8 ms·

The argument here is extremely simple. Encryption is the only way to secure information. This is true for criminals and non-criminals alike. To deny encryption

by unabst 9y ago

The argument here is extremely simple. Encryption is the only way to secure information. This is true for criminals and non-criminals alike. To deny encryption is to deny security to everyone. Presuming it's the criminals who will look to exploit these vulnerabilities, denying security is making every non-criminal susceptible to attack. So the only question that needs to be answered is this. Do we want to protect our citizens? The only answer is yes. The only solution is encryption. The problem with strong encryption is that it already exists. Even if strong encryption were made illegal, criminals will be the one's securing their data despite the law. To deny citizens the right to protect themselves is just putting them all at risk. It's disarmament. Under the law, all the police should need is a warrant. It's not even an exception to any rule.

bradknowles 9y ago
But how do you design a strong encryption algorithm that can be trivially unlocked once a warrant is provided? Answer: you can’t.
- unabst 9y ago
  That's not the point. Like a body buried in the desert, there is nothing that can force a person to reveal anything. Silence is encryption enough when it comes to secrets. Torture doesn't work either. So it's business as usual. It's obstruction of justice. Book'em. And of course, "I can't remember" is always the greatest defense. This whole thing is about the government endangering the public in exchange for abusing their rights. It's all bad. You could go as far as argue that the government is obstructing justice and endangering the public by denying basic security. We already know the enemy will find ways to access all the data. Encryption is not the last line of defense. It's the only line.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Can't remember is a statement that can be disproven. Pleading non self incrimination laws (as per Miranda) is more effective. Even if you have nothing incriminating. This is what DoJ wants to close by making just possession of encrypted documents criminal. (Note: not a lawyer.)
    - garblegarble 9y ago
      >Can't remember is a statement that can be disproven It is? I'm not sure how you'd disprove it. Anecdotally (which I suppose actually matters in this case!) I've had a case where a (fairly long, 26 character) password I used regularly suddenly (and thus far, permanently!) went out of my head. I can remember some fragments of the password but not the whole thing.
      - AstralStorm 9y ago
        If the prosecution has evidence you have recently logged in it will be all upto whether the jury believes you.
      - jasomill 9y ago
        I'd say the point is that the idea that the legal system suddenly has no way to deal with witnesses claiming forgetfulness "because encryption" is absurd. The only novel issues encryption brings to the table involve self incrimination, because, AFAIK, IANAL, etc., the only time an encryption key is inarguably protected by the fifth amendment is where the fact that the defendant knows the key is itself incriminating evidence, because the fifth amendment only applies to self-incriminating testimony, not other self-incriminating evidence in the defendant's possession (e.g., the contents of a hard drive, encrypted or not).
- DropbearRob 9y ago
  my first though as to how you would do this, is that you would implement some kind of key bag. You don't ever own your own private keys, theres a copy of them held in a central repository. they are all centrally stored and can be requested by a warrant. The problem with this of course is that its a truly horrible idea which defeats the whole concept of a private key. Another massive problem here is that you've just created the biggest target for hackers. once the keys are out... everyone is screwed.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  > Answer: you can’t. No, it is incredibly simple. You have a master key and the government holds this key on a secure audited system which can only be used to unlock a device once a court order is granted. The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least. You would also make the master keys expire regularly (maybe daily) so as long as a user updates their phone they will get updated with the new keys to protect against a leaked key.
  - ditn 9y ago
    "incredibly simple"
  - sametmax 9y ago
    If you want all the investigators to be able to open things with the master keys without compromising it, it's not simple at all.
  - Daycrawler 9y ago
    This is called a key escrow, which is known for not working, mainly because the assumptions ("once a court order is granted") can't be implemented technically.
    - saas_co_de 9y ago
      > known for not working care to provide any evidence for that claim? > ("once a court order is granted") can't be implemented technically we live in the real world. if you can't trust your judiciary then your precious little algorithms aren't going to save you. (sorry to be the bearer of bad news)
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - Aaargh20318 9y ago
    > The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least. Yes it will. A single user being careless with their password only exposes that user. Leaking the master key (and it will leak) exposes everyone. The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys, the risks are immense.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  Dual-key encryption. You just have to trust the government not to lose their key.
arkh 9y ago
> Do we want to protect our citizens? The only answer is yes. This is not the right question. It is the one they use but is not the right one. "Do we want our citizen able to protect themselves" is the right question. And as most government have shown, they really don't want it. They want to be in charge of the protecting. Once you see things from their perspective their position makes more sense.
- sametmax 9y ago
  But it's funny that the US is so adament about being able to defend yourself with guns. But with software it's a debate. And it seems that often, the people for guns are against encryption and vice versa. From a european perspective it's so strange.
  - crtasm 9y ago
    Doesn't seem odd to me, the government has bigger and more guns at their disposal and that's the situation they want with encryption too.
    - datavirtue 9y ago
      they have had cases where criminals basically handed them the case by not encrypting their storage. then they run into a case where the criminal had encrypted all of their storage and they have zero access to the data. They are basically that they want to force people not to be careful with their data so they can expose their entire with a simple court document. They don't want to have to do real police work.
  - jerf 9y ago
    The metaphorical person on the street can wrap their head around why having a gun in a person's hand gives that person power. Everyone basically knows that the gun control debate is a debate about who has and is allowed to have power. I'm not sure the metaphorical person on the street even knows encryption exists; if they do, it's only very vague and probably an entirely incorrect understanding of it. As for people who are for one and not the other, even though I'm personally in favor of both the second amendment and encryption in the hands of people, it's not hard to see a meaningful difference between them that would make it reasonable to have differing opinions. Guns in the hands of the populace is a positive power to do harm, encryption in the hands of the populace is strictly defensive. Criminals can use encryption to defend things we'd rather not have defended, but that is fundamentally a different concern that criminals using guns to attack things we'd rather not have attacked. I think the only weird case would be being in favor of gun rights but thinking the government should have back door access to encryption, on the part of someone who deeply understands both. That is to say, I'm sure you can find people who believe both those things, but I suspect the latter is mostly an un-thought-out instinctive reaction to generally trust authority figures who seem generally trustworthy to them combined with a lot of ignorance about what encryption is and how it works. Humans have an all-but-instinctual understanding of physical weapons, encryption is basically magic by comparison.
briandear 9y ago
It’s interesting because these arguments are identical to those that could support the Second Amendment for exactly the same reasons.
saas_co_de 9y ago
> Encryption is the only way to secure information. I am not sure that this argument is simple at all. Encryption only provides theoretical security. In practice even if strong encryption can't be broken it can almost always be bypassed rather trivially if data is being accessed on a regular basis. If data is encrypted and left cold then that can be difficult or impossible to retrieve if a secure key is used and that key has never leaked anywhere but that is a pretty limited use case. For average people encryption provides very little real world security because their data is online on buggy insecure devices all the time so there are always easier ways to compromise their data than breaking crypto. Sophisticated criminals also don't trust encryption and don't use digital devices at all.
- thisacctforreal 9y ago
  This ignores transport encryption, which is the bulk of what protects you on a daily basis from street criminals.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Interesting example. Transport encryption provides basically no real world security at all. The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of millions of credit cards with full PII available for sale so it is almost certain that whatever PII you are sending over your highly secure connection is already in the hands of criminals. The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen so there is a very low chance that you will be a victim of identity theft, but it has nothing to do with transport layer encryption.
    - datavirtue 9y ago
      "The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen" This is pretty much the case, to include security vulnerabilities in most systems as well. Most just are not exploited because their arent enough criminals with enough time.
    - 9y ago
amelius 9y ago
> Even if strong encryption were made illegal, criminals will be the ones securing their data despite the law. Well, anybody can hide their use of encryption by using steganography, [1]. E.g. you just piggy-back your secret file as noise on top of a legitimate file. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
- amelius 9y ago
  Or you write an email to your friend, saying: Hi Alice, I just did a billion coin-tosses, and the outcomes were: HTTHHTHTHHTHHTHHTHHTTTHTHTHTTTHHTHTTHT ... Regards, Bob
  - vog 9y ago
    What's the point of such an email? If you consider police officers and judges to be that stupid, you don't even need that. You can simply say: "No, my hard drive isn't encrypted, I'm just collecting white noise." The whole point of steganography is to not raise suspiciousness in the first place.
    - iamnothere 9y ago
      What if you were to use the noise (encrypted data on a hard drive) as a one time pad to send obviously innocent messages to your friend, messages you could produce the plaintext for on demand? With the right setup it would appear very innocent, if a little strange.

by unabst 9y ago

bradknowles 9y ago

But how do you design a strong encryption algorithm that can be trivially unlocked once a warrant is provided? Answer: you can’t.

unabst 9y ago
That's not the point. Like a body buried in the desert, there is nothing that can force a person to reveal anything. Silence is encryption enough when it comes to secrets. Torture doesn't work either. So it's business as usual. It's obstruction of justice. Book'em. And of course, "I can't remember" is always the greatest defense. This whole thing is about the government endangering the public in exchange for abusing their rights. It's all bad. You could go as far as argue that the government is obstructing justice and endangering the public by denying basic security. We already know the enemy will find ways to access all the data. Encryption is not the last line of defense. It's the only line.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Can't remember is a statement that can be disproven. Pleading non self incrimination laws (as per Miranda) is more effective. Even if you have nothing incriminating. This is what DoJ wants to close by making just possession of encrypted documents criminal. (Note: not a lawyer.)
  - garblegarble 9y ago
    >Can't remember is a statement that can be disproven It is? I'm not sure how you'd disprove it. Anecdotally (which I suppose actually matters in this case!) I've had a case where a (fairly long, 26 character) password I used regularly suddenly (and thus far, permanently!) went out of my head. I can remember some fragments of the password but not the whole thing.
    - AstralStorm 9y ago
      If the prosecution has evidence you have recently logged in it will be all upto whether the jury believes you.
    - jasomill 9y ago
      I'd say the point is that the idea that the legal system suddenly has no way to deal with witnesses claiming forgetfulness "because encryption" is absurd. The only novel issues encryption brings to the table involve self incrimination, because, AFAIK, IANAL, etc., the only time an encryption key is inarguably protected by the fifth amendment is where the fact that the defendant knows the key is itself incriminating evidence, because the fifth amendment only applies to self-incriminating testimony, not other self-incriminating evidence in the defendant's possession (e.g., the contents of a hard drive, encrypted or not).
DropbearRob 9y ago
my first though as to how you would do this, is that you would implement some kind of key bag. You don't ever own your own private keys, theres a copy of them held in a central repository. they are all centrally stored and can be requested by a warrant. The problem with this of course is that its a truly horrible idea which defeats the whole concept of a private key. Another massive problem here is that you've just created the biggest target for hackers. once the keys are out... everyone is screwed.
saas_co_de 9y ago
> Answer: you can’t. No, it is incredibly simple. You have a master key and the government holds this key on a secure audited system which can only be used to unlock a device once a court order is granted. The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least. You would also make the master keys expire regularly (maybe daily) so as long as a user updates their phone they will get updated with the new keys to protect against a leaked key.
- ditn 9y ago
  "incredibly simple"
- sametmax 9y ago
  If you want all the investigators to be able to open things with the master keys without compromising it, it's not simple at all.
- Daycrawler 9y ago
  This is called a key escrow, which is known for not working, mainly because the assumptions ("once a court order is granted") can't be implemented technically.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    > known for not working care to provide any evidence for that claim? > ("once a court order is granted") can't be implemented technically we live in the real world. if you can't trust your judiciary then your precious little algorithms aren't going to save you. (sorry to be the bearer of bad news)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- Aaargh20318 9y ago
  > The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least. Yes it will. A single user being careless with their password only exposes that user. Leaking the master key (and it will leak) exposes everyone. The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys, the risks are immense.
0xfeba 9y ago
Dual-key encryption. You just have to trust the government not to lose their key.

arkh 9y ago

> Do we want to protect our citizens? The only answer is yes. This is not the right question. It is the one they use but is not the right one. "Do we want our citizen able to protect themselves" is the right question. And as most government have shown, they really don't want it. They want to be in charge of the protecting. Once you see things from their perspective their position makes more sense.

sametmax 9y ago
But it's funny that the US is so adament about being able to defend yourself with guns. But with software it's a debate. And it seems that often, the people for guns are against encryption and vice versa. From a european perspective it's so strange.
- crtasm 9y ago
  Doesn't seem odd to me, the government has bigger and more guns at their disposal and that's the situation they want with encryption too.
  - datavirtue 9y ago
    they have had cases where criminals basically handed them the case by not encrypting their storage. then they run into a case where the criminal had encrypted all of their storage and they have zero access to the data. They are basically that they want to force people not to be careful with their data so they can expose their entire with a simple court document. They don't want to have to do real police work.
- jerf 9y ago
  The metaphorical person on the street can wrap their head around why having a gun in a person's hand gives that person power. Everyone basically knows that the gun control debate is a debate about who has and is allowed to have power. I'm not sure the metaphorical person on the street even knows encryption exists; if they do, it's only very vague and probably an entirely incorrect understanding of it. As for people who are for one and not the other, even though I'm personally in favor of both the second amendment and encryption in the hands of people, it's not hard to see a meaningful difference between them that would make it reasonable to have differing opinions. Guns in the hands of the populace is a positive power to do harm, encryption in the hands of the populace is strictly defensive. Criminals can use encryption to defend things we'd rather not have defended, but that is fundamentally a different concern that criminals using guns to attack things we'd rather not have attacked. I think the only weird case would be being in favor of gun rights but thinking the government should have back door access to encryption, on the part of someone who deeply understands both. That is to say, I'm sure you can find people who believe both those things, but I suspect the latter is mostly an un-thought-out instinctive reaction to generally trust authority figures who seem generally trustworthy to them combined with a lot of ignorance about what encryption is and how it works. Humans have an all-but-instinctual understanding of physical weapons, encryption is basically magic by comparison.

briandear 9y ago

It’s interesting because these arguments are identical to those that could support the Second Amendment for exactly the same reasons.

saas_co_de 9y ago

> Encryption is the only way to secure information. I am not sure that this argument is simple at all. Encryption only provides theoretical security. In practice even if strong encryption can't be broken it can almost always be bypassed rather trivially if data is being accessed on a regular basis. If data is encrypted and left cold then that can be difficult or impossible to retrieve if a secure key is used and that key has never leaked anywhere but that is a pretty limited use case. For average people encryption provides very little real world security because their data is online on buggy insecure devices all the time so there are always easier ways to compromise their data than breaking crypto. Sophisticated criminals also don't trust encryption and don't use digital devices at all.

thisacctforreal 9y ago
This ignores transport encryption, which is the bulk of what protects you on a daily basis from street criminals.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Interesting example. Transport encryption provides basically no real world security at all. The fact of the matter is that there are hundreds of millions of credit cards with full PII available for sale so it is almost certain that whatever PII you are sending over your highly secure connection is already in the hands of criminals. The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen so there is a very low chance that you will be a victim of identity theft, but it has nothing to do with transport layer encryption.
  - datavirtue 9y ago
    "The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen" This is pretty much the case, to include security vulnerabilities in most systems as well. Most just are not exploited because their arent enough criminals with enough time.
  - 9y ago

amelius 9y ago

> Even if strong encryption were made illegal, criminals will be the ones securing their data despite the law. Well, anybody can hide their use of encryption by using steganography, [1]. E.g. you just piggy-back your secret file as noise on top of a legitimate file. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

amelius 9y ago
Or you write an email to your friend, saying: Hi Alice, I just did a billion coin-tosses, and the outcomes were: HTTHHTHTHHTHHTHHTHHTTTHTHTHTTTHHTHTTHT ... Regards, Bob
- vog 9y ago
  What's the point of such an email? If you consider police officers and judges to be that stupid, you don't even need that. You can simply say: "No, my hard drive isn't encrypted, I'm just collecting white noise." The whole point of steganography is to not raise suspiciousness in the first place.
  - iamnothere 9y ago
    What if you were to use the noise (encrypted data on a hard drive) as a one time pad to send obviously innocent messages to your friend, messages you could produce the plaintext for on demand? With the right setup it would appear very innocent, if a little strange.