11 ms·

Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress

362 points by rietta 9y ago

1001101 9y ago
Does anyone here remember the clipper chip? If you don't, I'd recommend boning up on this chapter of the crypto wars. The 'because terrorism' excuse falls a bit flat with me. Thought experiment: how hard would it be for a terrorist organization with access to 100's of millions of dollars (eg. ISIS) to come up with a secure communications scheme? One time pad. A reasonable cipher that hasn't had any 'help' during development. Even run an encrypted channel over a backdoored product. I'm sure many of us could come up with something in a day (with decryption over an airgap). How about a hostile government with multi-billion dollar budgets (and who have been using OTP already for decades). Is this about terrorists, or is this about citizens? My bet is on the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
- sitkack 9y ago
  The Clintons and Al Gore have their paws all over the Clipper Chip.
  - acdha 9y ago
    It's a grave mistake to demonize a single politician you dislike: if it were that simple, they'd have dropped it as soon as that one person left office. In reality, there's a large community pushing for things which they perceive as making their job easier and that persists across administrations — that started well before Clinton ran for office and certainly didn't end after he left.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      You are putting words in my mouth. I demonize no one. My feelings about them (The Clintons) have indeed declined over the years. I mostly have huge respect for Al Gore. But my personal feelings have absolutely nothing do to with their material involvement with the Clipper Chip. Nor do I care when it started. They all carried the baton of government key escrow which is not something I am going to forget. It is a grave mistake to not hold people accountable for their actions, to not take a stand while the bureaucracy pushes you along with the current.
      - acdha 9y ago
        “paws” isn't a neutral term – it has strong negative connotations. My point was simply that while, yes, Bill Clinton ultimately owns his official actions, it's naive to ignore the massive weight of the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus, especially coming off of the Cold War footing, on a subject where he was hearing from a lot of experts in government and business saying this was a good move.
    - libeclipse 9y ago
      If you disagree with someone, the right thing to do is to put forward your own side of the argument. It isn't polite to simply disregard what someone says because of your conceptions about where that belief is coming from.
      - acdha 9y ago
        Is it polite to pompously lecture someone about making an argument while ignoring the one they made?
        libeclipse 9y ago
        Rather that than attack the straw man.
- rietta 9y ago
  I was too young at the time to understand it then, but based on history its a good thing that the ill-planned scheme did not become law.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
natch 9y ago
For congressional consumption, I suspect arguments like this need to be dumbed way, way, down. Tim Cook's "software equivalent of cancer" is an example of an effective dumbed down take on it, but it need not be the last one. The more ways the point can be re-worded concisely so that lay people will understand it, the better.
Nomentatus 9y ago
The irony here is that simple one-time-pad solutions (OTP) will continue to be available to securely encrypt the sort of messaging that's of use to terrorists (relatively short infrequent messages), instead it's the general communications (including for banking) that the rest of us perform online that will be made vulnerable. You don't even have to program or use a computer to create these OTP solutions, for limited messages you could just flip a coin to create the OTP if necessary (although there are lots of more automated solutions available as well.) Airgapped computers at both ends provide another way 'round restrictions for more sophisticated actors. Their backdoors won't be accessible (remotely.) So taking away secure encryption from the rest of us is just security theatre; a destructive, narcissistic legislative exercise designed to make it look like the pompous powerful doing something when they're doing nothing of any real use while creating terrible risks. This is why, I think, legislators have consistently ignoring logic and math from professionals such as the OP - they don't care. They know perfectly well they're pissing into the wind doing nothing useful; that it's all theatre; they just think the fallout is going to land on someone else's pants after they're out of office. But tech works (and fails) faster than that. [Counterargument: if everything else is breakable, securely encrypted messages really stand out. One answer: But very short messages (in an unknown format) aren't generally breakable, anyway, and that's the likely case.]
- rietta 9y ago
  One time pads are perfect! Everything less than that trades security for convenience. So true.
  - omginternets 9y ago
    Key management is a very real issue in cryptographic systems. Arguably, convenient key management improves security. Simplistic interpretations are the bane of security engineering, especially where human factors are involved.
    - rietta 9y ago
      Indeed. I'm about to have a form of that conversation with a client today. Just encrypting columns in your database is of some value, but having the symmetric key in an environment variable (a common practice) is not going to prevent a breach when the data and the key are compromised at the same time.
rietta 9y ago
I'm going to have to go back to listen to the entirety of the Senate hearing at some point. With so much talk about Russia hacking and influence and then they flip the switch and want backdoors into encryption even though any mandated tool the government demands for so called lawful intercept can be hacked by or ordered by the judges in Russia! There is a strange disconnect and I think it hurts us that the public discourse is security vs privacy rather than being about the personal security off all citizens.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
I_am_neo 9y ago
As a sovereign I demand my privacy!
_jal 9y ago
The Four Horseman of the Infocalypse[1] ride again! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
notliketherest 9y ago
This is not a battle they can win. Most American's DGAF if their shit is encrypted, until the PSA campaign fighting against laws like these tells them the government is taking away their rights and able to snoop on their lives. Just like SOPA and others this will be defeated.
- shrimp_emoji 9y ago
  Are you sure? Yet again, privacy is being challenged, and it'll continue to be challenged. It seems like a battle with entropy, lost whenever a bill squeaks by under the public's consciousness. Regardless, I derive emotional sustenance from your optimism.
- jliptzin 9y ago
  I would not be so sure of that. I really believe the President's guiding principle is to do whatever it is that will enrage liberals the most. If Republicans see that liberals want strong encryption, they might decide to oppose it just to piss off liberals. It's amazing to me that a lot of the same people advocating gun rights are also the ones that support government mandated encryption backdoors.
  - PKop 9y ago
    Eh.. it's messy isn't it. Politically motivated libertarians strongly support both 2nd amendment and oppose back doors. Generally speaking, the govt is always seen as the biggest threat to guard against. Probabaly the ones supportive of backdoors are as you said, simply "trusting" of the current leader they voted for but would immediately oppose the same policy coming from a Democrat. ...which is the exact impulse and logic that should push all partisans to distrust government power to snoop on communications. There will always be someone in charge somewhere that you don't trust.
    - NoGravitas 9y ago
      As a libertarian socialist, I continually struggle to get US progressives to understand this argument.
microcolonel 9y ago
Good sentiment, and better cause... but please, for the love of god, proofread your writing!
- rietta 9y ago
  Thank you.
shmerl 9y ago
Some just never learn. How many times will they bring up this "let's make a backdoor but we don't really want a backdoor" stupidity?
nom 9y ago
The greatest problem right now is our hardware, not our software. We can always devise secure encryption schemes without backdoors. Nobody can do anything against it. Our hardware on the other hand... is probably backdoored already.
azinman2 9y ago
Wait does he have a Masters in Information Security from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology???! Joking aside, unfortunately it takes deep problems to motivate people/the US to change. It'll swing this way, and there will be dramatic consequences. Only then will things swing back the other way. It's too bad there isn't any balance here -- it does make sense in many situations that the police/courts should be able to gain access to information. But encryption doesn't care about the situation. Encryption doesn't care who you are. Encryption has no contextual morales of its own. If data had physical weight, where things that were important we're really hard to steal, then it'd function like the real world. But data does not, and it's too easy to download gigs of data one should never have access to. It's very difficult to gain a middle ground as suggested by Pelosi. I don't know if she understands that.
- xapata 9y ago
  It looks like you forgot to pay your Squarespace bill: "This account has expired. ( http://empiric.al http://empiric.al )" Joking aside, I guess you're saying that leading with credentials in an article is unnecessary if that article is relatively short and you've got a bio blurb at the bottom of the page?
  - rietta 9y ago
    That's actually a good point. I originally wrote this as a private message to each of the Congressional candidates in the Georgia 6th district and in that format there was not the bio and all the surrounding blog template. It feels weird to be to lead with it too, but I'm trying to answer real quick to a politician who does not know the science why he or she should read on to the next paragraph.
    - xapata 9y ago
      I think you're discovering that text written for one medium might benefit from revision when published elsewhere. :-) Also, I think it's reasonable these days to write hardcopy letters that look more like websites -- multiple columns, a bio section, etc. Don't restrict yourself to obsolete and arbitrary etiquette.
paulddraper 9y ago
Encryption will never be intentionally backdoored on a large scale. I think one of RSA argued this, basically "Do you really think the government will want to review and approve everything on the app store?" Forcing big players to divulge data, making accused people decrypt their devices -- those are things the government could do. Encryption per se isn't in any danger.
- CoryG89 9y ago
  I don't think it is the encryption protocols at risk really. Secure protocols exist now, they will continue to exist. It is the future hardware implementations and closed source software implementations that we will no longer be able to trust.
  - bumblebeard 9y ago
    Are we currently able to trust hardware and closed source software implementations?
    - kakarot 9y ago
      That's a negative, Ghost Rider
- rocqua 9y ago
  The government doesn't review every app on the app-store to check whether it complies with CIPA (Children Internet Protection Act). And yet, most apps do comply. Why? because people don't like to break laws, especially when the fines are rather large.
deepnet 9y ago
> ... "protected being being stolen." repetition error.
- rietta 9y ago
  Deploying an update to remove the duplicate word now. Thank you.
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    Also, > The cybersecurity threats that face our nation are very important to my wife and I. "to my wife and me"
    - andyjohnson0 9y ago
      "my wife and I" is fine. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/i-or-me https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/i-or-me
      - mirimir 9y ago
        No, it's not, and your cite teaches that it's not. I went to the store. My wife and I went to the store. They loved me. They loved my wife and me.
      - Myrmornis 9y ago
        Um, what? You have linked to an explanation of why it's not fine. This mistake is getting more and more common, even among educated people. It's quite embarrassing/funny because it stems from a belief that "I" is inherently more "educated", and the result sounds anything but. I know us English speakers can't speak any non-English languages, in contrast to the rest of the educated world, but it's really not too much to ask for us to be able to comprehend the concept of subject of a sentence. Our parents' and grandparents' generations managed it fine, in fact would have been mortified to make a mistake like this.
        9y ago
xupybd 9y ago
Just think of the outrage if the government required master keys to everyone's homes? I know there is a difference, but it's not a huge leap to compare the two. We don't want the government to have such easy access to our homes because we can't trust every government employee not to abuse it. I think the same goes here. No mater what safe guards you put in place it's a scary thought that you simply can't keep the government out of your affair's. Sure now you think you have nothing to hide. But what if your political views become criminal, what if your religious views become hate speech? We're not there yet but times can change quickly.
- bo1024 9y ago
  Not to mention the chance that a buearocrat loses their copy of the master key, or has it stolen or secretly copied, and before you know it thousands of criminals have access to every home in the country. After the damage is done, we go through a large expense to re-key every house with new locks and the process continues. I think it's a good analogy.
  - jwfxpr 9y ago
    This is essentially the case right now with TSA key designs available with little trouble online. https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-luggage-keys-leaked-photos/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugg...
- joering2 9y ago
  I think its not a correct comparison. The reason government doesn't have or need keys to every house, because no matter how many lock you put on your door, government (SWAT team, for example) can break in anyways, if deem necessary. So for this reason alone if they truly want to... every house can be and will be open to them, no matter what. Meanwhile here the locks are based on sophisticated math.. and that math is smarter or more complicated than the largest compute power they can get hold of.. hence make your virtual locks unbreakable. I think that's the whole issue they have here.
  - 9y ago
sandworm101 9y ago
Access is under no risk whatsoever. Encryption is math. It is open source. It will always be there. What is at risk is the legal right to use it, the government's permission for the public to use that math. My point: people with good reason to fear the government will still access and use encryption. This therefore isn't about terrorists. It is about watching the everyday people who want to abide by the law.
feld 9y ago
Bernstein v. United States
pinaceae 9y ago
As if they'd give a shit. Right now they want to un-insure 24mil people, re-introduce the whole pre-existing condition scam. you really think a ruling class that has no qualms being "pro-life" while denying young mothers healthcare will care about your nerd bullshit?
WalterBright 9y ago
It isn't just our privacy at issue. With more and more critical infrastructure on the internet, having unbreakable encryption is a major national economic and national security requirement. It's unrealistic to think that if there is a means for access by the government, that foreign enemies and criminal organizations won't be able to access it, too, and cause havoc.
- rietta 9y ago
  Very, very true!
nickpsecurity 9y ago
A better example of work that Congress might be interested in would be Schneier and Kerr's writeup on encryption workarounds showing government tools they have available with legal considerations of current or expanded ones. That's the kind of practical stuff that can influence powerful people's opinion as they're always looking at grey areas to balance many conflicting interests. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/new_paper_on_en.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/new_paper_on_...
libeclipse 9y ago
I did my Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) [1] on this issue, and it actually surprised me how many people think that the governments are right in this debate. When presenting the work, I had a chance to ask ordinary people, and they all pretty much agreed that the government should be able to "break" encryption with a warrant. This is a scary prospect, and I feel that educating citizens as well as the government is important. [1] https://github.com/libeclipse/EPQ/blob/master/paper.pdf https://github.com/libeclipse/EPQ/blob/master/paper.pdf
- braveo 9y ago
  They're right, they just don't understand it doesn't really work like that. In theory, being able to break encryption with a warrant is exactly the right scenario. In practice, if you an break it with a warrant, someone else can break it without a warrant and can do so without your knowledge.
  - libeclipse 9y ago
    You're absolutely right. Encryption is either strong for everyone all of the time, or it isn't.
threepipeproblm 9y ago
I read that Sen. Diane Feinsetin is supporting an anti-encryption bill. It's never been completely clear to me if she, and those like her, fall more on the stupid side, or more on the evil side. But the arguments against this aren't that difficult... so I have to guess it's the evil. Power corrupts.
spilk 9y ago
The US Department of Defense arguably runs the most extensive key escrow system in the world. Every DoD employee and many contractors have Common Access Cards (CAC) that contain email encryption keys that are escrowed with DISA.
- sitkack 9y ago
  God I love Starship Troopers. Heinlein was a true patriot.

362 points by rietta 9y ago

Does anyone here remember the clipper chip? If you don't, I'd recommend boning up on this chapter of the crypto wars. The 'because terrorism' excuse falls a bit flat with me. Thought experiment: how hard would it be for a terrorist organization with access to 100's of millions of dollars (eg. ISIS) to come up with a secure communications scheme? One time pad. A reasonable cipher that hasn't had any 'help' during development. Even run an encrypted channel over a backdoored product. I'm sure many of us could come up with something in a day (with decryption over an airgap). How about a hostile government with multi-billion dollar budgets (and who have been using OTP already for decades). Is this about terrorists, or is this about citizens? My bet is on the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

sitkack 9y ago
The Clintons and Al Gore have their paws all over the Clipper Chip.
- acdha 9y ago
  It's a grave mistake to demonize a single politician you dislike: if it were that simple, they'd have dropped it as soon as that one person left office. In reality, there's a large community pushing for things which they perceive as making their job easier and that persists across administrations — that started well before Clinton ran for office and certainly didn't end after he left.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    You are putting words in my mouth. I demonize no one. My feelings about them (The Clintons) have indeed declined over the years. I mostly have huge respect for Al Gore. But my personal feelings have absolutely nothing do to with their material involvement with the Clipper Chip. Nor do I care when it started. They all carried the baton of government key escrow which is not something I am going to forget. It is a grave mistake to not hold people accountable for their actions, to not take a stand while the bureaucracy pushes you along with the current.
    - acdha 9y ago
      “paws” isn't a neutral term – it has strong negative connotations. My point was simply that while, yes, Bill Clinton ultimately owns his official actions, it's naive to ignore the massive weight of the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus, especially coming off of the Cold War footing, on a subject where he was hearing from a lot of experts in government and business saying this was a good move.
  - libeclipse 9y ago
    If you disagree with someone, the right thing to do is to put forward your own side of the argument. It isn't polite to simply disregard what someone says because of your conceptions about where that belief is coming from.
    - acdha 9y ago
      Is it polite to pompously lecture someone about making an argument while ignoring the one they made?
      - libeclipse 9y ago
        Rather that than attack the straw man.
rietta 9y ago
I was too young at the time to understand it then, but based on history its a good thing that the ill-planned scheme did not become law.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

natch 9y ago

For congressional consumption, I suspect arguments like this need to be dumbed way, way, down. Tim Cook's "software equivalent of cancer" is an example of an effective dumbed down take on it, but it need not be the last one. The more ways the point can be re-worded concisely so that lay people will understand it, the better.

Nomentatus 9y ago

The irony here is that simple one-time-pad solutions (OTP) will continue to be available to securely encrypt the sort of messaging that's of use to terrorists (relatively short infrequent messages), instead it's the general communications (including for banking) that the rest of us perform online that will be made vulnerable. You don't even have to program or use a computer to create these OTP solutions, for limited messages you could just flip a coin to create the OTP if necessary (although there are lots of more automated solutions available as well.) Airgapped computers at both ends provide another way 'round restrictions for more sophisticated actors. Their backdoors won't be accessible (remotely.) So taking away secure encryption from the rest of us is just security theatre; a destructive, narcissistic legislative exercise designed to make it look like the pompous powerful doing something when they're doing nothing of any real use while creating terrible risks. This is why, I think, legislators have consistently ignoring logic and math from professionals such as the OP - they don't care. They know perfectly well they're pissing into the wind doing nothing useful; that it's all theatre; they just think the fallout is going to land on someone else's pants after they're out of office. But tech works (and fails) faster than that. [Counterargument: if everything else is breakable, securely encrypted messages really stand out. One answer: But very short messages (in an unknown format) aren't generally breakable, anyway, and that's the likely case.]

rietta 9y ago
One time pads are perfect! Everything less than that trades security for convenience. So true.
- omginternets 9y ago
  Key management is a very real issue in cryptographic systems. Arguably, convenient key management improves security. Simplistic interpretations are the bane of security engineering, especially where human factors are involved.
  - rietta 9y ago
    Indeed. I'm about to have a form of that conversation with a client today. Just encrypting columns in your database is of some value, but having the symmetric key in an environment variable (a common practice) is not going to prevent a breach when the data and the key are compromised at the same time.

rietta 9y ago

I'm going to have to go back to listen to the entirety of the Senate hearing at some point. With so much talk about Russia hacking and influence and then they flip the switch and want backdoors into encryption even though any mandated tool the government demands for so called lawful intercept can be hacked by or ordered by the judges in Russia! There is a strange disconnect and I think it hurts us that the public discourse is security vs privacy rather than being about the personal security off all citizens.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

I_am_neo 9y ago

As a sovereign I demand my privacy!

_jal 9y ago

The Four Horseman of the Infocalypse[1] ride again! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

notliketherest 9y ago

This is not a battle they can win. Most American's DGAF if their shit is encrypted, until the PSA campaign fighting against laws like these tells them the government is taking away their rights and able to snoop on their lives. Just like SOPA and others this will be defeated.

shrimp_emoji 9y ago
Are you sure? Yet again, privacy is being challenged, and it'll continue to be challenged. It seems like a battle with entropy, lost whenever a bill squeaks by under the public's consciousness. Regardless, I derive emotional sustenance from your optimism.
jliptzin 9y ago
I would not be so sure of that. I really believe the President's guiding principle is to do whatever it is that will enrage liberals the most. If Republicans see that liberals want strong encryption, they might decide to oppose it just to piss off liberals. It's amazing to me that a lot of the same people advocating gun rights are also the ones that support government mandated encryption backdoors.
- PKop 9y ago
  Eh.. it's messy isn't it. Politically motivated libertarians strongly support both 2nd amendment and oppose back doors. Generally speaking, the govt is always seen as the biggest threat to guard against. Probabaly the ones supportive of backdoors are as you said, simply "trusting" of the current leader they voted for but would immediately oppose the same policy coming from a Democrat. ...which is the exact impulse and logic that should push all partisans to distrust government power to snoop on communications. There will always be someone in charge somewhere that you don't trust.
  - NoGravitas 9y ago
    As a libertarian socialist, I continually struggle to get US progressives to understand this argument.

microcolonel 9y ago

Good sentiment, and better cause... but please, for the love of god, proofread your writing!

rietta 9y ago
Thank you.

shmerl 9y ago

Some just never learn. How many times will they bring up this "let's make a backdoor but we don't really want a backdoor" stupidity?

nom 9y ago

The greatest problem right now is our hardware, not our software. We can always devise secure encryption schemes without backdoors. Nobody can do anything against it. Our hardware on the other hand... is probably backdoored already.

azinman2 9y ago

Wait does he have a Masters in Information Security from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology???! Joking aside, unfortunately it takes deep problems to motivate people/the US to change. It'll swing this way, and there will be dramatic consequences. Only then will things swing back the other way. It's too bad there isn't any balance here -- it does make sense in many situations that the police/courts should be able to gain access to information. But encryption doesn't care about the situation. Encryption doesn't care who you are. Encryption has no contextual morales of its own. If data had physical weight, where things that were important we're really hard to steal, then it'd function like the real world. But data does not, and it's too easy to download gigs of data one should never have access to. It's very difficult to gain a middle ground as suggested by Pelosi. I don't know if she understands that.

xapata 9y ago
It looks like you forgot to pay your Squarespace bill: "This account has expired. ( http://empiric.al http://empiric.al )" Joking aside, I guess you're saying that leading with credentials in an article is unnecessary if that article is relatively short and you've got a bio blurb at the bottom of the page?
- rietta 9y ago
  That's actually a good point. I originally wrote this as a private message to each of the Congressional candidates in the Georgia 6th district and in that format there was not the bio and all the surrounding blog template. It feels weird to be to lead with it too, but I'm trying to answer real quick to a politician who does not know the science why he or she should read on to the next paragraph.
  - xapata 9y ago
    I think you're discovering that text written for one medium might benefit from revision when published elsewhere. :-) Also, I think it's reasonable these days to write hardcopy letters that look more like websites -- multiple columns, a bio section, etc. Don't restrict yourself to obsolete and arbitrary etiquette.

paulddraper 9y ago

Encryption will never be intentionally backdoored on a large scale. I think one of RSA argued this, basically "Do you really think the government will want to review and approve everything on the app store?" Forcing big players to divulge data, making accused people decrypt their devices -- those are things the government could do. Encryption per se isn't in any danger.

CoryG89 9y ago
I don't think it is the encryption protocols at risk really. Secure protocols exist now, they will continue to exist. It is the future hardware implementations and closed source software implementations that we will no longer be able to trust.
- bumblebeard 9y ago
  Are we currently able to trust hardware and closed source software implementations?
  - kakarot 9y ago
    That's a negative, Ghost Rider
rocqua 9y ago
The government doesn't review every app on the app-store to check whether it complies with CIPA (Children Internet Protection Act). And yet, most apps do comply. Why? because people don't like to break laws, especially when the fines are rather large.

deepnet 9y ago

> ... "protected being being stolen." repetition error.

rietta 9y ago
Deploying an update to remove the duplicate word now. Thank you.
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  Also, > The cybersecurity threats that face our nation are very important to my wife and I. "to my wife and me"
  - andyjohnson0 9y ago
    "my wife and I" is fine. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/i-or-me https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/i-or-me
    - mirimir 9y ago
      No, it's not, and your cite teaches that it's not. I went to the store. My wife and I went to the store. They loved me. They loved my wife and me.
    - Myrmornis 9y ago
      Um, what? You have linked to an explanation of why it's not fine. This mistake is getting more and more common, even among educated people. It's quite embarrassing/funny because it stems from a belief that "I" is inherently more "educated", and the result sounds anything but. I know us English speakers can't speak any non-English languages, in contrast to the rest of the educated world, but it's really not too much to ask for us to be able to comprehend the concept of subject of a sentence. Our parents' and grandparents' generations managed it fine, in fact would have been mortified to make a mistake like this.
      - 9y ago

xupybd 9y ago

Just think of the outrage if the government required master keys to everyone's homes? I know there is a difference, but it's not a huge leap to compare the two. We don't want the government to have such easy access to our homes because we can't trust every government employee not to abuse it. I think the same goes here. No mater what safe guards you put in place it's a scary thought that you simply can't keep the government out of your affair's. Sure now you think you have nothing to hide. But what if your political views become criminal, what if your religious views become hate speech? We're not there yet but times can change quickly.

bo1024 9y ago
Not to mention the chance that a buearocrat loses their copy of the master key, or has it stolen or secretly copied, and before you know it thousands of criminals have access to every home in the country. After the damage is done, we go through a large expense to re-key every house with new locks and the process continues. I think it's a good analogy.
- jwfxpr 9y ago
  This is essentially the case right now with TSA key designs available with little trouble online. https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-luggage-keys-leaked-photos/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugg...
joering2 9y ago
I think its not a correct comparison. The reason government doesn't have or need keys to every house, because no matter how many lock you put on your door, government (SWAT team, for example) can break in anyways, if deem necessary. So for this reason alone if they truly want to... every house can be and will be open to them, no matter what. Meanwhile here the locks are based on sophisticated math.. and that math is smarter or more complicated than the largest compute power they can get hold of.. hence make your virtual locks unbreakable. I think that's the whole issue they have here.
- 9y ago

sandworm101 9y ago

Access is under no risk whatsoever. Encryption is math. It is open source. It will always be there. What is at risk is the legal right to use it, the government's permission for the public to use that math. My point: people with good reason to fear the government will still access and use encryption. This therefore isn't about terrorists. It is about watching the everyday people who want to abide by the law.

feld 9y ago

Bernstein v. United States

pinaceae 9y ago

As if they'd give a shit. Right now they want to un-insure 24mil people, re-introduce the whole pre-existing condition scam. you really think a ruling class that has no qualms being "pro-life" while denying young mothers healthcare will care about your nerd bullshit?

WalterBright 9y ago

It isn't just our privacy at issue. With more and more critical infrastructure on the internet, having unbreakable encryption is a major national economic and national security requirement. It's unrealistic to think that if there is a means for access by the government, that foreign enemies and criminal organizations won't be able to access it, too, and cause havoc.

rietta 9y ago
Very, very true!

nickpsecurity 9y ago

A better example of work that Congress might be interested in would be Schneier and Kerr's writeup on encryption workarounds showing government tools they have available with legal considerations of current or expanded ones. That's the kind of practical stuff that can influence powerful people's opinion as they're always looking at grey areas to balance many conflicting interests. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/new_paper_on_en.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/new_paper_on_...

libeclipse 9y ago

I did my Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) [1] on this issue, and it actually surprised me how many people think that the governments are right in this debate. When presenting the work, I had a chance to ask ordinary people, and they all pretty much agreed that the government should be able to "break" encryption with a warrant. This is a scary prospect, and I feel that educating citizens as well as the government is important. [1] https://github.com/libeclipse/EPQ/blob/master/paper.pdf https://github.com/libeclipse/EPQ/blob/master/paper.pdf

braveo 9y ago
They're right, they just don't understand it doesn't really work like that. In theory, being able to break encryption with a warrant is exactly the right scenario. In practice, if you an break it with a warrant, someone else can break it without a warrant and can do so without your knowledge.
- libeclipse 9y ago
  You're absolutely right. Encryption is either strong for everyone all of the time, or it isn't.

threepipeproblm 9y ago

I read that Sen. Diane Feinsetin is supporting an anti-encryption bill. It's never been completely clear to me if she, and those like her, fall more on the stupid side, or more on the evil side. But the arguments against this aren't that difficult... so I have to guess it's the evil. Power corrupts.

spilk 9y ago

The US Department of Defense arguably runs the most extensive key escrow system in the world. Every DoD employee and many contractors have Common Access Cards (CAC) that contain email encryption keys that are escrowed with DISA.

sitkack 9y ago
God I love Starship Troopers. Heinlein was a true patriot.