all your data. The long term solution is you should have a "my cloud" box in your basement. That's where your data lives, or at least the O(1) encryption keys for the O(n) amount of data you have elsewhere. In that situation government will need to request data from you directly if they want it.
There really is a strictly technical solution to these problems and we are getting closer every day to the solutions. https://security.googleblog.co...
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
What about ROT13? Nobody ever cracked it.
#DeleteFacebook
I could jump into a long discussion about how anyone, anyone, who thinks it is possible to have perfect encryption that also just-so-happens to let perfectly benevolent law enforcement in, is either ignorant of the technology, lying to achieve some other purpose, or simply doesn't care about keeping us safe from the broader and more potent dangers of weak encryption.
I could do that, but CGP Gray has done a fine job of it in one five-minute video.
A tech company should not have the capacity to compromise security. (Since all companies can be coerced, whether legally or illegally, and your computer won't ever know the difference.) At worst they should only be able to deploy malware which uses a covert channel to leak keys or something. The crypto itself (which will probably also involve key exchange, though not always) needs to be done in a way that complies with a standard (i.e. there are multiple competing tools, by different developers, that can work with the data) then the data itself ought to be safe.
OpenPGP is an example of something done right. LUKS/dmcrypt is another. If a hostile entity pressures a developer to make it not work right, what could they do?
If some company is in charge of your security, then you don't have security. And if you are using proprietary communications software, that means you have one company in charge of your security.
Phase out the "tech companies"' role in your communications. The US government is telling you right now they intend to exert force to prevent whatever-it-is from being able to be secured. If you're using proprietary software for any sort of non-public communication, then you're doing it wrong, and you know you're doing it wrong (i.e. you do not have any expectation of privacy).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
First, to hear the Justice department tell it, they must have been unable to solve crimes back before networks existed. Which is clearly BS.
Second, if their argument is to be taken seriously, then we also need to have laws preventing people from owning safes unless they give a copy of the key/combo to the government.
ROT26 is twice as good.
Don't know about how the single-payer healthcare is working out for US veterans. But here in Canada, single-payer healthcare works out well enough for almost everyone. It's not perfect and there are gaps in the system, but overall it does the trick. I'm a self-employed entrepreneur - and I'm not afraid of a health problem causing me to go out of business and/or personally bankrupt.
In fact, two years ago I had a health scare that resulted in numerous trips to the hospital, visits to a neurologist, multiple MRIs, etc. I didn't pay out-of-pocket once, and I didn't worry that 30 days later I'd get a scary bill in the mail. Turns out my issue was easily addressed by some diet and lifestyle changes - but if it *was* more serious, at least I would be able to get treatment.
Failing to stop crimes is spun as requiring additional power and budget in order to ensure it doesn't happen.
Chances are they knew what this guy was going to do, but stopping him at the last minute like the movies means they don't require draconian new measures to "keep us safe".
It's funny how you translated "more registered voters than residents" into "voted democrat".
The errors in the registration lists are largely due to people moving, dying, etc. and not contacting the state to deregister. It's a common problem and it's not just among Democrats, despite your obvious desire to paint it as such.
After Trump bitched about fraudulent voting and people being registered where they shouldn't, it came out that Steve Bannon, Tiffany Trump, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin were all registered in more than one state because they hadn't deregistered themselves when they moved.
If you honestly believe that someone being registered in two states means they're voting in both states, then you should be demanding that all those Republicans be arrested for voter fraud.
"Violent criminal organizations" are the last thing on their minds when making these arguments. They want to go after dissent, after whistleblowers. They want to stalk their exes, commit industrial espionage and blackmail. They want to track the best moments to rape and murder, or to be able to plant evidence without alibis making their so-called discoveries as obviously fake as they can be.
These powers would not and will never be used to make citizens or the country safer in any way, even if it could be used in this fashion. If there were any chance they could, they would never pursue them.
I actually couldn't have said it any better myself. Go search in the recent news; Trump has been openly hunting down regular citizens who have spoken out against him. Why would he do that if not to persecute them, perhaps to the point of false charges being raised against them, as a punitive action for DARING to speak out against the Great and Mighty Donald J. Trump, (LOL)? Note also that way too many people get into 'law enforcement' because they have Power Fantasies about subjugating (bullying, whatever you want to call it) whoever they please to, and apparently there are way too many closeted White Supremacists in law enforcement, if you take the frequency of young black men being shot to death for no damned good reason as any indicator of that.
Nope, banning encryption (or destroying it's effectiveness, same difference really) isn't going to make anyone in this country safer or reduce crime or terrorism or effectively prosecute offenders, it's going to be just one more step towards a TOTAL POLICE STATE where there is no such thing as 'Freedom', not unless you're a COP, or you're RICH. So FUCK THEM and their 'aggressive stance' (read as: BULLYING) in getting tech companies to breach citizens' devices.
In order to make everyone safe, we have to restrict law abiding citizen's access to guns and encryption, The only people who need encryption must be people who have something to hide; just like the only people who need something stronger than a bb-gun must be people who want to shoot innocent people in the streets.
This is another argument for a decentralized web. Too much of our data is congregating in the hands of fewer and fewer players. We are going back to the mainframe days where all the data was managed in a central location. Everything is being stored in 'the cloud' which is just another name for somebody else's hard drive where it can be copied, stolen, or turned over to the government. Time for the pendulum to start swinging the other way.
Ha! I think the public--much of it, anyway--is already very aware that companies are resisting government intrusion into the content of their ``personal devices'' or providing back doors that allow the government to waltz right into their phones and/or computers. What the public is largely unaware of is how many of these tech companies don't bother to stick up for their users/customers at all and just bend over and take it when the government sends them a request; it's only news when a company doesn't. I, for one, am happy to see them resist letting us become targets of government fishing expeditions. A pox on Mr. Rosenstein for playing the fear card in attempting to drum up support for increased domestic spying.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Think of all the wars in history which did not have access (or capacity) to gather this sort of information. They were a far far bigger threat than a small number of suicidal people. Somehow they managed....
Today's threat doesn't even pass car accidents and many classifications are less than the number cell phone drivers kill each year.
The real enemy is the pursuit of perfection (aka utopia;) furthermore, such pursuits are mostly cover for alternator motives.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
For Facebook, shadowy "big data", Twitter, Google, Microsoft, *Gram, Pokemon and all of the subpoena-enabled Orwellian spy shit being intentionally baked into every toaster oven on the planet.
Troves of new leads and capabilities previously wouldn't have possibly in their wildest dreams been able to pursuit is not enough. It will never be enough for LEA who sees their mission in a vacuum as the only consideration of import.
Each act of aggression towards tech companies offering mass communication services only drives the proliferation of decentralized alternatives run by Mr nobody and pushes key management closer to the edge. It's not possible to prevent someone who desires to do so from speaking in code or otherwise outlaw basic math. All you end up doing is making everything temporarily less secure before the tech companies role in securing communications is completely extricated from the equation.
Yes, enlightenment is good. Single-payer in CA isn't dead; it's tabled until it's done correctly - http://www.latimes.com/politic...
Judicial Watch, Inc. appears to be rather biased, as evidenced by the below:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com...
http://www.snopes.com/dhs-quie...
http://www.politifact.com/pers...
I'd take their filings with a grain of salt...or two or three.
I'm confused, don't they ALREADY have access to the encrypted data...?
Regardless, the government will just have keyloggers built into the BIOS. The manufacturers are the weak link here.
Keyloggers are a well-known problem -- and one for which security solutions are designed to mitigate. U2F was designed to be secure with a keylogger installed (because spyware is a thing). There are completely open, easily manufactured designs of U2F keys.
GPG cards similarly have an open design, and are designed such that the keys can't be recovered from the device -- and the critical decryption is done on the GPG card.
There's also Coreboot, Libreboot, and OpenFirmware before that -- all open source BIOSes you can audit and compile yourself.
Electronics hobbyists design entire computers -- from PC board design and manufacture (at home) all the way to working Linux computers with internet access. Completely from scratch.
The reality is that the skills and tools to bypass such spying is common, widespread, and well published. Many who have the skills are thrilled when somebody shows an interest in their hobby, and eagerly assist anyone who asks.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
"When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost."
just tell your pigs to quit shooting people and lives won't be lost. quit paying terrorist's rent and helping them plan attacks. stop running guns, drugs and god knows what else. quit trying to destroy the country.
> The pen is mightier than the sword.
The penis, mightier than the sword
- Bill Clinton
Shhhhh, Americans still think its them making the profits, rather than the rest of the world profiting from their early deaths.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein issued the warning in a speech in Annapolis, Md., saying that negotiating with technology companies hasn't worked. "Warrant-proof encryption is not just a law enforcement problem," Mr. Rosenstein said at a conference at the U.S. Naval Academy. "The public bears the cost. When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost."
Translation: We want to continue sacrificing billions around the world to dictatorship because we are missing a tiny handful of criminal notches in our belt.
These are needed to prevent thuggery from accessing info that challenges their dictatorsbips. That is sufficient.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
....the stage for another round of clashes in the tug of war between privacy and public safety.
No, there is a clash between privacy and dragnet operations by lazy and corrupt law enforcement.
This.
Seriously, if your entire investigation hinges on the contents of one locked cell phone, you couldn't be doing it more wrong.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The intelligent argument is not that the government should be in charge of health care, but that the government should be the single-payer for health care.
Wrong. The intelligent person asks why do we need to have health insurance to start with and solves that problem. Reduce the costs for all regardless of insurance coverage.
Also, the intelligent person realizes that government only adds bureaucracy and overhead to the cost of anything it provides. It does not improve it; rather it makes any changes take longer and longer.
There are very few things government can do well - military is one of them.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I don't rely on third party services for crypto, preferring to do it myself.
For the longest time, I thought that just made me weird. Now, it's starting to look like it makes me prescient.
The government can't stop my use of strong crypto, they can only stop third party services from using it.
I applaud your sentiment. If you are ever really in that position, though, you'll be going to jail.
Are you ready and willing to do that?
Then we're a hop skip and a jump away from having DRM that the consumer is unable to crack.
To a very limited extent, perhaps. There are some very large technical differences between the two cases that make this conclusion dubious. And, to the extent that it could be true, it's already true.
I'm not sure I really trust what powerful organizations can do with the perfect crypto
Then you can relax, because we don't have perfect, unbreakable crypto.
Gov pushed malware is going to be running under, over, around and with better encryption. The better encryption will be tested, passed and work perfectly.
So will the gov malware.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
His argument would work equally to defend requiring every home builder to include a recording device in every home so that law enforcement could, with a subpeona or warrant, access the recordings to investigate crimes.
Re "I wonder how they managed to do that without access to smartphone data?" :)
When the UK was tracking US and international funding and support in Ireland in the 1980's?
The UK just collected on every call into and out of Ireland. All domestic calls too. Voice prints made it easy.
Funding, support and methods get discovered when interring people talk too much on phones thinking that are hidden in lots of other random calls.
GCHQ listened in on Ireland (18 July 1999) https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
How Britain eavesdropped on Dublin (15 July 1999) http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
What to do about smart phone with new encryption? Gov malware will get under that
The other really smart thing the UK did was never tell anyone what they did. Only the UK mil, GCHQ and Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch really got to see what was collected. No courts, police, human rights lawyers, media, telco workers really had any idea what was been done and the UK ensured it kept is secrets and kept on collecting everything in real time.
Contrast that with US methods, crypto, gov malware been commented on in public 2017.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Government can do many things well, unless it's sabotaged. It's no mistake that military, police, and fire are agreed on as necessary and mostly functional. It's the disgreed on parts that are deliberately broken as a "example" to show everyone how bad government does. There are plenty of parts that once ran great until they were sabotaged.
Cheap storage VM.
When it's not terrorism there is some other FEAR they are trying to sell us their cure for it if we only hand them more money and power to implement it... It's always a snake oil salesman with a cure for the incurable disease of FEAR.
"Perfect is the enemy of good" and they always hype cures as much as possible as being as perfect as possible (because an imperfect cure or incomplete solution is just mitigation.) You don't see a good salesman selling partial plans of mitigation-- they sell "comprehensive plans" to "solve" problem X. We just suffered through Trump making idiotically blatant false promises to solve everything because "it's so easy" (for him.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Consider the Miami night club shooter. The police knew he was a serious danger, and all the crypto in the world isn't going to show you anything more useful than that. The problem was that the police couldn't do anything about it. They don't have the power to arbitrarily imprison people indefinitely, and I (at least) consider that a Good Thing. They couldn't assign a couple of officers to follow him around at all times. They couldn't find significant laws he'd broken.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The FISA court is composed of real judges. Its warrants will be backed by police, and if you defy one (as opposed to contest it in court, and you probably won't win) you will be prosecuted.
The Constitution implicitly says that there can be departments in the executive branch, since the President is Constitutionally able to get written answers from the heads of the departments. Most of the President's power is derived from laws Congress passes, and Congress established a Department of Justice to help enforce the law, all according to the Constitution.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Civil war: there was active tapping of telegraph wires and cryptanalysis of messages. At that point, the Viginere cipher was considered extremely hard to break. There was also the case of Confederate battle plans wrapped around a couple of cigars, lost by the messenger, and found by a Union soldier.
WWI: The light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground in the Baltic, and the Russians were able to recover the naval codes and give them to the British. That's one example.
WWII: Enigma is the obvious example, but decryption of Japanese naval codes was also important. The Japanese carriers at Midway were where the plans had said. There's also a US military observer in North Africa who was sending back very good reports on British capabilities and intentions, in a code the Germans had managed to steal a copy of. It may be a coincidence, but Rommel's luck turned seriously against him when the observer left North Africa (and his signals intelligence people were lost in an encounter with a British supply column).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The U.S.A. was birthed from the notion that freedom is worth more than a few lives, and that prevention of tyranny is worth spilt blood.