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DOJ: Strong Encryption That We Don't Have Access To Is 'Unreasonable' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just two days after the FBI said it could not get into the Sutherland Springs shooter's seized iPhone, Politico Pro published a lengthy interview with a top Department of Justice official who has become the "government's unexpected encryption warrior." According to the interview, which was summarized and published in transcript form on Thursday for subscribers of the website, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein indicated that the showdown between the DOJ and Silicon Valley is quietly intensifying. "We have an ongoing dialogue with a lot of tech companies in a variety of different areas," he told Politico Pro. "There's some areas where they are cooperative with us. But on this particular issue of encryption, the tech companies are moving in the opposite direction. They're moving in favor of more and more warrant-proof encryption." "I want our prosecutors to know that, if there's a case where they believe they have an appropriate need for information and there is a legal avenue to get it, they should not be reluctant to pursue it," Rosenstein said. "I wouldn't say we're searching for a case. I''d say we're receptive, if a case arises, that we would litigate."
In the interview, Rosenstein also said he "favors strong encryption." "I favor strong encryption, because the stronger the encryption, the more secure data is against criminals who are trying to commit fraud," he explained. "And I'm in favor of that, because that means less business for us prosecuting cases of people who have stolen data and hacked into computer networks and done all sorts of damage. So I'm in favor of strong encryption." "This is, obviously, a related issue, but it's distinct, which is, what about cases where people are using electronic media to commit crimes? Having access to those devices is going to be critical to have evidence that we can present in court to prove the crime. I understand why some people merge the issues. I understand that they're related. But I think logically, we have to look at these differently. People want to secure their houses, but they still need to get in and out. Same issue here." He later added that the claim that the "absolutist position" that strong encryption should be by definition, unbreakable, is "unreasonable." "And I think it's necessary to weigh law enforcement equities in appropriate cases against the interest in security," he said.
In the interview, Rosenstein also said he "favors strong encryption." "I favor strong encryption, because the stronger the encryption, the more secure data is against criminals who are trying to commit fraud," he explained. "And I'm in favor of that, because that means less business for us prosecuting cases of people who have stolen data and hacked into computer networks and done all sorts of damage. So I'm in favor of strong encryption." "This is, obviously, a related issue, but it's distinct, which is, what about cases where people are using electronic media to commit crimes? Having access to those devices is going to be critical to have evidence that we can present in court to prove the crime. I understand why some people merge the issues. I understand that they're related. But I think logically, we have to look at these differently. People want to secure their houses, but they still need to get in and out. Same issue here." He later added that the claim that the "absolutist position" that strong encryption should be by definition, unbreakable, is "unreasonable." "And I think it's necessary to weigh law enforcement equities in appropriate cases against the interest in security," he said.
It's also pretty unreasonable that criminals can't just be forced to admit guilt. Think of all the wasted time giving criminals due process of law.
In the interview, Rosenstein also said he "favors strong encryption." "I favor strong encryption, because the stronger the encryption, the more secure data is against criminals who are trying to commit fraud," he explained.
Let's just punch in random players here for the purpose of examining random outcomes: What if the governments are/become the criminals? It's not exactly unheard of.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
i know the fourth hangs by a thread, tattered and mostly extinguished, but it still chills me to hear the government speak so blatantly.
Government jobs attract thugs. Government is a coercive, violent institution that attracts people who have dictatorial personalities and who cannot compete properly on the open market. It is gangsterism on a grand scale.
They also do not understand that the more they push this ridiculous and mathematically-impossible idea about encryption that they alone have access to, they will push businesses and users into more and more secure technologies.
They fought Apple, and Apple hardened its systems. They get caught running PRISM, consumers ramp up their use of encryption and VPNs. Every time government does this, they push the world into more secure encryption.
Encryption either works for everyone, or no one.
Why don't we all give you our front door keys as well? That will make things easier for you too!!!
Not really much easier than simply breaking down the door -- which isn't something they can do to a smartphone.
More seriously, I don't remember the part of the Constitution that says our rights are contingent on how easy it is for the Government to usurp and/or ignore them.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Authorities have no one to blame but themselves. They have proven beyond any doubt time and time again that they cannot be trusted to have such access without abusing it, so why would anyone ever trust them.
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
Stop trying to doublespeake the issue, you cannot treat things differently just because it's covenient to you.
Encryption is either strong, or weak and thus useless, there is no middleground, you cannot devise a way to make it weak for some case scenarios while being strong for others because this defeats it's ultimate purpose.
There is zero reason to pursue something like this because the moment US based companies start using a crippled encryption scheme like that is the moment hackers will find a way to exploit it, and criminals will switch to encryption systems made in a country that does not have such ignorant moronic people in the DOJ barking crap like that.
Or do these morons really thing that criminals will go "oh hey, these chat apps have US weakened and backdoored encryption and we are commiting crimes in the US, let's use it!". Fucking stupid.
You know what encryption is about? Reducing the rampant privacy erosion that has been happening in recent years because DOJ and other US governmental agencies cannot control their hunger for data. Crimes were solved well before this age of constant mass surveillance and privacy invasion at dystopic scales. Police should be able to do their jobs without having to step on the privacy of everyone they can reach, and arguably sometimes they can do a better job when they are not focusing so much on how to better collect data without anyone knowing about it.
So you can go suck a cock Rosenstein. No one wants to live in a totalitarian state where your half assed ideas comes to fruition. Fucking deal with the reality that there will always be methods for criminals to lock information down in ways that they become unaccessible.
Headline: "The DOJ Supports Criminals"
There is no such thing as a safe backdoor.
If it's there, especially if knowledge of it is public, criminals will get access.
It will drive everyone who has any sense to use non US encryption products.
you have to stop voting the right wing "Tough on Crime" folks into office. I know that's not a popular thing to say, but this stuff all comes from the same folks (you'd not I said Right wing, nothing about "Ds" or "Rs", that's because right wing is a political ideology, not a party, and both sides have plenty of right wingers).
You also need to get your friends and family on board. And for Pete's sake vote in your primary. It doesn't do any good to vote if everyone running is a right wing "Tough on Crime" politician.
Or you can keep reading these stories and hoping for the best. I guess that works too.
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What he should be asking is why this happened. Working backwards we know that Corporations rarely do things that aren't in the interest of profit which means there was a demand for this feature. Why was there a sudden demand for iron clad smartphone security? Well strong encryption didn't start showing up in smartphones until after the exposure of a massive surveillance apparatus.
Now, you can kill the messenger but it's the reality that is the real problem: people don't want to live in a surveillance state!
The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Somehow I don't think we should be limiting the world to the smartest that the DoJ can buy...
I agree that it should not include those things, but you are horribly naive if you don't realize that it always does mean those things.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But you trust government to "competently" control guns and healthcare?
If government can't trust the public with a mathematical algorithm what makes you think the government will not trample all over the rights of a disarmed populace? The most recent Texas church shooting might have been prevented if the government followed its own damn rules.
Is this the same government you want running healthcare?
Very few people in jail or prison claim to be innocent. Most freely admit their guilt*. This makes it more interesting when someone claims to be either innocent, guilty of only part of their charges, or not guilty of any of their charges (although often guilty of some other uncharged offense).
After you talk to 15 or 20 of these people (and read their documentation) you start to get a feel for who is bullshitting and who got fucked. Talking to members of either group will make you angry, but in very different ways.
*: Before a plea or trial your lawyer will tell you to STFU and plead innocent at your arraignment. This gives your lawyer a little leverage ion the plea negotiations (although in the Feds they're not allowed to call it 'negotiation' anymore).
PS. If you get arrested, say "I want to speak to a lawyer," and then stop talking. Seriously. Make your mouth be still. It's your life, don't screw around.
You trust the government you distrust to have the sole access to means of violence, but not encryption? Not a good plan.
A decent locksmith can open any lock consumers use in a minute or two.* Yet the lock DOES generally work - if you lock up your bike with a decent lock, a thief probably isn't going to walk off with it.
So the physical lock serves it's protective purpose, yet when you lock yourself out Pop-A-Lock can get you in for $25, and with a warrant police can enter an apartment. That's really not a bad situation. Compare if you lose your encryption key - you're permanently fucked; you can't call a digital locksmith if you're encryption is "good".
I think it's perfectly reasonable for a non-technical person to say "I like the idea of a security system or lock that protects things from the bad guys, but with enough effort can be bypassed in an emergency or by an expert with a warrant". Again, it works well for physical locks, so CONCEPTUALLY it's reasonable.
However, in today's digital world everything is connected to the internet and computer accessible, so a bad guy 5,000 miles away can have his computer working around the clock to try to break everybody's encryption. He doesn't have to hire a locksmith to work each lock. As computers get faster, it gets easier and easier to break a given level encryption, too. Therefore as a PRACTICAL matter, encryption needs to be super strong to be very useful. That's a practical fact for internet-connected devices.
So I think the person is either a) unfamiliar with the practical realities of computer encryption or b) expressing a desire of what they'd want if they could have whatever they want, not proposing that it's actually available in a practical way today. Possibly both.
It's not unreasonable to desire that digital locks worked like physical locks, secure from ordinary bad guys but locksmiths can open them. We just don't have any practical implementation that works that way, and probably never will.
We actually DO have a technical implementation that *would* work if the government could be trusted to a) keep the keys secret and b) not abuse the keys, using them without a properly executed warrant.
* Medeco locks used by some businesses and $5,000 safes take a few minutes longer.
You should become familiar with a concept called "Signal-to-Noise Ratio" before speaking any similar bullshit regarding the shit circus that you dare to call "intelligence gathering" on your side of the Atlantic pond.
Technically, torture works fine if you torture several persons
By inflicting torture to more people, you'll just end up with even more unreliable bullshit that all spat to you just to make you stop.
Just a bigger pile of more random stuff they all hoped will make you stop, and that is.
and cross reference the statements.
You have such a huge pile of random bullshit, that you won't generate anything significant by cross-referencing.
You're most likely to get random match (some people happen to have randomly uttered the same thing in the middle of their ordeal) or thing that match due to shared common beliefs rather than actual truth (basically the poor victims will shout anything that they think will make you stop. Lots of them might think that you want to hear that it's the "evil foreign pedo-terrorist pirates with a a slightly different skin shade who did it, I swear !" So you're going to hear that a lot, even if none of the poor victim you've caught has the faintest clue of whatever you're speaking about).
You might not even have a single person in your pool of human playthings for sadists which has any information relevant to this.
Thus, it can be used for intelligence gathering but not in the justice system.
"Intelligence gathering" means the gathering of actual intelligence. Not hoarding as much noise as possible and hoping for some miracle by the data analyst guys which will suddenly make a small signal shine in the middle of the pile.
You don't find needles by stacking more hay on top of the haystack.
This is valid both regarding human-rights violating practice such as torture : you're basically just adding noise, you're not helping anything, except maybe your disgusting sadistic tendencies.
And it is valid regarding privacy violating practice such as NSA-levels mass-spying.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yet another mass killing, yet another nutter allowed to have a weapon and zero guts in the Republican party to tackle the gun-funded NRA lobby.
These nutters were "allowed" to have a weapon? Can you show me a mass murder where the killer was not barred from possessing the weapon (by state or federal law) due to being in a "gun free zone", prior conviction of drug use/possession, mental health issues, prior conviction of a felony or violent misdemeanor, being in the nation illegally, or having been dishonorably discharged from the military?
Can you show me one of these murderers that was a member of the NRA?
BTW, the person that stopped the murderer in Sutherland Springs was an NRA firearms instructor. The killer in that shooting did pass a background check, only because his mental health history, violent crimes, and discharge from the Air Force were not reported to the FBI. Are these the same guys we want to trust with the keys to our electronic data?
Are these the same people we want to trust with stopping the next "nutter" with mass murder on their mind? No thanks. I have greater trust in those that cling to their bibles and their guns.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
They can't even keep their OWN secrets.
What makes them think that a secret backdoor only THEY have been entrusted with will be safe?
Sorry, but if a weakness exists, it'll be found.
What's more, if it's a DELIBERATE weakness, it will likely be found FASTER, as what CAN be done to compromise such a thing is predictable.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The word you're looking for is an assault rifle (machine guns are not used by people other than military) but that's a moot point.
This important thing to note is argument is a red herring when it comes to the issue of gun legislation because fact of the matter is that US has both a higher rate of homicide in general as well as a higher rate of mass shootings/murders than Europe. So the fact of the matter is that you're statistically much more likely to become a victim of a mass murder in the US than in Europe.
This is correct.
You want to know what I've noticed about these recent mass shootings? Over a third of them globally happen in the US despite you being only 5 % of the world population. Compared to other western nations, even other western nations with a high gun ownership rate such as we here in Finland, the difference is staggering.
First of all, this idea that most mass murders are done with an illegal gun seems to not hold true in light of the facts (more on that later).
But even if it would, even if it'd be the case that most mass shootings are done with an illegal weapon, that's not an argument against control, that's evidence to the contrary because it indicates that what gun control you do have is poorly implemented if criminals can acquire guns with such ease. Those illegal weapons come from somewhere. The fact that people who shouldn't be allowed to own guns manage to get them with such ease that mass shootings are now almost a daily phenomenon in the US should tell you that the system is broken somewhere. Either the laws are broken or alternatively the enforcement of the rules is lacking, because it should be alarming to you that murderous criminals can acquire weapons that they should not be allowed to get with relative ease.
Nearly every illegal weapon used was at some point a legal one. The gun show loophole is perhaps the most famous one of the examples that comes to my mind, though I'm not an expert on US law. No level of gun control will make much difference if there exist legal ways for people to bypass the level of control and purchase weapons without having their backgrounds checked and so on. This comes down to a combination of points made by the OP and you. The OP said that the ease of getting an AR-15 probably has something to do with it, and you rightfully corrected him that most mass murders are done with handguns. Therefore the correct question is: does the ease of getting a handgun affect the rate of murders?
Yes, yes it does. One of the key reasons why Europe on average has less murders & mass murders is precisely because you cannot acquire a legal handgun here nearly as easily as you can in the states. This means that the amount of handguns in the black market is also consid
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
If the police can break encryption without the owner's consent, then criminals and foreign powers can break it just as easily. There is no magic encryption that opens only for the "good" guys.
Your one and only source for mass shooting statistics was Every Town? That group states openly that their goal is to ban all the guns. You could not have found a more biased source if you tried. How about coming back with some neutral sources? Or even some sources biased on the other end to balance that out?
Le's go with that for a bit though. 54% were domestic violence cases, and 63% happened in private homes. Does this mean people cannot even keep a firearm in their own home? That's going to go over like a turd in a punch bowl when we see that 1/3rd of Americans own a gun. I find that statistic interesting. Why use the word "American" since 24% of the US population is under 18 and are legally barred from owning a gun. The percentage of Americans under 21, the age at which a person may legally purchase a handgun under federal law, or legally carry a concealed firearm in most states, is 27%. That means of "American adults" the gun ownership is closer to 50% than 30%. When using the metric "gun owning household" we find it's 44%, which is probably a better metric to use as children are not really counted.
Then there's the claim that 34% of these murderers were prohibited from possessing a firearm. Here's a question, why were these people not in prison? I mean, if these people cannot be trusted with a firearm then why would we release them from prison? Are they barred from other dangerous items as well? People get stabbed, run over by trucks, beaten with baseball bats, and so on and so on. Why focus just on the firearms? Lock them up if they are still a threat. If they aren't a threat then they should not be barred, but that's perhaps a discussion for another time.
The Every Town admits that "only" 10% of mass shooting deaths happen in "gun free zones". Is this supposed to make me feel better? Is that not still an epic fail of the "gun free zone" to protect the people within it? That number should not be 10%, or 5%, or 1%, it should be 0% or it's a failure.
You also mention "mass shootings" as a metric, why is it important that people are shot? Don't having people get run over by a truck count? Why compare the USA to Europe? Why not Mexico? Why not anywhere else in the world? Why compare the entire USA when the laws on gun ownership vary widely from state to state? Murder rates vary widely from state to state as well. The "murderous" USA is still far safer than so many places in the world. Is this safety from owning guns? Maybe we should pick nations of similar area and population, like Brazil.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
always so damned ignorant ?
Why do we have to keep explaining the same things over and over to the same people ?
Encryption is doing its job if it prevents unauthorized folks from obtaining the data it's protecting. This includes the government. ( Whom no one fully trusts with anything ) Especially the government in some instances.
As leaky as the government is with their own networks and the data that rides them, it would only be a matter of time before any mandated backdoor became semi-public knowledge. At which point the damage that can be done would be epic.
What's " unreasonable " is the government demanding levels of transparency on the people while doing their damndest to hide everything they do under veils of secrecy, NSL's and secret courts. ( All under the guise of 'protecting' us of course. )
Tell you what, we'll give you access to our data, when you give us full access to yours.
Until then, you all can go fuck yourselves.
Hugs and kisses from all of us.