15 ms·
Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making
- scottoreily 7y agoBarr killed Epstein and everyone knows it and nobody cares
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cs702 7y agoThis is a terrible article. There are ZERO mentions of the risks and tradeoffs inherent to mandating or requiring backdoor access. Here is a good summary of such risks: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690
- seibelj 7y ago> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved? OK boomer? Seriously, the reason the problem is still around is because the solution will destroy the digital economy. The government is populated by luddites.
- save_ferris 7y agoI don't think it has as much to do with the government being populated by luddites as it does with having the government being populated by people who want more power. They're clearly not arguing from the perspective that their solution is the most technologically feasible. They're arguing very clearly that they don't have the power they "need" to do their jobs. It's that simple.
- notashoxk9393 7y agoNot a shock. Nixon era politicians have been seething over having their hands tied by laws that effectively curb literal panopticon. Trump and other right wingers (Rand Paul for one) are on record fuming over the laws that explicitly block political bribery. Hello Citizens United. Can’t be illegal if it’s protected speech! Dems sells us out to the rich, equivocate over universal healthcare while families die off from curable disease, locks up peaceful whistleblowers, bomb other nations with impunity. GOP abuses, murders, kicks puppies in plain view with impunity. We police each other by making us fear for our jobs. HR is watching. Those metrics are not going up fast enough. We stare at screens that don’t have to watch us cause we watch them tell us how it’s all just right. Pray to the all mighty profit margin harder! Brave new world you got there.
- mewse-hn 7y agoI still remember Comey saying that only criminals need encryption
- martamoreno2 7y agoThere is nothing in the making. Some government moron came up with this nonsense 30 years ago and now they just can't move past this stupid, self-defeating idea.
- xenospn 7y agoSee: war on drugs.
- djohnston 7y agoDamn war on drugs is almost 50
- hyperbovine 7y ago48 years and 7 months, according to Wikipedia!
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoDrugs won the war on drugs.
- clamprecht 7y agohttp://archive.is/Zz6zx http://archive.is/Zz6zx
- wjsetzer 7y agoThanks. Currently stuck on the wrong side of their paywall.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago> You’re going to find a way to do this or we’re going to do this for you How? By decreeing that use of encryption is evidence of guilt?
- rcoveson 7y agoThere's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards the latter, and I think this is the reason: My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history. So why is it that there is so much support for tough-on-crime policies that decrease popular freedom in obvious ways? Why does it seem like the less people are affected by crime, the more they abhor it and feel the need to root it out to the last, no matter the cost? There are diminishing returns here. The price we pay to track down the last criminal on Earth will be _everything_.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Ben Franklin No one likes to say this but your average citizen is either not smart enough or doesn't care enough to understand statistics... so sensationalism wins.
- skybrian 7y agoBen Franklin would have done well on Twitter, but this is in essence a snappy Revolution War slogan, nothing more. It makes a false binary distinction and real world decisions are more complicated.
- krapp 7y ago>Ben Franklin would have done well on Twitter, but this is in essence a snappy Revolution War slogan, nothing more. It actually isn't, it's a snippet of a greater dialogue with often taken out of context in order to to infer precisely the opposite meaning of what was intended[0,1]. Ben Franklin understood the nuance and complexity of the real world better than many of the libertarians and ancaps who quote him.. [0]https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-benjamin-franklins-quote-on-liberty-vs-security/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be... [1]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
- throw7 7y agoPCR (paywall couldn't read). Barr should hook up with these academics instead: https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-failed-technology-harming-children-dissidents-and-journalists https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-failed-t... Then he can get the pols to push the ever popular "for the children" narrative and have legislation slipped through the child protection act bill to mandate backdoors to encryption.
- unnouinceput 7y agoQuote: "He views the current conflict as similar to one that was emerging when he led the Justice Department in the early 1990s, they said, when law enforcement’s wiretapping efforts were disrupted by newly emerging digital technology." Translation (also this can be viewed as a resume for entire article): The powers in charge are pissed off because they lost a tiny percent of their control and want it back.
- javajosh 7y agoGo through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were like this in the west. Law enforcement officers (and politicians) must confront the simple fact that they must accept the restraints that the law places on them, even if it means letting the bad guy get away with it. Getting the bad guy at any cost ("Tango and Cash" style) makes a fun movie but it undermines the freedoms that our ancestors (by both blood and principal) fought and died for.
- dgzl 7y agoBut what about the children?
- robomartin 7y ago> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them. This is a massive difference with other systems that lots of people, both inside and outside the US are not aware of. Take the right to bare arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government. Here's the key difference between "grant" and "recognize": The government can't take away that which it does not own, did not and cannot grant. An example of a right (well, a privilege) government can take away is your driver's license. They grant it and they can take it away. In the case of firearms, the US government does not have the ability to confiscate weapons because that is not a right the government granted and, therefore, they don't have unilateral power to cancel that right with a simple bill. In fact, it takes a tremendously complex agreement across all States and the federal government to make any changes to the US Constitution (2/3 majority in the Senate, House and all 50 State Legislatures). Even that does not guarantee government to have the right to eliminate rights. This is good. This means, among other things, that the government can't take your freedom of speech away because they do not own it, they did not grant it. It is recognized as a fundamental right. All rights in the Bill of Rights are equal in this sense (as far as I know). If we weaken one of them (as many want to do with firearms) you run the risk of opening Pandora's box and exposing the people to government control of rights. It's an interesting problem. Coming from this perspective it is hard to understand why people in any nation would want to live in an environment where the government owns and grants rights --and can take them away at will. If the idea is that government works for us --they are our representatives-- why in the world would it make sense that they would be able to take away our rights? Imperfect analogy: It's like a project manager hiring a worker and then having that worker fire the project manager. PS.: A lot of anti-gun activists keep pointing at places like New Zealand and their gun confiscation and buy-back programs. The typical cry is "We should do the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that right. And it can't take it away. In many ways this kind of activism is nothing less than futile and even nonsensical. It's almost like demanding that we change the gravitational constant in that it is about as likely.
- hanniabu 7y agoAnybody have a non-paywall link? Every one I try just links to WSJ.
- wyxuan 7y agoencryption regulations by people who don't understand encryption. this is encryption export ban 2.0
- ohazi 7y agoThe differences in opinion on this topic are almost entirely defined by whether or not the person has the most basic understanding of what cryptography actually is. Comment #1: > This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the government mandates. Comment #2: > Encryption is an issue that Congress needs to resolve. However, there has not been any leadership on this issue for several decades. Apparently, there is no lobby and fundraising money to be made by either party and it does not win any votes, so Congress is not interested. Until the leadership vacuum in Congress is resolved this problem and many others will not go away. It's obvious where Barr falls: > Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved? Maybe we should be teaching this stuff in high school. The pseudocode for RSA is like twelve lines. Outlawing it is not practical.
- joe_the_user 7y agoI sympathize with your position but I think we need to imagine the counter argument the state would make. That argument would be "you don't understand the determination of the state. If you are correct and the threat exists in basic arithmatic and if we determine the threat is too great, we outlaw basic arithmatic. That is the level the state will go to." See O'Brien's speech in concerning "if we determine that 1+1 equals 3, we will make 1+1 equal 3", etc. IE, yes, it's impossible but that still doesn't mean they keep trying harder and harder and more and more destructively.
- ohazi 7y agoYou're right of course, but theory and practice look very different. The "I don't care how cryptography works, why can't we just have a backdoor?" crowd is imagining that a magical piece of "common sense" legislation is capable of solving this problem. Yes, they can pass something, but it isn't going to work. Because two days after it passes, they'll have courts full of obstinate people who refuse to provide keys for their homebrew encrypted messaging systems. Sure, you can jail them indefinitely, but that just highlights how obviously unsolved the problem remains.
- graycat 7y ago> WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William Barr returned to the Justice Department last year, law-enforcement officials briefed him on how encryption and other digital-security measures were hindering investigations into everything from child sex abuse to terrorism. > Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved? So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"? It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of digits. Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct public key infrastructures. The math and corresponding source code became readily available. So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital information that only intended persons can decrypt and read. This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996. etc. In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc. So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996. LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well! So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996? I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating? Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are cinema noir of crime dramas. In general it's interesting to use those old movies to get insight into what US pop culture was like, and how different it was from the present, those several decades ago. In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier! So, if Apple wants to use unbreakable encryption to sell smartphones, around the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those old movies!
- anon463637 7y agoI'm surprised he's not joining the Starr/Dershowitz impeachment defense. BTW, Dershowitz wrote a book that boldly, intellectually-dishonestly conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In his mind, Godwin's law doesn't exist and anyone who's critical of Israel must be silenced by waving around dishonest, duplicitous, hasty generalizations for purely political purposes. Also, pro-Likud college groups (who are often funded and staffed by Likud) also do this very effectively to nonviolent, peaceful BDS supporters; they want no debate, just banning, canceling and expelling anyone who's against their crusade to keep the Christian evangelicals giving them carte blanche in the West Bank and giving them billions.
- blackflame 7y agoI’m a republican and I totally disagree with Barr’s push. I honestly believe that once enough people explain to Trump the implications of unlocking one phone he’s pragmatic enough not to unbottle that genie. He’s been much more reserved than many would have expected given the loudness of his bark.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoI guess that may be part of the issue. For better or worse, I check president's twitter feed from time to time and one of his recent shares includes a talking point about Apple not helping with the phone. One would think he would want to not let goverment have this power, but, well, perception of things depend on where you sit. Right now he sits in the WH.
- blackflame 7y agoIf you recall, this situation happen before with Barack Obama as president. Eventually he dropped it because something new and more important will come up a sure as sunrise. It seems to be bipartisan if you ask me. It boils down to do the ends justify the means and that doesn’t split among party lines.
- throwaway846657 7y agoReminds me of the time some politicians thought it would be a good idea to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoIn the US, tomato sauce counts as a vegetable when assessing school lunch health. Thanks GOP: https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-sauce-pizza-vegetable-congress-gop-healthier-school-lunches-expensive-article-1.978339 https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-sauce-p...
- dependenttypes 7y agoThese are must-read and very relevant: https://cr.yp.to/export.html https://cr.yp.to/export.html, https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab... Cryptographic software is protected under the 1st amendment.
- bradleyjg 7y agoThe entire "going dark" narrative presupposes that the era of the wiretap is the one true background from which to judge the present. But long before there was a wiretap a warrant was mostly useless for listening in on private conversations because there was nothing to wiretap and nothing to wiretap with. Was the pre-telephone and pre-microphone era some kind of lawless hell on earth where law enforcement was completely helpless to do anything?