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Senator Asks FBI Director To Justify His 'Ill-Informed' Policy Proposal For Encryption (gizmodo.com)
In a speech earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the inability of law enforcement authorities to access data from electronic devices due to powerful encryption is an "urgent public safety issue." He proposed that Silicon Valley companies should add a backdoor to their encryption so that they could both "provide data security and permit lawful access with a court order." One person is not amused by Wray's proposal. Senator Ron Wyden criticized Wray on Thursday for not consulting him before going public with the proposal for encryption. Wyden said today, via Gizmodo: Your stated position parrots the same debunked arguments espoused by your predecessors, all of whom ignored the widespread and vocal consensus of cryptographers. For years, these experts have repeatedly stated that what you are asking for is not, in fact, possible. Building secure software is extremely difficult, and vulnerabilities are often introduced inadvertently in the design process. Eliminating these vulnerabilities is a mammoth task, and experts are unified in their opinion that introducing deliberate vulnerabilities would likely create catastrophic unintended consequences that could debilitate software functionality and security entirely.
[...] I would like to learn more about how you arrived at and justify this ill-informed policy proposal. Please provide me with a list of the cryptographers with whom you've personally discussed this topic since our July 2017 meeting and specifically identify those experts who advised you that companies can feasibly design government access features into their products without weakening cybersecurity. Please provide this information by February 23, 2018.
[...] I would like to learn more about how you arrived at and justify this ill-informed policy proposal. Please provide me with a list of the cryptographers with whom you've personally discussed this topic since our July 2017 meeting and specifically identify those experts who advised you that companies can feasibly design government access features into their products without weakening cybersecurity. Please provide this information by February 23, 2018.
Ahh, but some people, of which I presume rogoshen1 is, realize that people from the other side of the aisle aren't always the enemy, but can in fact do things that you like. It's not "Us" vs "Them" it's all "Us" just that we may not agree 100% with some of the othe othe rparts of "us"
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Wyden was always reliable on this sort of issue. If you search his name, you'll see a lot of past stories not unlike this one on various encryption or privacy issues.
We could use more people in Congress like him.
>Why do you assert that criminals *will* have the backdoor key?
Because the backdoor key will be tremendously valuable, someone with legit access will be corrupted into handing it, or access to it, over. Similarly, a software program that provides access to the backdoor will be copied and its accountability protections stripped because it's tremendously valuable to the NSA. And so forth.
The genie ain't staying in the bottle for two fucking days.