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FBI Director: Without Compromise on Encryption, Legislation May Be the 'Remedy' (cyberscoop.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that unless the U.S. government and private industry are able to come to a compromise on the issue of default encryption on consumer devices, legislation may be how the debate is ultimately decided. "I think there should be [room for compromise]," Wray said Wednesday night at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado. "I don't want to characterize private conversations we're having with people in the industry. We're not there yet for sure. And if we can't get there, there may be other remedies, like legislation, that would have to come to bear." Wray described the issue of "Going Dark" because of encryption as a "significant" and "growing" problem for federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He claims strong encryption on mobile phones keeps law enforcement from gaining access to key evidence as it relates to active criminal investigations. "People are less safe as a result of it," he said.
More like the government institutions are less safe from the people.
This guy sounds like one of those out of touch eurotrash politicians. STFU and be better at your job asshat.
Either private companies give up our privacy by allowing the government access to our communications...... or laws will be passed FORCING them to give up our privacy.
And we wonder why the United States Government won't pass a law protecting our personal data.
Actually it can. The solution: give us the key or go to jail. Or even better, give us the key or we'll hit you with this $5 wrench. https://xkcd.com/538/
Math doesn't have it. If there's a shared key to all our communications, it will sooner or later leak and it will render all encrypted data wide open. Also, I presume that for some reasons Christopher Wray doesn't keep a copy of the keys to his house at some government agency, no?
Governments and often unrelated companies are less privy to our private lives as a result of it. FTFY.
before smartphones came along? Why do they not get that the people don't want them to be able to utilize new technology to make solving crimes any easier than before?
Everyone is guilty of something. The only way the system works is if the balance between cost of prosecution and magnitude of the crime worth prosecuting remains stable (or given that we already incarcerate far more than most, shifts a bit in favor of crime). If prosecution becomes cheaper and easier, we can quickly become a police state without changing any laws.
When encryption has backdoors, then NO ONE will have encryption at all
You CANNOT have 'backdoors' in an encyption algorithm and still have effective encryption, goddamnit!
Clearly the FBI and Congress doesn't give a rat's ass whether or not anyone has secure systems or not, so long as they can stick their little brown noses into everyones business. Who cares if every computer in the country is easily hacked by even script kiddies, everyones identity is stolen, and everyones bank accounts drained and credit cards charged up? The Feds will have 'unbreakable' encryption, as will all elected officials and of course The Rich, they'll all be exempt from it, while the rest of us are wide open to whoever wants to victimize us.
Them, them, FUCK THEM.
"People are less safe as a result of it." People are less safe by leaving their room every day. Some things are just expected to be "less safe" but we do them because we want to be more than prisoners.
They keep talking about "compromise" as if Tim Cook and Larry Page have everyone's encryption keys in a file on their laptops that they refuse to hand over for convicted mobsters. That sort of mindset just does not reflect the nature of the situation.
Here is what it ultimately boils down to:
1. The user - and only the user - has the encryption key.
2. Companies are compelled to sell devices that cannot be secured at all, because a 'master key' lives somewhere.
That's it. Those are the two options. There is no way for the phone to verify if there is a warrant, or if the person inputting the master key is truly a law enforcement agent or not, or any other way to ensure the individual using the master key is justified in doing so, or any means of discriminating between a hack and a court order.
If Wray would like to come up with a third option that doesn't ultimately fall into the category of one of the other two, he's welcome to try. Smarter people have failed.
Problem with "give us the key or go to jail" is...what if you don't have the key?
What's to stop someone sending me some encrypted communication with a public key that I don't have access to?
Anytime any political type of any stripe says they just want compromise, what they mean is they want capitulation.
and he'll get his legislation.
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There's nothing to stop you doing just that A/C, just like there will be nothing stopping the FBI charging you with using unlawful encryption if you do.
Your choice.
Spies and soldiers (especially on the spy side) need as good or better security than I need to talk to my bank. The CIA, military and (Canadian) CSE know it's a trade-off. The FBI and RCMP pitch it as a trivial question with an obvious answer.
For every hard problem there is always one clear, obvious and simple answer.. and it's wrong .
davecb@spamcop.net
Good comments:
"... there is still open source, free and openly available encryption."
"... there are phones moving across political boundaries."
Many people in government and in management of private companies have NO knowledge of technical issues. That doesn't prevent them from having what they consider to be a strong and sensible opinion. They don't recognize they are ignorant.
ALSO: Back doors are not an answer. They will ALWAYS eventually be compromised.
I'll get modded to hell for this, but I kind of agree with him?
Most people I know have no qualms about the way old-school wire-taps worked.
Law enforcement got a warrant from a judge, and only if the judge thought that there's enough reason to suspect the target is on to something, only THEN could they hook into a user's phone lines or open their mail. (or at least that's how it was supposed to work).
This, IMHO, seems like a good balance between the right to privacy and law enforcement needs, and has enough judicial oversight to not be easily abused.
I have no idea how one could implement a similar scheme nowadays. Backdoors are dangerous, and the oversight mechanisms have been broken for quite a while (just say "it's for national security!"). But having some means for the 'good' guys, with sufficient oversight, to be able to use surveillance to catch the baddies doesn't seem too bad to me?
Correction - they want the ability to illegally invade our privacy *back* - they've been invading it at will for many decades, and for the last couple decades have been doing it at a scale and invasiveness to dwarf anything ever before seen in all but the most dystopian fantasies. The rise of encryption has been a direct response to that unbridled power grab, and now they're trying to cast off those unwelcome limits on their unsupervised power. I mean hell, when they flat out lie to Congress about their activities, repeatedly, you've got to realize that they are no longer in any way a legitimate government agency.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Back before the days of cell phones, judges could give prosecutors the ability to (1) break into someone's house, (2) install a device like these and then collect data.
You could also take someone's smart phone, root it, and install a surveillance software (with the same due process above). Even with encryption, if I have access to your phone (and it's unlocked -- figuring out a 6 key pass-code by spying isn't exactly James Bond's hardest mission) I would have access to your private key to decrypt said messages.
What law enforcement wants here are not the old rights they've always had -- but new ones. As the late Antonin Scalia wrote for the unanimous court regarding the unconstitutionality of planting a GPS device without a warrant:
“What we apply is an 18th century guarantee against unreasonable searches, which we believe must provide at a minimum the degree of protection it afforded when it was adopted,”
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.