16 ms·

More encryption means less privacy

178 points by zeveb 10y ago

zyxley 10y ago
The article seems to make the fundamental error of assuming that there is any middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all". If crypto can be broken, it will be broken, whether that's by state actors or by some kid in Mongolia who wants to make a quick buck by ransoming all your files.
- omginternets 10y ago
  I read this a bit differently, i.e.: "unbreakable crypto is necessary but not sufficient" && "unbreakable crypto alone has a paradoxical effect of decreasing privacy through political means."
- mike_hearn 10y ago
  Because it's not a fundamental error or indeed an error at all. What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact. It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default: • Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider. • Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most. And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed. That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think). PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers. The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.
  - nightcracker 10y ago
    If there is a backdoor, that backdoor can be used by anyone that has the key. I do not trust a government to responsibly handle such a key, as it leaking once results in total failure of security for everyone. A backdoored crypto system is a broken crypto system.
    - coldcode 10y ago
      A backdoored crypto system is a no crypto system.
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      You can always mitigate the "failure for everyone" scenario. Plethora of government keys, for example, or rotating government keys, or rapidly expiring government keys... Anyway, they've managed to keep stacks and stacks of information secret for decades and decades. It seems like it could be managed. No one has stolen the cert for *.whitehouse.gov. Sidenote, why do people call a second key a backdoor? To me, backdoor suggests exploit, not used-as-designed.
      - Aelinsaar 10y ago
        Because it involves trusting that no one made copies of the key, turning a locked door into a backdoor? Your mitigation ideas are sound though, and could also be used as a kind of rolling canary trap.
    - mike_hearn 10y ago
      There are lots of examples of governments maintaining the integrity of keys over the long term. The e-Passport system is an example of that. Another would be that the NSA had the ultimate insider hack - literally a sysadmin who dumped their entire internal wikis and document stores - and yet it appears that no key material was compromised. You can repeat "a backdoored system is no system" mantra to yourself if you like, but there are a LOT of threats that aren't governments and those are the ones people tend to care about the most.
- mirhagk 10y ago
  Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more. This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.
- hx87 10y ago
  That's like saying there is no middle ground between product X being free and being infinitely expensive. Even if product X has a price I can afford, I have to consider the trade-offs between buying it and other uses for my money. If it's free, though, there are no trade-offs. If somebody can break my crypto, fine, but I want them to expend valuable resources on it so they won't do it for shits and giggles.
codemac 10y ago
> Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement. While political engagement is an alternative to "slapping unbreakable crypto" onto things, this article establishes no precedent for political engagement actually helping! I see the technical as political, direct action as engagement. An article like this that's attempting to be a call to action, needs to provide some positive reinforcement. I find myself failing to come up with big wins, the examples I can think of are almost exclusively heartbreakingly tragic (snowden, manning, swartz, Occupy, etc). When I think of political engagement in the US, I think of pretty violent end cases for everyone involved.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  SOPA's defeat was a big win. There is almost no political engagement from the technology sector, as compared to others (like pharmaceuticals, finance, telecoms, entertainment). If there had, the DMCA might not be so onerous, the CFAA would be gone, and SOPA would never have gotten as far as it did.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    SOPA is probably the biggest recent achievement from activism (unless you want to count Wheeler and the Title II decision). But tellingly, activism has failed to solidify a victory there. It was COICA, then SOPA, then PIPA, then ACTA, and now TPP, all pushing a bunch of the same core changes. Whenever there's resistance, the thing goes into hiding and comes back wearing new clothes. Lately, it's been handled in settings where debate happens behind closed doors and domestic activism has little power. And yes, that might look different if major corporate players were more involved. But their stances are varied and inconsistent at best, and to the extent that this is for the benefit of private citizens the political approach appears to be an endless defensive fight.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I wonder. I've seen people on HN saying that Google is one of the biggest lobbyist, so apparently tech sector is very much present in Washington. So maybe it's not that there is no engagement, but that those who engage have different goals in mind than your average HNer?
theandrewbailey 10y ago
Kinda clickbait-y, and ignores the fact that encrypted communications were able to be used (with some effort) before Snowden, but his last point is solid: > The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement.
- bhhaskin 10y ago
  No its not. The reality is the biggest threat to privacy is due to political engagement. Stronger encryption that no one can break is really the only viable option.
  - noenpnqnoen 10y ago
    - Written by Poul-Henning Kamp - In a section called The Bike Shed This link is related: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#idp64924272 https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.h...
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    Political engagement is a very good tool to keep political engagement in check. Political engagement can make strong crypto illegal to use, or mandate a state MITM[0]; neither are viable or effective at anything, but those inconveniences aren't going to stop their implementation. [0] Almost happened in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
  - mirhagk 10y ago
    That won't solve the problem > Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse > > The IT and networking communities overlooked a wise saying from soldiers and police officers: "Make sure the other side has an easier way out than destroying you." Who is developing this stronger encryption? The development of encryption has a huge incentive to build backdoors for payouts by government or corporate or worse groups. Then you have the people implementing the encryption that could also introduce backdoors (who knows if heartbleed was intentional or not). Then you have lots of other ways to backdoor the system, from default software installs, viruses, or even compiler or CPU backdooring. There is no such thing as a system that has perfect security. Even if you build everything yourself and are perfect at doing so, the tools you use could easily have backdoors. By increasing usage of encryption for more and more mundane things all we're doing is increasing the incentive to break that encryption.
ffwd 10y ago
Nobody really knows the correct answer and I think that's the reason communication is failing between the government and the tech sector. I think we have to realize that some transparency into private lives is needed to have a proper society, and the anarcho-capitalists want full privacy from the get go and then increasing transparency as needed for society, while government is kind of hovering on the "we need transparency everywhere for any arbitrary reason because we don't know when we'll need it", and this is a difficult position to hold. I think unfortunately if we are to have a government, we need to do the latter, because the government can't intrude on privacy NOR punish people without evidence or at least minimum cause, while in a completely private anarcho-capitalist society the individuals who don't comply can be punished indirectly with exclusion and isolation from society. Personally this seems like a pretty crappy way to do things but that's a post for another time.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Absolutely disagree. A) Even when the government has the data to stop someone, they don't: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/terrorists-were-already-known-to-authorities/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/terrorists-were-already-... B) Outlawing crypto just doesn't work. You can't outlaw math. You can try all day long, but that only hurts the masses At some point, you have to realize that breaking encryption has nothing to do with safety, but is all about power.
  - ffwd 10y ago
    a) I don't want to comment on that intercept piece because there is clear bias there and I don't have all the facts. b) I think actually the FBI is mainly talking about the defaults in software, like how Apple enabled strong encryption for any user. Defaults matter when you consider the 95% of people who would not otherwise use encryption, including all kinds of criminals. I think everyone realizes you can't remove encryption from the face of the earth, it's just not doable and not worthy of discussion and that's not what I'm talking about. The FBI is doing this because they try to reverse the Apple defaults and don't really have any other way. The next step is to "have the debate" but as we can see that is incredibly difficult. Regarding your last point. Sure, that's one way to talk about it, but if it is the case that it's all about power, then why do we even have governments? All the trust is broken and we are essentially asking to be left alone to solve crimes that happen in our neighborhoods. The government and the FBI / others are supposed to work FOR us, for society as a whole, based on the laws we vote for/lobby for. They aren't meant to have their own will and goals like "power". Only private corporations and individuals want power, that's what the whole point of this government thing was in the first place.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mordocai 10y ago
All of the things the governments are trying to do won't (and shouldn't) work though. We can work around their attempts. If the government wants data, it should get it at rest not during transmission. They can get a warrant to get the data store that your data is residing on. If they can't get what they want because that is encrypted then they can try to legislate all they want but it is pretty much impossible to stop someone from encrypting something at rest, especially considering the existence of the open source and open hardware movements.
mindslight 10y ago
It sure makes for a nice contrarian opinion, but fighting politically vs technically is a needless dichotomy. At least this post attempts to back up this assertion, but it seems a quite handwavey to assume that because eg a protocol contains key escrow, that governments aren't still going to want to preemptively read, archive, and datamine the cleartext. Yes, all governments. Because governments, even democratic ones, fundamentally desire power. The best political argument we have is getting working strong encryption into the hands of everybody and making them appreciate the security it gives them. Presently, they have no choice about being personally surveilled, so they might as well lobby for everyone else to be surveilled as well. As an aside, HTTPS is easy to coopt by network operators because it is a terribly naive protocol: - fingerprintable, even going so far as to put the site name in the clear! - naming system that assumes unfettered Internet access - generally requires communication for every micro action - crypto keys are disconnected from naming, requiring binding together by ambient third party - naming system based on specific servers inevitably leading to centralized data silos that will be governmentally or economically coopted (Yes, the problems are centered around naming. It's one of the 3^h2 hard things in computer science, yet is easy to ignore when focused on the details of transferring data)
- cbsmith 10y ago
  > The problems are centered around naming. What's that expression? "All problems in computer science are ultimately about naming."
  - redbeard0x0a 10y ago
    There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton Variant: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
    - cbsmith 10y ago
      You can solve cache invalidation by doing naming right. ;-)
skybrian 10y ago
I'd put it a different way. Encryption and other forms of good security force surveillance out of the shadows. Without it we wouldn't know what Kazakhstan is doing. If the law requires a warrant to access your GMail account, good security is why law enforcement has to get a valid warrant and send it to Google to get access. Done right, it's not a substitute for politics. It enables politics. It allows agreements on checks and balances to be enforced rather than letting state hackers do what they like.
- rocqua 10y ago
  We all like end to end encryption though. In fact, most people call it the pinnacle of crypto done right. And yet, it completely circumvents any warrants.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    And yet, it completely circumvents any warrants. No, it just means the warrant must target one of the ends.
  - emilecantin 10y ago
    I don't think e2e crypto circumvents any warrant, in fact it makes it very similar to a warrant for a physical thing at your house. An analogy: Gmail is like having a safe at your bank, if the police want something in it, they get a warrant to search your safe. E2E Crypto is like having a safe at home, if they want something in it, they get a warrant to search your house. So I wouldn't say it circumvents any warrants, it just changes who is served said warrant.
    - sliverstorm 10y ago
      Except, the safe in your house can be cracked on a judge's order. Your encrypted machine, on the other hand, does not listen to judges. Ergo, the FBI-unlocking-dead-guy's-iPhone thing, and the key-disclosure thing.
      - 10y ago
fatdog 10y ago
Encryption is political engagement. Loosely translated, TLS and PGP have historically been computerese for "get a warrant." Of course the deep state will use politicians to assert its power, and if politicians do not work for us instead, people will use networks, technology, and trade (or the alternatives) to defend their freedom. It is a reasonable question to ask, how long does a typical nation really maintain its territorial sovereignty, and which ones are outliers? Kamp misinterprets the fact that because some states have begun to fight means that they will win. It does mean, however, that crypto facilitates freedom, and it forces the discussion in regard to the limits on elite powers. The crypto genie is out of the bottle. It is on states to rethink how they engage, not us.
SloopJon 10y ago
This is a disappointingly defeatist perspective on the new crypto wars: unbreakable encryption is why we can't have nice things. I would rephrase most of his examples with the old saw: if you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will have encryption. Since Snowden we've increasingly realized that our own governments are the adversaries, but hopefully incidents like the DNC hack will shift the narrative from the terrorism bogeyman back to defense against black-hat hackers.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  Those hats might be a dingy shade of gray, but I appreciate their shedding some light on our political process. The DNC is the adversary of decent citizens, in this case.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
I think this point of view isn't just wrong it's actively harmful. It completely ignores what happened - which is that various government agencies skirted around constitutional law, subverted public discussion of the matter [0] and have still not been brought into adequate compliance (Since it's incredibly hard to demonstrate standing and not have the case squashed [1]). And after all this the author is saying the problem is that the users aren't part of the political process? I would say until powers and programs employed by government agencies are brought into accountability (let's not forget the CIA monitoring the computers of it's own oversight committee [2]) and a transparent debate is allowed to take place, there is precisely nothing better to do and encryption everywhere is precisely the correct populist and democratic way to fight it. >Just this past week Kazakhstan announced that a "state root certificate" would have to be installed on all computers wanting to use SSL/TLS/HTTPS out of the country. Yes backwards nations like Kazakhstan might be implementing "state root certificates" but this is just clearly demonstrative that the power is on the side of the users in this debate. Isn't having these kinds of crazy measures on ballot in Western countries precisely forcing the political process the lack of which the author of this paper is criticizing? [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/06/watch-top-u-s-intelligence-officials-repeatedly-deny-nsa-spying-on-americans-over-the-last-year-videos/#521129b121d3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/06/watch-t... [1] https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel [2] https://theintercept.com/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-community-whos-overseeing/ https://theintercept.com/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-co...
- rocqua 10y ago
  I think a very important point was raised though. Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so. With crypto this changes. The issue also comes up, in a clearer way, with crypto currencies. There is no way to deal with fraud or mistaken tranfers in bitcoin. That loss of intervention hurts, and we gotta think about it. Even though no government has given a satisfactory solution, that doesn't mean there isn't a problem in need of solving.
  - Semiapies 10y ago
    Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so Tell that to J. Edgar Hoover.
mtgx 10y ago
I assume the author also believes that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
- acuozzo 10y ago
  And I assume that you failed to read the article.
Semiapies 10y ago
I'd honestly expect something this ridiculous and intellectually insulting to have been said by an NSA official during an interview. There no possible political engagement at this point. Agencies of major governments can quite secretly and even illegally engage in mass surveillance, as they documentably have. They can even spy on each others' citizens. The only way you can force issues out into the open where they can be politically engaged is by making secret surveillance impossible. "Make sure the other side has an easier way out than destroying you." That only works when the other guy isn't already dedicated to destroying every vestige of your privacy.
jkot 10y ago
> Kazakhstan announced that a "state root certificate" would have to be installed on all computers wanting to use SSL/TLS/HTTPS out of the country Devils advocate: Practically every country (national telecom) has its own root certificate. Here is the list: https://mozillacaprogram.secure.force.com/CA/IncludedCACertificateReport https://mozillacaprogram.secure.force.com/CA/IncludedCACerti... When Czech goverment started digitalization, it was very user unfriendly to install Czech CA. I think Kazakhstan is just using force it has to speedup its own application.
darawk 10y ago
I don't totally understand this view. Government doesn't have a right to ephemeral conversations that happen in physical space between two people. We aren't required to record them in case some law enforcement officer might request them. Why is online discourse different? Just because the bits still exist in some sense, why does that mean they need to be accessible?
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Government doesn't have a right to meticulous transcriptions of every verbal conversation you've ever had. But, it does have a right to do its utmost to figure out what was said. It has a right to search your file cabinet, or tap your phone, or tail you with a detective, with a warrant of course.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    Does it though? A right? Like your right to freedom of thought? That's big! Would you think this if a judge hadn't ruled this way? Because in our system it's not the judge who can make that call, it's you (theoretically a citizen) who grants the government the authority to take certain (constitutionally limited) actions as long as it serves the people. If the government has a "right" to tap your phone they have the same right to plant a microphone on you, and at that, they do have a right to every verbal conversation you've had. Because they can get one from the other.
Kenji 10y ago
This argument is like saying that if you build a castle to protect yourself from the attacker, you are responsible for the enemy's construction of trebuchets that siege the castle. Yeah, the castle builders are at fault. Nevermind that they protect so many innocent with their work. Of course we need political involvement, but we also need encryption everywhere, literally everywhere.
- phkamp 10y ago
  You should study the history of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems, and you will find that for the longest time nobody wanted them, because that would force the enemy to attack before they were completed. Never build more formidable weapons or defenses than you are willing to lay your life down for.
  - hansjorg 10y ago
    You're describing a reluctant, cautious and rational adversary. There never was any effective political opposition to "Star Wars" in the US.
apeace 10y ago
This is a fringe opinion, but I personally wish the U.S. would make all forms of hacking and digital surveillance totally legal. Yes, legal, with no "I". I think this would drastically change the technology landscape, putting more impetus on vendors to provide (and prove) protections such as encryption, and an impetus on users to select the vendors who are the best at doing so. Hacking laws are a crutch that attempt to patch insecure systems with law enforcement. And they risk being interpreted incorrectly--see interpretation of CFAA in the Aaron Swartz case, where downloading files could have meant 35 years in prison. I say let the CPUs interpret the bits, not the politicians. They cannot keep up with changes in technology, will make many wrong decisions, and are susceptible to corruption. In a world where hacking is legal, encrypting everything would be the right thing to do. It would be the only way to stop the government from spying on us, and the only way for them to stop us from spying on them.
- Taek 10y ago
  That would backfire very rapidly. We have trillions of dollars of infrastructure that would last 3 days against a single competent hacker. There was just an article recently on vulnerable hardcoded-password medical devices. Electrical grids and construction equipment aren't much better. People's webcams that they already own, phones that they already own, highly insecure software is pervasive in everyone's every day life. It's inescapable. The pressure you are talking about would be too great. Things would collapse if it became legal to actively pursue hacking them.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    So instead you want to wait until it gets worse? What's the end-game there? With bailing wire and plucky determination the FBI and NSA defend us, forever on guard against the one mistake that may bring it all crumbling down? This "too big too risk" is precisely why we need this, and needed it twenty years ago. And we need it now, so that we aren't in a worse spot next year, etc. To lessen the pain maybe for the first few years only "mostly harmless" hacks with full disclosure could be made fully legal. We could ramp up slowly.
Glyptodon 10y ago
Yes, math is not like gravity and can be overturned by legislation. Really now?
rdtsc 10y ago
So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet. Is it just pointing out an interesting contradiction and we should enhance and improve existing products, or there a message about moving back and reverting to using weak encryption like before or treating it like "munitions" for purposes of export control. So you you end up in prison just as long long for using OpenSSL as for reselling grenade launchers. Yeah I can see how PR is on government side here -- "look terrorists use this and other horrible criminals, this needs to be stopped". The answer usually is -- "Ah, but think of the human rights people from <insert far away country>" or make a reference to some generalized principle from the Constitution about freedom from search. Both of those lose in comparison to an image of scary guy with a bomb under their arm. So the answer is to operate at the same level of PR. Bring in issues people can identify with: for companies and enterprises remind them of the Target credit card breach, about the Sony hack and how embarrassing that is. Or for private individuals talk about identity theft. Everyone has heard about that how disruptive and upsetting that is. "We need stronger encryption to protect you from criminals" kind of message. (I am not the first one to think of this, I noticed Apple applied this in their response to FBI. I just thought it was a great approach).
- cbsmith 10y ago
  > So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet. I think the larger implication of the essay is to consider addressing privacy from a systemic/game theory perspective. The underlying threat isn't technological, but in the response to technological capabilities. Encryption is just another capability that provokes a response.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    That's valid. I think they way it is presented it is easy to mis-read it. I kind of hinted at finding a better way to respond to the problem in the PR domain. However,a technological solution can still help. For example, focusing on plausible deniability, traffic hiding, dead man switches and so on. Technology is just another approach and for some it might be easier to work with for some and easier to disseminate.
atemerev 10y ago
Crypto is just bringing back real-life privacy options into digital space. IRL, two people could go to some quiet place and have a private talk. If they feel suspicious, they might have checked the place for not being bugged (hard, but possible). In the Internet, the default communication mode was public, which was exploited by NSA and other surveillance organizations. But now, thanks to usable crypto, two or more people can also have a private conversation, and if suspicious, they can check for not being MITMed (also hard, but possible). Therefore, crypto brings nothing new to expectations of privacy, and the entire premise of this article is wrong. Nice try, NSA.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Given the pitch in the article, I think they may be switching up for "Ministry of Truth".
FungalRaincloud 10y ago
I'm probably echoing others by saying this, but: I don't agree that there is even correlation between more encryption and less privacy. Even if we were not attempting to subvert injustices done to us by our own governments by providing technical solutions, I believe wholeheartedly that many governments would still be attempting to decrease our privacy in every possible way. They're using increased encryption use as a scapegoat, but they have never had a shortage of scapegoats. Not employing strong crypto wherever possible would be irresponsible for the future of our privacy. Likewise, not engaging in political activism to change laws that impact our privacy would also be irresponsible. We need to do both, whenever possible and necessary.
- michael_fine 10y ago
  Typically (in the US) it's been the executive branch that has tried to subvert privacy (see COINTELPRO), and the judicial which has (sometimes) upheld it. However, because crypto would actively impede the ability of the judicial branch to use warrants, I imagine it would alienate our typical ally.
  - FungalRaincloud 10y ago
    That might be true, and that's a conversation we should definitely have, as we decide how we will be governed in the future. But that alone does not mean less crypto is preferable.
cJ0th 10y ago
<rant> everything means everything. lately i am starting to become really mad at high schools and universities for teaching this "x implies y" mentality as a tool to look at real world phenomenas. thanks to this kind of "education" everyone constantly feels like s/he is discovering some Ultimate Truth™ and thus fails at accounting for a chaotic, ever changing world. "cause and effect" may exists but these pattern mostly happens on a scale for which human language is just too clumsy. stop writing and discussing these articles. if you really got nothing better to do at any point in time, just stare out of the window for a while and relax a bit. </rant>
- mark_edward 10y ago
  This is incoherent
upofadown 10y ago
>When Edward Snowden made it known to the world that pretty much all traffic on the Internet was collected and searched by the NSA, GCHQ (the UK Government Communications Headquarters) and various other countries' secret services as well, the IT and networking communities were furious and felt betrayed. That's not how I remember it. Among those communities it was pretty well known that such surveillance was occurring. Knowing the scope of it caused a sense of obligation; that we should finally get around to adding some privacy protection to day to day internet traffic. Everyone knew that it was something that had to be done sooner or later.
homulilly 10y ago
I think the author is completely wrong on the premise that more encryption has meant less privacy. People are using more encryption because we already had no or little privacy. It hasn't gotten worse, it was already this bad. He is right on one count though, this isn't a technical problem and it cannot be solved through a purely technical solution.
rietta 10y ago
Mr. Camp has written about this topic before, see More Encryption Is Not the Solution (2013) https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864 http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/escaping-the-dragnet-of-surveillance-what-the-experts-say-about-encryption/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/escaping-the-dr... "The recent exposure of the dragnet-style surveillance of Internet traffic has provoked a number of responses that are variations of the general formula, ‘More encryption is the solution.' This is not the case. In fact, more encryption will probably only make the privacy crisis worse than it already is." https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JulSep/0933.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JulSep... Re: Mandatory encryption is theater " Correct, but if you make encrypt mandatory, they will have to break _all_ encryption, that's what the law tells them to. As long as encryption only affects a minority of traffic and they can easier go around (ie: FaceBook, Google etc. delivering the goods) they don't need to render _all_ encryption transparent. "
serge2k 10y ago
> whatever you may feel about politicians, they do have the legitimacy and power to do so. They have the constitutions, legislative powers, courts of law, and police forces to make this happen. Do they have the actual power? As the article states, the reason for the all or nothing approach is that we currently don't have any way to do a middle ground with TLS. We have the technology, and it's already available anywhere. How do you actually put that genie back in the bottle? Probably the best you can do is heavy handed enforcement. That also does nothing to deal with the fact that an organization like ISIS are going to find ways to continue to use strong encryption.
mdip 10y ago
The observations being made are correct in that what he's describing is actually and actively happening. The spot where things stop working is in the very last paragraph in that it very neatly wrecks the argument: Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement. The words "any amount of electronic privacy" are where we have big problems. When it comes to protecting privacy from the prying eyes of a hacker, the only amount of electronic privacy that is acceptable is total privacy through unbreakable crypto. This is the problem our politicians have a difficult time grokking but most of us understand: what the government is able to break into (i.e. a lesser amount of privacy from total) is also able to be broken into by a hacker. And, in fact, it becomes more easy if it is government mandated since a hack only need to attack the specific method used by the government to inspect those packets. I agree that political engagement is necessary, but so too is slapping unbreakable crypto onto ore and more packets. The political engagement needs to come in the form of educating politicians on the realities of today's internet-connected world. We either have solid, unbreakable encryption[0] which necessarily includes protection for people performing financial and otherwise sensitive operations over a public network or we have limited and government-breakable encryption that offers less security than "in the clear" transmission[1]. [0] To the extent that such a thing is possible since this isn't a "set it and it's done" sort of situation but an ever increasing arms race of privacy vs. attacker. This includes such things as ensuring researchers are allowed to test/expose and validate said technologies and not be hindered by legal requirements that prevent them from notifying people of the dangers of broken crypto. [1] At least, potentially less. Assuming the "backdoor" method is used and protected as well as TSA master keys, we now have a scenario where limited use results in easy to identify "high value" traffic and less security because the hacker need only attack the government for the masters. Even if a much more "well thought out" method is used for providing government access, the problems multiply since now we're not only having to create sufficiently attack-resistant protocols but also manage sufficiently complicated escrow or other processes to provide access. Complexity is the enemy of reliability.
carapace 10y ago
Just out of curiosity, can anyone reading this say that their mind has been changed, even a little bit?
throw2016 10y ago
This doesn't follow. All it shows that it increases transparency and a goverment can't pretend to be a democracy while running a total surveillance operation against public interest and funded by the public on the side. Non democratic governments are not the benchmarks for democratic behavior by definition. Governments in countries like Kazakstan and China have already made it clear they are not interested in privacy and its for their citizens and social structures to respond. Countries like the US and UK claim to the defenders of democracy but are running equally intensive surveillance operations on the side, and in this case without outliers like Snowden we won't even know. So let this debate happen in the open so citizens and the state can reach an acceptable consensus on checks and balances. It would also be a good idea to remove the emotional threats of terrorism that are used to manipulate and manufacture outcomes from this debate. There is a long history of government abuse of power that citizens cannot ignore. There needs to be more accountability of US and UK relations with Saudi Arabia and its 30 year funding of wahhabism globally. The effects of this and geopolitical games cannout be brushed aside as they are fundamental to terrorism today. Without terrorism there is essentially no debate and citizens will not give up their rights for day-to-day law and order problems.
infodroid 10y ago
This reminds me of a 2013 blog post by Albert Wenger where he argues that treating the problem of mass surveillance as a technical problem is futile: We cannot and should not be living in digital fortresses any more than we are living in physical fortresses at home. Our homes are safe from thieves and from government not because they couldn’t get in if they wanted to but because the law and its enforcement prevents them from doing so. All we have to do is minimal physical security (lock the doors when you are out)... Surveillance is a political and legal problem, not a technical problem. We have to all become outraged and start a big and public online and offline campaign to take back the law into the hands of the people and their representatives and away from secret organizations “overseen” by secret courts in a system that goes beyond Kafka’s worst nightmares. http://continuations.com/post/60444129080/disagreeing-with-bruce-schneier-more-crypto-is http://continuations.com/post/60444129080/disagreeing-with-b...

178 points by zeveb 10y ago

The article seems to make the fundamental error of assuming that there is any middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all". If crypto can be broken, it will be broken, whether that's by state actors or by some kid in Mongolia who wants to make a quick buck by ransoming all your files.

omginternets 10y ago
I read this a bit differently, i.e.: "unbreakable crypto is necessary but not sufficient" && "unbreakable crypto alone has a paradoxical effect of decreasing privacy through political means."
mike_hearn 10y ago
Because it's not a fundamental error or indeed an error at all. What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact. It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default: • Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider. • Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most. And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed. That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think). PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers. The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.
- nightcracker 10y ago
  If there is a backdoor, that backdoor can be used by anyone that has the key. I do not trust a government to responsibly handle such a key, as it leaking once results in total failure of security for everyone. A backdoored crypto system is a broken crypto system.
  - coldcode 10y ago
    A backdoored crypto system is a no crypto system.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    You can always mitigate the "failure for everyone" scenario. Plethora of government keys, for example, or rotating government keys, or rapidly expiring government keys... Anyway, they've managed to keep stacks and stacks of information secret for decades and decades. It seems like it could be managed. No one has stolen the cert for *.whitehouse.gov. Sidenote, why do people call a second key a backdoor? To me, backdoor suggests exploit, not used-as-designed.
    - Aelinsaar 10y ago
      Because it involves trusting that no one made copies of the key, turning a locked door into a backdoor? Your mitigation ideas are sound though, and could also be used as a kind of rolling canary trap.
  - mike_hearn 10y ago
    There are lots of examples of governments maintaining the integrity of keys over the long term. The e-Passport system is an example of that. Another would be that the NSA had the ultimate insider hack - literally a sysadmin who dumped their entire internal wikis and document stores - and yet it appears that no key material was compromised. You can repeat "a backdoored system is no system" mantra to yourself if you like, but there are a LOT of threats that aren't governments and those are the ones people tend to care about the most.
mirhagk 10y ago
Not necessarily. You don't need to introduce compromised crypto (that's exactly the problem that's happening currently). I think the point of the article more shows that by using TLS everywhere the government is incentivized to attack it a lot more. This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.
hx87 10y ago
That's like saying there is no middle ground between product X being free and being infinitely expensive. Even if product X has a price I can afford, I have to consider the trade-offs between buying it and other uses for my money. If it's free, though, there are no trade-offs. If somebody can break my crypto, fine, but I want them to expend valuable resources on it so they won't do it for shits and giggles.

codemac 10y ago

> Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement. While political engagement is an alternative to "slapping unbreakable crypto" onto things, this article establishes no precedent for political engagement actually helping! I see the technical as political, direct action as engagement. An article like this that's attempting to be a call to action, needs to provide some positive reinforcement. I find myself failing to come up with big wins, the examples I can think of are almost exclusively heartbreakingly tragic (snowden, manning, swartz, Occupy, etc). When I think of political engagement in the US, I think of pretty violent end cases for everyone involved.

theandrewbailey 10y ago
SOPA's defeat was a big win. There is almost no political engagement from the technology sector, as compared to others (like pharmaceuticals, finance, telecoms, entertainment). If there had, the DMCA might not be so onerous, the CFAA would be gone, and SOPA would never have gotten as far as it did.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  SOPA is probably the biggest recent achievement from activism (unless you want to count Wheeler and the Title II decision). But tellingly, activism has failed to solidify a victory there. It was COICA, then SOPA, then PIPA, then ACTA, and now TPP, all pushing a bunch of the same core changes. Whenever there's resistance, the thing goes into hiding and comes back wearing new clothes. Lately, it's been handled in settings where debate happens behind closed doors and domestic activism has little power. And yes, that might look different if major corporate players were more involved. But their stances are varied and inconsistent at best, and to the extent that this is for the benefit of private citizens the political approach appears to be an endless defensive fight.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I wonder. I've seen people on HN saying that Google is one of the biggest lobbyist, so apparently tech sector is very much present in Washington. So maybe it's not that there is no engagement, but that those who engage have different goals in mind than your average HNer?

theandrewbailey 10y ago

Kinda clickbait-y, and ignores the fact that encrypted communications were able to be used (with some effort) before Snowden, but his last point is solid: > The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement.

bhhaskin 10y ago
No its not. The reality is the biggest threat to privacy is due to political engagement. Stronger encryption that no one can break is really the only viable option.
- noenpnqnoen 10y ago
  - Written by Poul-Henning Kamp - In a section called The Bike Shed This link is related: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#idp64924272 https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.h...
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Political engagement is a very good tool to keep political engagement in check. Political engagement can make strong crypto illegal to use, or mandate a state MITM[0]; neither are viable or effective at anything, but those inconveniences aren't going to stop their implementation. [0] Almost happened in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
- mirhagk 10y ago
  That won't solve the problem > Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse > > The IT and networking communities overlooked a wise saying from soldiers and police officers: "Make sure the other side has an easier way out than destroying you." Who is developing this stronger encryption? The development of encryption has a huge incentive to build backdoors for payouts by government or corporate or worse groups. Then you have the people implementing the encryption that could also introduce backdoors (who knows if heartbleed was intentional or not). Then you have lots of other ways to backdoor the system, from default software installs, viruses, or even compiler or CPU backdooring. There is no such thing as a system that has perfect security. Even if you build everything yourself and are perfect at doing so, the tools you use could easily have backdoors. By increasing usage of encryption for more and more mundane things all we're doing is increasing the incentive to break that encryption.

ffwd 10y ago

Nobody really knows the correct answer and I think that's the reason communication is failing between the government and the tech sector. I think we have to realize that some transparency into private lives is needed to have a proper society, and the anarcho-capitalists want full privacy from the get go and then increasing transparency as needed for society, while government is kind of hovering on the "we need transparency everywhere for any arbitrary reason because we don't know when we'll need it", and this is a difficult position to hold. I think unfortunately if we are to have a government, we need to do the latter, because the government can't intrude on privacy NOR punish people without evidence or at least minimum cause, while in a completely private anarcho-capitalist society the individuals who don't comply can be punished indirectly with exclusion and isolation from society. Personally this seems like a pretty crappy way to do things but that's a post for another time.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Absolutely disagree. A) Even when the government has the data to stop someone, they don't: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/terrorists-were-already-known-to-authorities/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/terrorists-were-already-... B) Outlawing crypto just doesn't work. You can't outlaw math. You can try all day long, but that only hurts the masses At some point, you have to realize that breaking encryption has nothing to do with safety, but is all about power.
- ffwd 10y ago
  a) I don't want to comment on that intercept piece because there is clear bias there and I don't have all the facts. b) I think actually the FBI is mainly talking about the defaults in software, like how Apple enabled strong encryption for any user. Defaults matter when you consider the 95% of people who would not otherwise use encryption, including all kinds of criminals. I think everyone realizes you can't remove encryption from the face of the earth, it's just not doable and not worthy of discussion and that's not what I'm talking about. The FBI is doing this because they try to reverse the Apple defaults and don't really have any other way. The next step is to "have the debate" but as we can see that is incredibly difficult. Regarding your last point. Sure, that's one way to talk about it, but if it is the case that it's all about power, then why do we even have governments? All the trust is broken and we are essentially asking to be left alone to solve crimes that happen in our neighborhoods. The government and the FBI / others are supposed to work FOR us, for society as a whole, based on the laws we vote for/lobby for. They aren't meant to have their own will and goals like "power". Only private corporations and individuals want power, that's what the whole point of this government thing was in the first place.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mordocai 10y ago

All of the things the governments are trying to do won't (and shouldn't) work though. We can work around their attempts. If the government wants data, it should get it at rest not during transmission. They can get a warrant to get the data store that your data is residing on. If they can't get what they want because that is encrypted then they can try to legislate all they want but it is pretty much impossible to stop someone from encrypting something at rest, especially considering the existence of the open source and open hardware movements.

mindslight 10y ago

It sure makes for a nice contrarian opinion, but fighting politically vs technically is a needless dichotomy. At least this post attempts to back up this assertion, but it seems a quite handwavey to assume that because eg a protocol contains key escrow, that governments aren't still going to want to preemptively read, archive, and datamine the cleartext. Yes, all governments. Because governments, even democratic ones, fundamentally desire power. The best political argument we have is getting working strong encryption into the hands of everybody and making them appreciate the security it gives them. Presently, they have no choice about being personally surveilled, so they might as well lobby for everyone else to be surveilled as well. As an aside, HTTPS is easy to coopt by network operators because it is a terribly naive protocol: - fingerprintable, even going so far as to put the site name in the clear! - naming system that assumes unfettered Internet access - generally requires communication for every micro action - crypto keys are disconnected from naming, requiring binding together by ambient third party - naming system based on specific servers inevitably leading to centralized data silos that will be governmentally or economically coopted (Yes, the problems are centered around naming. It's one of the 3^h2 hard things in computer science, yet is easy to ignore when focused on the details of transferring data)

cbsmith 10y ago
> The problems are centered around naming. What's that expression? "All problems in computer science are ultimately about naming."
- redbeard0x0a 10y ago
  There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton Variant: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
  - cbsmith 10y ago
    You can solve cache invalidation by doing naming right. ;-)

skybrian 10y ago

I'd put it a different way. Encryption and other forms of good security force surveillance out of the shadows. Without it we wouldn't know what Kazakhstan is doing. If the law requires a warrant to access your GMail account, good security is why law enforcement has to get a valid warrant and send it to Google to get access. Done right, it's not a substitute for politics. It enables politics. It allows agreements on checks and balances to be enforced rather than letting state hackers do what they like.

rocqua 10y ago
We all like end to end encryption though. In fact, most people call it the pinnacle of crypto done right. And yet, it completely circumvents any warrants.
- icebraining 10y ago
  And yet, it completely circumvents any warrants. No, it just means the warrant must target one of the ends.
- emilecantin 10y ago
  I don't think e2e crypto circumvents any warrant, in fact it makes it very similar to a warrant for a physical thing at your house. An analogy: Gmail is like having a safe at your bank, if the police want something in it, they get a warrant to search your safe. E2E Crypto is like having a safe at home, if they want something in it, they get a warrant to search your house. So I wouldn't say it circumvents any warrants, it just changes who is served said warrant.
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Except, the safe in your house can be cracked on a judge's order. Your encrypted machine, on the other hand, does not listen to judges. Ergo, the FBI-unlocking-dead-guy's-iPhone thing, and the key-disclosure thing.
    - 10y ago

fatdog 10y ago

Encryption is political engagement. Loosely translated, TLS and PGP have historically been computerese for "get a warrant." Of course the deep state will use politicians to assert its power, and if politicians do not work for us instead, people will use networks, technology, and trade (or the alternatives) to defend their freedom. It is a reasonable question to ask, how long does a typical nation really maintain its territorial sovereignty, and which ones are outliers? Kamp misinterprets the fact that because some states have begun to fight means that they will win. It does mean, however, that crypto facilitates freedom, and it forces the discussion in regard to the limits on elite powers. The crypto genie is out of the bottle. It is on states to rethink how they engage, not us.

SloopJon 10y ago

This is a disappointingly defeatist perspective on the new crypto wars: unbreakable encryption is why we can't have nice things. I would rephrase most of his examples with the old saw: if you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will have encryption. Since Snowden we've increasingly realized that our own governments are the adversaries, but hopefully incidents like the DNC hack will shift the narrative from the terrorism bogeyman back to defense against black-hat hackers.

jessaustin 10y ago
Those hats might be a dingy shade of gray, but I appreciate their shedding some light on our political process. The DNC is the adversary of decent citizens, in this case.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

I think this point of view isn't just wrong it's actively harmful. It completely ignores what happened - which is that various government agencies skirted around constitutional law, subverted public discussion of the matter [0] and have still not been brought into adequate compliance (Since it's incredibly hard to demonstrate standing and not have the case squashed [1]). And after all this the author is saying the problem is that the users aren't part of the political process? I would say until powers and programs employed by government agencies are brought into accountability (let's not forget the CIA monitoring the computers of it's own oversight committee [2]) and a transparent debate is allowed to take place, there is precisely nothing better to do and encryption everywhere is precisely the correct populist and democratic way to fight it. >Just this past week Kazakhstan announced that a "state root certificate" would have to be installed on all computers wanting to use SSL/TLS/HTTPS out of the country. Yes backwards nations like Kazakhstan might be implementing "state root certificates" but this is just clearly demonstrative that the power is on the side of the users in this debate. Isn't having these kinds of crazy measures on ballot in Western countries precisely forcing the political process the lack of which the author of this paper is criticizing? [0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/06/watch-top-u-s-intelligence-officials-repeatedly-deny-nsa-spying-on-americans-over-the-last-year-videos/#521129b121d3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/06/watch-t... [1] https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel [2] https://theintercept.com/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-community-whos-overseeing/ https://theintercept.com/2014/03/05/congress-intelligence-co...

rocqua 10y ago
I think a very important point was raised though. Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so. With crypto this changes. The issue also comes up, in a clearer way, with crypto currencies. There is no way to deal with fraud or mistaken tranfers in bitcoin. That loss of intervention hurts, and we gotta think about it. Even though no government has given a satisfactory solution, that doesn't mean there isn't a problem in need of solving.
- Semiapies 10y ago
  Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so Tell that to J. Edgar Hoover.

mtgx 10y ago

I assume the author also believes that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

acuozzo 10y ago
And I assume that you failed to read the article.

Semiapies 10y ago

I'd honestly expect something this ridiculous and intellectually insulting to have been said by an NSA official during an interview. There no possible political engagement at this point. Agencies of major governments can quite secretly and even illegally engage in mass surveillance, as they documentably have. They can even spy on each others' citizens. The only way you can force issues out into the open where they can be politically engaged is by making secret surveillance impossible. "Make sure the other side has an easier way out than destroying you." That only works when the other guy isn't already dedicated to destroying every vestige of your privacy.

jkot 10y ago

> Kazakhstan announced that a "state root certificate" would have to be installed on all computers wanting to use SSL/TLS/HTTPS out of the country Devils advocate: Practically every country (national telecom) has its own root certificate. Here is the list: https://mozillacaprogram.secure.force.com/CA/IncludedCACertificateReport https://mozillacaprogram.secure.force.com/CA/IncludedCACerti... When Czech goverment started digitalization, it was very user unfriendly to install Czech CA. I think Kazakhstan is just using force it has to speedup its own application.

darawk 10y ago

I don't totally understand this view. Government doesn't have a right to ephemeral conversations that happen in physical space between two people. We aren't required to record them in case some law enforcement officer might request them. Why is online discourse different? Just because the bits still exist in some sense, why does that mean they need to be accessible?

sliverstorm 10y ago
Government doesn't have a right to meticulous transcriptions of every verbal conversation you've ever had. But, it does have a right to do its utmost to figure out what was said. It has a right to search your file cabinet, or tap your phone, or tail you with a detective, with a warrant of course.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  Does it though? A right? Like your right to freedom of thought? That's big! Would you think this if a judge hadn't ruled this way? Because in our system it's not the judge who can make that call, it's you (theoretically a citizen) who grants the government the authority to take certain (constitutionally limited) actions as long as it serves the people. If the government has a "right" to tap your phone they have the same right to plant a microphone on you, and at that, they do have a right to every verbal conversation you've had. Because they can get one from the other.

Kenji 10y ago

This argument is like saying that if you build a castle to protect yourself from the attacker, you are responsible for the enemy's construction of trebuchets that siege the castle. Yeah, the castle builders are at fault. Nevermind that they protect so many innocent with their work. Of course we need political involvement, but we also need encryption everywhere, literally everywhere.

phkamp 10y ago
You should study the history of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems, and you will find that for the longest time nobody wanted them, because that would force the enemy to attack before they were completed. Never build more formidable weapons or defenses than you are willing to lay your life down for.
- hansjorg 10y ago
  You're describing a reluctant, cautious and rational adversary. There never was any effective political opposition to "Star Wars" in the US.

apeace 10y ago

This is a fringe opinion, but I personally wish the U.S. would make all forms of hacking and digital surveillance totally legal. Yes, legal, with no "I". I think this would drastically change the technology landscape, putting more impetus on vendors to provide (and prove) protections such as encryption, and an impetus on users to select the vendors who are the best at doing so. Hacking laws are a crutch that attempt to patch insecure systems with law enforcement. And they risk being interpreted incorrectly--see interpretation of CFAA in the Aaron Swartz case, where downloading files could have meant 35 years in prison. I say let the CPUs interpret the bits, not the politicians. They cannot keep up with changes in technology, will make many wrong decisions, and are susceptible to corruption. In a world where hacking is legal, encrypting everything would be the right thing to do. It would be the only way to stop the government from spying on us, and the only way for them to stop us from spying on them.

Taek 10y ago
That would backfire very rapidly. We have trillions of dollars of infrastructure that would last 3 days against a single competent hacker. There was just an article recently on vulnerable hardcoded-password medical devices. Electrical grids and construction equipment aren't much better. People's webcams that they already own, phones that they already own, highly insecure software is pervasive in everyone's every day life. It's inescapable. The pressure you are talking about would be too great. Things would collapse if it became legal to actively pursue hacking them.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  So instead you want to wait until it gets worse? What's the end-game there? With bailing wire and plucky determination the FBI and NSA defend us, forever on guard against the one mistake that may bring it all crumbling down? This "too big too risk" is precisely why we need this, and needed it twenty years ago. And we need it now, so that we aren't in a worse spot next year, etc. To lessen the pain maybe for the first few years only "mostly harmless" hacks with full disclosure could be made fully legal. We could ramp up slowly.

Glyptodon 10y ago

Yes, math is not like gravity and can be overturned by legislation. Really now?

rdtsc 10y ago

So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet. Is it just pointing out an interesting contradiction and we should enhance and improve existing products, or there a message about moving back and reverting to using weak encryption like before or treating it like "munitions" for purposes of export control. So you you end up in prison just as long long for using OpenSSL as for reselling grenade launchers. Yeah I can see how PR is on government side here -- "look terrorists use this and other horrible criminals, this needs to be stopped". The answer usually is -- "Ah, but think of the human rights people from <insert far away country>" or make a reference to some generalized principle from the Constitution about freedom from search. Both of those lose in comparison to an image of scary guy with a bomb under their arm. So the answer is to operate at the same level of PR. Bring in issues people can identify with: for companies and enterprises remind them of the Target credit card breach, about the Sony hack and how embarrassing that is. Or for private individuals talk about identity theft. Everyone has heard about that how disruptive and upsetting that is. "We need stronger encryption to protect you from criminals" kind of message. (I am not the first one to think of this, I noticed Apple applied this in their response to FBI. I just thought it was a great approach).

cbsmith 10y ago
> So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet. I think the larger implication of the essay is to consider addressing privacy from a systemic/game theory perspective. The underlying threat isn't technological, but in the response to technological capabilities. Encryption is just another capability that provokes a response.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  That's valid. I think they way it is presented it is easy to mis-read it. I kind of hinted at finding a better way to respond to the problem in the PR domain. However,a technological solution can still help. For example, focusing on plausible deniability, traffic hiding, dead man switches and so on. Technology is just another approach and for some it might be easier to work with for some and easier to disseminate.

atemerev 10y ago

Crypto is just bringing back real-life privacy options into digital space. IRL, two people could go to some quiet place and have a private talk. If they feel suspicious, they might have checked the place for not being bugged (hard, but possible). In the Internet, the default communication mode was public, which was exploited by NSA and other surveillance organizations. But now, thanks to usable crypto, two or more people can also have a private conversation, and if suspicious, they can check for not being MITMed (also hard, but possible). Therefore, crypto brings nothing new to expectations of privacy, and the entire premise of this article is wrong. Nice try, NSA.

Aelinsaar 10y ago
Given the pitch in the article, I think they may be switching up for "Ministry of Truth".

FungalRaincloud 10y ago

I'm probably echoing others by saying this, but: I don't agree that there is even correlation between more encryption and less privacy. Even if we were not attempting to subvert injustices done to us by our own governments by providing technical solutions, I believe wholeheartedly that many governments would still be attempting to decrease our privacy in every possible way. They're using increased encryption use as a scapegoat, but they have never had a shortage of scapegoats. Not employing strong crypto wherever possible would be irresponsible for the future of our privacy. Likewise, not engaging in political activism to change laws that impact our privacy would also be irresponsible. We need to do both, whenever possible and necessary.

michael_fine 10y ago
Typically (in the US) it's been the executive branch that has tried to subvert privacy (see COINTELPRO), and the judicial which has (sometimes) upheld it. However, because crypto would actively impede the ability of the judicial branch to use warrants, I imagine it would alienate our typical ally.
- FungalRaincloud 10y ago
  That might be true, and that's a conversation we should definitely have, as we decide how we will be governed in the future. But that alone does not mean less crypto is preferable.

cJ0th 10y ago

<rant> everything means everything. lately i am starting to become really mad at high schools and universities for teaching this "x implies y" mentality as a tool to look at real world phenomenas. thanks to this kind of "education" everyone constantly feels like s/he is discovering some Ultimate Truth™ and thus fails at accounting for a chaotic, ever changing world. "cause and effect" may exists but these pattern mostly happens on a scale for which human language is just too clumsy. stop writing and discussing these articles. if you really got nothing better to do at any point in time, just stare out of the window for a while and relax a bit. </rant>

mark_edward 10y ago
This is incoherent

upofadown 10y ago

>When Edward Snowden made it known to the world that pretty much all traffic on the Internet was collected and searched by the NSA, GCHQ (the UK Government Communications Headquarters) and various other countries' secret services as well, the IT and networking communities were furious and felt betrayed. That's not how I remember it. Among those communities it was pretty well known that such surveillance was occurring. Knowing the scope of it caused a sense of obligation; that we should finally get around to adding some privacy protection to day to day internet traffic. Everyone knew that it was something that had to be done sooner or later.

homulilly 10y ago

I think the author is completely wrong on the premise that more encryption has meant less privacy. People are using more encryption because we already had no or little privacy. It hasn't gotten worse, it was already this bad. He is right on one count though, this isn't a technical problem and it cannot be solved through a purely technical solution.

rietta 10y ago

Mr. Camp has written about this topic before, see More Encryption Is Not the Solution (2013) https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864 http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/escaping-the-dragnet-of-surveillance-what-the-experts-say-about-encryption/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/escaping-the-dr... "The recent exposure of the dragnet-style surveillance of Internet traffic has provoked a number of responses that are variations of the general formula, ‘More encryption is the solution.' This is not the case. In fact, more encryption will probably only make the privacy crisis worse than it already is." https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JulSep/0933.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JulSep... Re: Mandatory encryption is theater " Correct, but if you make encrypt mandatory, they will have to break _all_ encryption, that's what the law tells them to. As long as encryption only affects a minority of traffic and they can easier go around (ie: FaceBook, Google etc. delivering the goods) they don't need to render _all_ encryption transparent. "

serge2k 10y ago

> whatever you may feel about politicians, they do have the legitimacy and power to do so. They have the constitutions, legislative powers, courts of law, and police forces to make this happen. Do they have the actual power? As the article states, the reason for the all or nothing approach is that we currently don't have any way to do a middle ground with TLS. We have the technology, and it's already available anywhere. How do you actually put that genie back in the bottle? Probably the best you can do is heavy handed enforcement. That also does nothing to deal with the fact that an organization like ISIS are going to find ways to continue to use strong encryption.

mdip 10y ago

The observations being made are correct in that what he's describing is actually and actively happening. The spot where things stop working is in the very last paragraph in that it very neatly wrecks the argument: Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement. The words "any amount of electronic privacy" are where we have big problems. When it comes to protecting privacy from the prying eyes of a hacker, the only amount of electronic privacy that is acceptable is total privacy through unbreakable crypto. This is the problem our politicians have a difficult time grokking but most of us understand: what the government is able to break into (i.e. a lesser amount of privacy from total) is also able to be broken into by a hacker. And, in fact, it becomes more easy if it is government mandated since a hack only need to attack the specific method used by the government to inspect those packets. I agree that political engagement is necessary, but so too is slapping unbreakable crypto onto ore and more packets. The political engagement needs to come in the form of educating politicians on the realities of today's internet-connected world. We either have solid, unbreakable encryption[0] which necessarily includes protection for people performing financial and otherwise sensitive operations over a public network or we have limited and government-breakable encryption that offers less security than "in the clear" transmission[1]. [0] To the extent that such a thing is possible since this isn't a "set it and it's done" sort of situation but an ever increasing arms race of privacy vs. attacker. This includes such things as ensuring researchers are allowed to test/expose and validate said technologies and not be hindered by legal requirements that prevent them from notifying people of the dangers of broken crypto. [1] At least, potentially less. Assuming the "backdoor" method is used and protected as well as TSA master keys, we now have a scenario where limited use results in easy to identify "high value" traffic and less security because the hacker need only attack the government for the masters. Even if a much more "well thought out" method is used for providing government access, the problems multiply since now we're not only having to create sufficiently attack-resistant protocols but also manage sufficiently complicated escrow or other processes to provide access. Complexity is the enemy of reliability.

carapace 10y ago

Just out of curiosity, can anyone reading this say that their mind has been changed, even a little bit?

throw2016 10y ago

This doesn't follow. All it shows that it increases transparency and a goverment can't pretend to be a democracy while running a total surveillance operation against public interest and funded by the public on the side. Non democratic governments are not the benchmarks for democratic behavior by definition. Governments in countries like Kazakstan and China have already made it clear they are not interested in privacy and its for their citizens and social structures to respond. Countries like the US and UK claim to the defenders of democracy but are running equally intensive surveillance operations on the side, and in this case without outliers like Snowden we won't even know. So let this debate happen in the open so citizens and the state can reach an acceptable consensus on checks and balances. It would also be a good idea to remove the emotional threats of terrorism that are used to manipulate and manufacture outcomes from this debate. There is a long history of government abuse of power that citizens cannot ignore. There needs to be more accountability of US and UK relations with Saudi Arabia and its 30 year funding of wahhabism globally. The effects of this and geopolitical games cannout be brushed aside as they are fundamental to terrorism today. Without terrorism there is essentially no debate and citizens will not give up their rights for day-to-day law and order problems.

infodroid 10y ago

This reminds me of a 2013 blog post by Albert Wenger where he argues that treating the problem of mass surveillance as a technical problem is futile: We cannot and should not be living in digital fortresses any more than we are living in physical fortresses at home. Our homes are safe from thieves and from government not because they couldn’t get in if they wanted to but because the law and its enforcement prevents them from doing so. All we have to do is minimal physical security (lock the doors when you are out)... Surveillance is a political and legal problem, not a technical problem. We have to all become outraged and start a big and public online and offline campaign to take back the law into the hands of the people and their representatives and away from secret organizations “overseen” by secret courts in a system that goes beyond Kafka’s worst nightmares. http://continuations.com/post/60444129080/disagreeing-with-bruce-schneier-more-crypto-is http://continuations.com/post/60444129080/disagreeing-with-b...