No, they are trying to force the private sector to collect the evidence in advance, and hold on to it for them. Totally different situation, if you believe the cops.
The film came out in 2008, before Obama took office, so I don't really understand your point. Perhaps you should have instead pointed out the sort of things that the Clinton administration was doing (like turning popular TV shows into propaganda vehicles).
Why does law enforcement need to know I go to slashdot.com daily or watch porn every other day? Why don't they just store data for child pornography sites?
The argument is that by the time they locate child pornography sites and gain access to the server logs, it is too late to arrest past visitors because their IP addresses have changed and the subscriber data is not stored long enough. Now, anyone who is capable of thinking for themselves recognizes that:
The worst offenders are frequent visitors, and so there would be traces of recent activity
The really dangerous people who produce child pornography for years on end put serious effort into hiding their IP addresses; that is why they are not caught for years on end
Most people do not think for themselves, and will panic as soon as they hear "child pornography," and law enforcement agencies know that. Worse still, most people are terrified of the idea of law enforcement not having enough power to protect their children from those dangerous child predators who are hiding behind every bush and around every corner, and so all law enforcement agencies have to do is claim that they cannot possibly arrest dangerous people without having longer ISP logs. People also don't bother to look at the public record on these cases, and so they have no idea how pedophile rings are tracked down or arrested.
TLDR: lack of understanding of technology, lack of desire to understand anything, and susceptibility to fearmongering.
The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables.
It is more akin to speaking and writing everything in your own private language, and forcing the police to determine how to translate that language.
No, in the case of hard drive encryption, they need to get to the defendant before the computer is turned off / the drive is unmounted. Which they know how to do, and which they have done in the past. Now they are asking for things to be made easier for them, probably because they neglected to carry out the arrest in a way that ensured the laptop was on and available for them to extract evidence from.
If I have a locked file cabinet filled with evidence the police can, with a proper warrant, sieze said cabinet, open it up and search it. At it's core, an encrypted hard drive is not much different from the aforementioned cabinet.
Actually, it is more akin to writing everything in a secret code that only you understand. One that is well designed and difficult to execute a ciphertext-only attack on. Should the government be able to demand that a defendant translate that secret code for them?
On the other hand, decrypting data amounts to interpreting evidence for the prosecutor. Suppose the defendant had been using secret code words, known only to her and her co-conspirators; should the prosecutor have the right to compel her to explain those code-words? What makes AES any different, other than the fact that it is a well-designed and difficult to crack cipher?
The argument that the police will be unable to gather evidence if criminals use encryption is just as weak, considering the techniques they have developed for defeating such measures:
That is not really applicable to hard drives, since you need to enter your passphrase to decrypt the drive as part of the normal operation of the computer. On the other hand, a related question is this: what if you simply forgot your passphrase? Given the amount of time people often sit in jail awaiting trial (on the order of years in some cases), it is entirely conceivable that someone could simply forget their passphrase, especially if it were very long and complex.
...because any of that happened in the 1950s? We are coming out of one of a period of some of the lowest taxes on the wealthy and on corporations since WW2.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. How many times are people going to make this mistake before they finally learn that Facebook is the wrong place to plan these sorts of things?
Wars of conquest? Let's see...fighting for independence from Britain...fighting against neighbors who keep invading their country...yup, sounds like "conquest" to me.
It is "either or" because there are few alternatives that can be scaled well. Wind power is great, but it needs to be augmented by other systems -- wind only is not really a possibility, and it will not even be a remote possibility when we run out of oil (i.e. when we suddenly find ourselves forced to create transportation infrastructures built on other sources of energy). Hydroelectric would be fine if there were rivers everywhere, but there are not. Solar, like wind, needs to be augmented with another source of electricity (the whole "night" thing).
At the end of the day, nuclear power, petroleum, natural gas, and coal have significant advantages over other technologies. It doesn't matter what the weather is like, it doesn't matter whether you are in a desert or a rainforest, you can get your energy. Of those four, nuclear power is the one that causes the least environmental harm, and which has caused the least amount of harm over the past few decades. Which would you prefer to see your green energy sources augmented with?
If we only count the people killed by nuclear accidents, we are talking in terms of what, dozens? Maybe hundreds? The number of people killed in coal mining accidents is orders of magnitude greater than the number of people killed by nuclear accidents. Sure, uranium mining is nasty...about as nasty as coal mining, and we need a lot more coal mines per joule than uranium. If you want to speak in terms of fallout (raising the number of deaths to tens of thousands) then you should speak in terms of deaths from coal emissions too (millions).
No energy source is 100% safe. Yet there have been only a handful of nuclear disasters, which killed only a handful of people. In terms of safety, nuclear power has a pretty good record, bested only by wind and hydroelectric power (possibly natural gas if we don't include the harm done by gas mining).
Your parliament is not phasing nuclear power out in favor of wind or hydroelectric energy, they are phasing out nuclear power in favor of coal. Coal is one of the deadliest energy sources around. It doesn't take a disaster to make coal power deadly -- it spews hazardous gases and heavy metals as part of its normal operation.
I'd take nuclear power over coal any day of the week.
Natural gas is only somewhat better than coal, in that the emissions from a natural gas plant are a bit cleaner (we only have to worry about carbon dioxide). Natural gas mining is a dangerous business that damages the environment and can ruin towns. Uranium mining is not the most environmentally friendly industry around, but the amount of uranium that needs to be mined is much smaller than the amount of natural gas, per joule.
Nevermind that in the entire history of nuclear power, only a handful of people have been killed by nuclear incidents, compared with hundreds of thousands of people killed by coal over the same period of time. Let's also take the time to remember that the environment impact of coal is immediate and very real: toxic gases and heavy metals spewed by coal plants as part of their normal operation, slag piles, abandoned mines/acid mine drainage, etc. Yes, uranium mining has an environmental impact, but less uranium needs to be mined per joule of energy than coal.
There are CANDU reactors, which are resilient to meltdown conditions (the fuel is positioned for optimal reactivity, and changes in that positioning e.g. the beginning of a meltdown reduce the reaction rate) and which can also accept Thorium as fuel (which is more abundant than Uranium and which is less useful for nuclear weapons). Newer designs, however, are even better; for example, pebble beds (which are not yet deployed afaik) do not require an active cooling system to prevent a meltdown, and so even a catastrophic event will not become a disaster.
So, instead of nuclear energy -- which has killed only a handful of people over the past few decades -- they would rather have coal, which has killed at least hundreds of thousands of people in that same period of time. Never mind the long lasting environmental hazards created by coal mining and the toxins that coal fired power plants spew as part of their normal operation -- nuclear is obviously a much greater concern.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are trying to force the private sector to collect the evidence in advance, and hold on to it for them. Totally different situation, if you believe the cops.
The film came out in 2008, before Obama took office, so I don't really understand your point. Perhaps you should have instead pointed out the sort of things that the Clinton administration was doing (like turning popular TV shows into propaganda vehicles).
Why does law enforcement need to know I go to slashdot.com daily or watch porn every other day? Why don't they just store data for child pornography sites?
The argument is that by the time they locate child pornography sites and gain access to the server logs, it is too late to arrest past visitors because their IP addresses have changed and the subscriber data is not stored long enough. Now, anyone who is capable of thinking for themselves recognizes that:
Most people do not think for themselves, and will panic as soon as they hear "child pornography," and law enforcement agencies know that. Worse still, most people are terrified of the idea of law enforcement not having enough power to protect their children from those dangerous child predators who are hiding behind every bush and around every corner, and so all law enforcement agencies have to do is claim that they cannot possibly arrest dangerous people without having longer ISP logs. People also don't bother to look at the public record on these cases, and so they have no idea how pedophile rings are tracked down or arrested.
TLDR: lack of understanding of technology, lack of desire to understand anything, and susceptibility to fearmongering.
wimmin
Way to go.
The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables.
It is more akin to speaking and writing everything in your own private language, and forcing the police to determine how to translate that language.
No, in the case of hard drive encryption, they need to get to the defendant before the computer is turned off / the drive is unmounted. Which they know how to do, and which they have done in the past. Now they are asking for things to be made easier for them, probably because they neglected to carry out the arrest in a way that ensured the laptop was on and available for them to extract evidence from.
I'm not sure why, with a proper warrant, this shouldn't happen.
For the same reason that you cannot get a warrant for someone to tell you the location of a dead body.
If I have a locked file cabinet filled with evidence the police can, with a proper warrant, sieze said cabinet, open it up and search it. At it's core, an encrypted hard drive is not much different from the aforementioned cabinet.
Actually, it is more akin to writing everything in a secret code that only you understand. One that is well designed and difficult to execute a ciphertext-only attack on. Should the government be able to demand that a defendant translate that secret code for them?
On the other hand, decrypting data amounts to interpreting evidence for the prosecutor. Suppose the defendant had been using secret code words, known only to her and her co-conspirators; should the prosecutor have the right to compel her to explain those code-words? What makes AES any different, other than the fact that it is a well-designed and difficult to crack cipher?
The argument that the police will be unable to gather evidence if criminals use encryption is just as weak, considering the techniques they have developed for defeating such measures:
http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/crypto-spy.pdf
That is not really applicable to hard drives, since you need to enter your passphrase to decrypt the drive as part of the normal operation of the computer. On the other hand, a related question is this: what if you simply forgot your passphrase? Given the amount of time people often sit in jail awaiting trial (on the order of years in some cases), it is entirely conceivable that someone could simply forget their passphrase, especially if it were very long and complex.
Arrange for fire service to spray people with water from the trucks
"We weren't trying to disperse the crowd with water cannons! We were just trying to help them cool off!"
...because any of that happened in the 1950s? We are coming out of one of a period of some of the lowest taxes on the wealthy and on corporations since WW2.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. How many times are people going to make this mistake before they finally learn that Facebook is the wrong place to plan these sorts of things?
Wars of conquest? Let's see...fighting for independence from Britain...fighting against neighbors who keep invading their country...yup, sounds like "conquest" to me.
Israel is a military/religious dictatorship with overly racist overtones; exactly the opposite of what the U.S. stands for.
How is that the opposite of making the rich richer (which is what the US really stands for)?
A better question is, where was the secret service when Sony was caught installing rootkits en masse?
It is "either or" because there are few alternatives that can be scaled well. Wind power is great, but it needs to be augmented by other systems -- wind only is not really a possibility, and it will not even be a remote possibility when we run out of oil (i.e. when we suddenly find ourselves forced to create transportation infrastructures built on other sources of energy). Hydroelectric would be fine if there were rivers everywhere, but there are not. Solar, like wind, needs to be augmented with another source of electricity (the whole "night" thing).
At the end of the day, nuclear power, petroleum, natural gas, and coal have significant advantages over other technologies. It doesn't matter what the weather is like, it doesn't matter whether you are in a desert or a rainforest, you can get your energy. Of those four, nuclear power is the one that causes the least environmental harm, and which has caused the least amount of harm over the past few decades. Which would you prefer to see your green energy sources augmented with?
I wonder if they will predict who is going to mock them, and the harass that person in advance.
If we only count the people killed by nuclear accidents, we are talking in terms of what, dozens? Maybe hundreds? The number of people killed in coal mining accidents is orders of magnitude greater than the number of people killed by nuclear accidents. Sure, uranium mining is nasty...about as nasty as coal mining, and we need a lot more coal mines per joule than uranium. If you want to speak in terms of fallout (raising the number of deaths to tens of thousands) then you should speak in terms of deaths from coal emissions too (millions).
No energy source is 100% safe. Yet there have been only a handful of nuclear disasters, which killed only a handful of people. In terms of safety, nuclear power has a pretty good record, bested only by wind and hydroelectric power (possibly natural gas if we don't include the harm done by gas mining).
Your parliament is not phasing nuclear power out in favor of wind or hydroelectric energy, they are phasing out nuclear power in favor of coal. Coal is one of the deadliest energy sources around. It doesn't take a disaster to make coal power deadly -- it spews hazardous gases and heavy metals as part of its normal operation.
I'd take nuclear power over coal any day of the week.
Natural gas is only somewhat better than coal, in that the emissions from a natural gas plant are a bit cleaner (we only have to worry about carbon dioxide). Natural gas mining is a dangerous business that damages the environment and can ruin towns. Uranium mining is not the most environmentally friendly industry around, but the amount of uranium that needs to be mined is much smaller than the amount of natural gas, per joule.
Nevermind that in the entire history of nuclear power, only a handful of people have been killed by nuclear incidents, compared with hundreds of thousands of people killed by coal over the same period of time. Let's also take the time to remember that the environment impact of coal is immediate and very real: toxic gases and heavy metals spewed by coal plants as part of their normal operation, slag piles, abandoned mines/acid mine drainage, etc. Yes, uranium mining has an environmental impact, but less uranium needs to be mined per joule of energy than coal.
There are CANDU reactors, which are resilient to meltdown conditions (the fuel is positioned for optimal reactivity, and changes in that positioning e.g. the beginning of a meltdown reduce the reaction rate) and which can also accept Thorium as fuel (which is more abundant than Uranium and which is less useful for nuclear weapons). Newer designs, however, are even better; for example, pebble beds (which are not yet deployed afaik) do not require an active cooling system to prevent a meltdown, and so even a catastrophic event will not become a disaster.
building new coal and gas power plants
So, instead of nuclear energy -- which has killed only a handful of people over the past few decades -- they would rather have coal, which has killed at least hundreds of thousands of people in that same period of time. Never mind the long lasting environmental hazards created by coal mining and the toxins that coal fired power plants spew as part of their normal operation -- nuclear is obviously a much greater concern.