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.

Comments

Legislation can't stop open source

[xaosflux]

When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will

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Re:Legislation can't stop open source

[novakyu]

That's why steganography exists. Don't make it obvious you have something to protect, unless you have a literal stronghold to actually protect it with.

P.S. BTW, I assume you meant to say "with a public key associated with a private key that I don't have access to?", because I am generous. The way you prevent that from happening is you revoke your public key once you don't have access to your private key. (And the way you do that is by generating revocation certificate and keep it somewhere safe before you lost access to your private key.)

Re:Legislation can't stop open source

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Steganography shoudln't change the image size unless the program is really dumb or it increases the entropy of the image making compression less effective. Most of the time it operates by changing the low order bits in an image file. The hidden data basically hides in the noise in the image and to help obfuscate its existence it usually encrypted. By packing too much data into an image you may end up introducing substantally more noise, so if one really wanted to hide a lot of data in an image file I would crank up the ISO to at least 6400 and go even higher to 12,800, 25,600 or more depending on the camera as even the best digitals now have a lot of noise at those ISOs. Also 16 bpc tiffs have a lot of low order bits to play with.

If anyone wants to play around with steganography the program openpuff is a good place to start. Sorry I don't have a link as it is blocked at work.

Anti-American. Anti-Democratic.

[gerald.edward.butler]

Please, I don't give a rat's ass about what evidence you can or can't gather from devices. It isn't pertinent to the discussion. People should be able to have private conversations that you don't get access to under ANY circumstances for whatever damn reason they please. Go F yourself. You anti-american, anti-democratic, nazi, communist, dick-weed. YOU are the enemy of the people. The "criminals" and "terrorists" are the least of our problems. You are and your ilk are to be feared and removed from office. You are the danger. You are not the solution. You are the problem.

Re:Nope

[Pinky's Brain]

That's not necessarily what he is asking. What the FBI asked Apple originally to do is provide them the service of unlocking the phone, the FBI didn't even demand the technology to allow them to do it themselves. They just wanted Apple to do it on, with a court order.

Apple having a key to unlock your phone doesn't fundamentally cause any more of a security hole than them having keys to sign updates and to authenticate their update servers, because pretty much everyone accepts updates. If their existing keys are compromised and someone pushes a rootkit update you'll have no security either, you obviously trust Apple to safeguard those keys. Why wouldn't you trust them with one more?

Re:"People are less"

[BlueStrat]

"People are less safe as a result of it," he said.

It's true. People are less safe in a free and open society.

~Safety~

~Liberty~.

Choose one.

They promise free schooling, free healthcare, free food, free housing, and work. You can get that anywhere. We call it a "prison".

What only a free and open society can provide is the opportunity to pursue whatever dream you have to the best of your ability, and leave success or failure up to you and the choices you make.

Not to mention (referring to Weay's comments) the simple fact that if governments can crack/access it, so can criminals. After all, "government" and "criminal" are synonymous in all practical sense.

Strat