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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.
I don't think Mr. Rosenstein is an idiot at all, I do think he is not being honest about what his end goal is.
I am also doubtful he understands what encryption really is and how it works, or that he can remember the US government fighting and losing a similar battle during the 1990's.
"Responsible" encryption lasted about 3 days before it was crucified by the EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
so lets see just how long "unreasonable" encryption goes. The fact of the matter is plain and simple. In any of these shootings, the ability to read the killers instagram posts and grindr chats isnt going to magically re-animate the dead. beating the motive horse for a killer just helps draw attention away from the real issues like competent gun control and healthcare reform in the US that isnt hinged on Reagan era de-institutionalization.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
"I don't understand how strong encryption works" - Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
#DeleteChrome
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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We have a problem that the FBI is controlled by political ebb and tides.
Not only that, we have people who go around and invoke mono-spaced fonts "just because". It's madness, I tell you!
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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...
Actually, thousands of people take that deal every year. I was locked up with several of them. This is not a Grisham novel, this is real life.
In the Feds (states are different, so YMMV), prosecutors establish the highest possible charges they can indict (I think this was supposed to be the highest 'provable' charges but that's not what we got) and then get the indictments. They present you with these charges (e.g.: A, B, C, D, and E) and offer you a 'reduction' to an appropriate charge for your offense (e.g.: A and B) in exchange for a guilty plea. Then they tell you their conviction rate (high 90's%).
THEY have practically unlimited resources from the FBI, the DEA, the ATFE, and to a lesser extent from local law enforcement. They have a large annual budget for crime lab and forensic analysis, as well as expert testimony. Most guys with no money and guys with prior engagement with the Feds immediately accept the plea. This means the Feds get to concentrate all of their firepower on the stubborn nails that insist on sticking up.
YOU have a public defender whose compensation for your case is capped at (IIRC) $3,000. If you are fortunate, and financially secure, maybe you have a paid attorney, but how much can you afford? $25,000? $50,000? A SIMPLE trial in the Fed can easily go past $30,000.
Worse, the benches are stacked with Republican nominated justices. Some of these guys act like they are extensions of the prosecutor's offices.
If you go to trial there is a high probability you are going to prison, even if you are innocent. When you are found guilty, you will be sentenced for all of the charges they originally laid against you (A, B, C, D, and E). They call this 'sending a strong signal'.
Charges A and B may have a sentencing range of 34 to 42 months. If you're at the bottom of the range (34 months) you will serve about 29 months with good behavior, do a little probation, and move on with your life. With such a short sentence you will be sent to a Low Security facility, if you're nonviolent maybe even a camp.
Charges A through E may carry a range of 270 to 300 months. If you make them go all the way through a trial you will probably not be at the bottom of the range. At 300 months you will have to serve at least 261 months. That's almost 22 years. You will also have to begin your sentence in a Maximum Security prison (a 'Penitentiary'). You will not like most of the people you meet there. Worse, they won't like you.
Rational people have this choice thrust upon them all the time in this country and do the Expected Value Equation:
Plead: 100% times 29 months.
vs
Trial: 90% times 261 months.
Often this happens to people who are guilty of some of their charges but not all of them (this is what happened to me). Sometimes it happens to people who are not guilty of any of their charges. There are many innocent people in prison because that's the best outcome they could realistically hope for.
I apologize for the length of this post.
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.
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.
Sometimes [choosing to plead to an offence for reduced sentence] happens to people who are not guilty of any of their charges. There are many innocent people in prison because that's the best outcome they could realistically hope for.
A friend since my college days became a public defender. He is rabidly against the death penalty. According to him, the main effect is to cause totally innocent people to plead guilty to lower-grades of murder rather than risk their lives by demanding a trial.
It's something like the argument against torture: Hurt someone enough and you can get him to say whatever he thinks you want him to say in the hope you'll stop hurting him. So information extracted by torture is unreliable.
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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 ]
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!!!
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.
I used to work as a locksmith. A long time ago, tools and techniques for tubular locks weren't common, so bike locks with a tubular cylinder WERE considered difficult. Tubular locks are the kind you see on soda machines, and have a circular key. Picks for tubular locks are now common, so they are no longer difficult. I've never seen any model of bike that would be considered difficult.
You might not BOTHER to pick a $12 lock since it's so easy to replace. It's not difficult, just not worth spending more than 3 minutes on if you happen to randomly get one with shallowing bitting at the key tip, and deep cuts near the bow. That's random to specific instances of the lock, though - in general they are slightly easier than home locks because they frequently have only four pins rather than five.
I mentioned bitting. If your key happens to have deep cuts near the "handle" and a very shallow cut near the top, that's more difficult. Especially if there is also a shallow cut right before the deep cut.
They can't, experts smoke pot and cannot be hired by gov :)
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