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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If the FBI gets their way on this weak breakable encryption, it will have economic consequences for the US.
The other 96% of the world's population will know that they can't trust American products. They might make their own phones, systems, devices, etc even more secure against American TLAs. Thus accomplishing the opposite of what the TLAs want.
Aren't the majority of smartphones already made outside the US? Maybe all they need to do is build their own secure OS with secure encryption that the US won't like. Will the US stop people coming in with foreign made phones that are too secure?
What about economic consequences of American executives traveling abroad using insecure US made equipment and having valuable trade secrets stolen?
But think of the children!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
While correct, you're missing the point. Ciphers have been around for a very, very long time. They weren't used as extensively in the past as they are today. But they've been around throughout history. A quick wikipedia search references Egyptian hieroglyphs for example. The technology progressed over time and the cost to break the encrypted text increased over time to what we have today.
Nonetheless, encrypted communications were available when the constitution was written and they were in use. Yet the constitution makes no mention of preventing the citizens from using encrypted communications or in forcing the users to decrypt the documents on demand.
The federal government gave itself the rights mentioned, but did not choose to worry about the technology of the day providing documents that they could see, but couldn't decrypt without a lot of work or the help of one of the parties on either end of the transmission. They had just fought a revolution against a government that employed big brother tactics (like garrisoning soldiers in people's homes). They didn't want the government doing any of that type of crap anymore.
The FBI and others might really wish today that the writers had considered encryption, but they didn't choose to. The writer's generation relied on spies and good old footwork to figure things out. They didn't rely solely on documents. Good for them.
Here is a nice little excerpt from Bruce Schneier's book Applied Cryptography that puts things in perspective on how to think about it. As an added bonus there is the phrase "orgy of computation" included:
One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less than kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the Boltzman constant. (Stick with me; the physics lesson is almost over.)
Given that k = 1.38×10-16 erg/Kelvin, and that the ambient temperature of the universe is 3.2 Kelvin, an ideal computer running at 3.2 K would consume 4.4×10^-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit. To run a computer any colder than the cosmic background radiation would require extra energy to run a heat pump.
Now, the annual energy output of our sun is about 1.21×10^41 ergs. This is enough to power about 2.7×10^56 single bit changes on our ideal computer; enough state changes to put a 187-bit counter through all its values. If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter.
But that's just one star, and a measly one at that. A typical supernova releases something like 10^51 ergs. (About a hundred times as much energy would be released in the form of neutrinos, but let them go for now.) If all of this energy could be channeled into a single orgy of computation, a 219-bit counter could be cycled through all of its states.
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
Time to offend someone