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How not to report on the encryption ‘debate’
- marshray 11y agoOK, so we have another well written article explaining how attempts to demonize encryption and put it back in the bottle are misguided, and the spokespeople for the authoritarians and intelligence community are being disingenuous on cable TV. But most of us already knew this. So what I'm asking is: * Are these well reasoned words affecting/effecting policy? * How will we know?
- wampus 11y agoWe'll know when having a secret is a criminal offense.
- apatters 11y agoMost of us who read Hacker News already know this, but it is important to keep publishing and reinforcing the message for everyone else!
- jlgaddis 11y agoBut is anyone hearing the message other than us?
- tedunangst 11y agoHave you tried using ALL CAPS?
- yanazendo 11y agoHello, I'm #ISIS. I use #POWSTEG encryption. Mike Spectre is a Ph.D. student at MIT. He is one of the co-authors of Keys Under Doormats, which represents the crypto guild's best answer they could come up with. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSAIL-TR-2015-026.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97690/MIT-CSA... https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/the_risks_of_ma.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/the_risks_of_... Mike Spectre only wanted to have small-chat with me today. He was unwilling to review one of my #POWSTEG hacks. #PWNed https://twitter.com/gmike/status/673197874461601792 https://twitter.com/gmike/status/673197874461601792
- yanazendo 11y agoThis is the #HACK I asked Spectre to review https://medium.com/@yanazendo/twttr-pwned-27a6af538247#.j0904pr4r https://medium.com/@yanazendo/twttr-pwned-27a6af538247#.j090...
- hellodolly 11y agoCopying the 2002 strategies of Anonymous doesn't make you a hacker; it makes you a loser. Stop using hashtags; this isn't Twitter. It's clear you love being addressed as a terrorist organization, but you're just some script kiddie in a basement who's about to have his internet unplugged.
- yanazendo 11y agoLulz I'm an expert in cyber-kinetic nuclear warfare https://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/cybersec/publications/publication-files/full_papers/2010_06_25_Gagnon_ISARCS_FP.pdf https://www.ll.mit.edu/mission/cybersec/publications/publica...
- yeukhon 11y agoYou do know HN is hosted on the U.S. soil, so HN can totally report you to FBI for a criminal investigation, right?
- jacquesm 11y agoWhere a website is hosted has very little to do with what you can and can not report to the FBI and whether or not they decide to turn something into a criminal investigation would require that there is a crime first. Posting dumb comments in a forum is not a crime (and it probably should not be or youtube.com will be out of an audience).
- hellodolly 11y agoFor anybody curious, the guy perpetrating this "hack" is Robert Brooks Authement (https://www.facebook.com/broox.authement.8 https://www.facebook.com/broox.authement.8), a heroin user and domestic abuser, who lives in Fort Collins, CO, runs a Facebook group (https://m.facebook.com/groups/cybrpunk https://m.facebook.com/groups/cybrpunk) and who has an arrest record, as well as an estranged wife/daughter. He's stolen money from Gagnon's various accounts as "seed money" for some bizarre purpose, and is now spamming Gagnon's Facebook, Twitter, and Medium accounts. Feel free to report all of those. Authement's not related to ISIS in the least, other than his obsession with hashtag-ing them. No doubt the twit will be shut out of these accounts within a day or so. Kindly report to whatever services you like.
- cgm616 11y ago"We kill people based on metadata." - former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” - NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker
- meowface 11y agoI think this article is great, but something did stand out for me. I'm a huge supporter of universal end-to-end encryption, but Feinstein's point is making me feel some cognitive dissonance: >"I think with a court order, with good justification, all of that can be prevented." There are cases where I would want law enforcement to be able to read encrypted communications in an emergency situation, with a valid court order. If someone is being held hostage, for example. Of course I don't want intelligence agencies having this same access; just very specific requests during exigent circumstances, with judge approval. A real judge in a real court, not a secret FISA court. But to do that you need some kind of key escrow already set up with the government, and if you have that, there's nothing stopping law enforcement and intelligent agencies from spying on what they want when they want. Right now this isn't a huge problem since a lot of people still communicate in plaintext, or things that are encrypted but logged/intercepted by a central location (Skype). But eventually more and more things will move to end-to-end encryption. What is the right way to handle this?
- ohthehugemanate 11y agoI wish that with a court order, we could read the thoughts of a suspect, too... But that's not possible, either. Remember that a police force doesn't need infinite, perfect access to all of a target's communications to catch them. Think about the case we're describing: we have enough information to convince a judge that this person is a suspect. In order to get evidence to convict, you can: * hack into their devices to retrieve stored data or install malicious software like keyloggers * bug their place of living and work for video, audio, and WiFi capture * interview/interrogate them, and everyone they associate with * search their place of living and work * place tracking devices * watch their every move with drone or human surveillance * have a human or drone tail them * record all the metadata from their Internet communication * record the contents of any unencrypted communication We actually have all the access we need, particularly since we're allowed to hack into the target's devices. The only thing we CAN'T do, is include the target in bulk communication capture schemes. We actually have to pick targets and spend resources on them. To be honest, I might be OK with that practical limit even WITHOUT a warrant requirement. If a police force believes that a suspect is worth spending their limited resources on, they must be worth something. If adding someone to a watch list is free, they'll do it to everybody.
- aczerepinski 11y agoIf the government forces the big American tech companies to adopt weaker encryption technologies, what's to stop terrorists from rolling their own communication app? Or new tech companies from deploying apps from countries where strong encryption is still legal? Would developers need to become familiar with government approved algorithms? Separate from the debate on whether this is a good idea, I'd love to see a proposal for how a global encryption ban could actually be implemented.
- csandreasen 11y agoForcing the terrorists/criminals to roll their own encryption would be a huge win for both law enforcement/foreign intelligence agencies and the general public. When non-cryptographers write their encryption software the likelihood that it's insecure goes up, and if they're off using Mujahideen Secrets v5.0 instead of WhatsApp their communications would stick out like a sore thumb instead of blending in with regular users. When the terrorists/etc. don't blend in, the FBI/NSA/etc. don't have to sift through mainstream communications channels to figure out which people are bad guys and which are just regular people.