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Why does this say that the DOJ has been pushing for this since 2016? They have been pushing for some variation on this since basically forever. I first became

• SuperFerret 7y ago
  Cryptographers and liberals.
• giggles_giggles 7y ago
  > Why does this say that the DOJ has been pushing for this since 2016? Because that's when Trump came into power and nothing bad ever happened under the Obama admin.
  • tick_tock_tick 7y ago
    There seems to be some kind of intentional ignorance of just how many programs people blame Trump for have been there since Obama or even earlier.
    • shadowgovt 7y ago
      A President (and the priorities of his administration) can make bad programs much worse. Take marijuana enforcement as an inverse example. The federal law around marijuana hasn't changed, and it's as illegal in 2020 to use, grow, and sell as it was in 2004. But the Obama administration made clear to the DEA and FBI that pursuit and enforcement of that law in states that had passed their own laws to legalize it would be a career-limiting move, which gave the states breathing room to experiment (and allowed hard evidence to gather that allowing medicinal and recreational use wouldn't cause societal collapse or, really, almost any negative outcomes). This aspect of the intersection of law and executive enforcement is why the Trump administration is correctly condemned for worsening the situation regarding immigration in the US. Most of the laws the administration uses have been on the books since before 2016. This administration chooses the harshest and cruelest ways to interpret and execute on those laws.
      • Supermancho 7y ago
        > A President (and the priorities of his administration) can make bad programs much worse. Ok? So that should counteract the behavior. > This aspect of the intersection of law and executive enforcement is why the Trump administration is correctly condemned for worsening the situation regarding immigration in the US. There is an element of "outrage" culture that means to ascribe new fault, in the established pursuit of a "federally safe" cryptography, to the administration as a proxy for other wrongs. This is not relevant to the issue of original fault.
      • tick_tock_tick 7y ago
        While Obama might have been nice to some states in some contexts that passed some laws he was as if not more aggressive on weed than the previous administration. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obamas-war-on-pot-231820/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obamas-w... https://swampland.time.com/2012/05/03/what-is-president-obamas-problem-with-medical-marijuana/ https://swampland.time.com/2012/05/03/what-is-president-obam... This was a big deal back during his term which I feel like people are already forgetting.
      • busterarm 7y ago
        That didn't really change enforcement elsewhere and choosing Biden for his VP, who is basically the legal architect of the entire War on Drugs, sent a huge signal. The Obama administration did exactly nothing for prison reform, which coincidentally is probably going to be a big part of Trump's legacy (he's done more on this than any other President), and nothing for situations where marijuana possession suddenly makes other things criminal (like owning a firearm _and_ marijuana). For as poor as Trump's record with women is, it's pretty shameful for everyone else that he's the president that made sure tampons are widely available in women's prisons.
        • shadowgovt 7y ago
          Yep. These are examples of the effects that a President can have on policy I was referring to.
  • quitethelogic 7y ago
    The current administration came into power in January 2017.
  • mitchdoogle 7y ago
    The author gives that date because, as is mentioned in the article, that is when Apple famously declined to help the FBI backdoor its own system, which happened before Trump was elected.
• gist 7y ago
  > Cryptographers have maintained that when you create a back door, it is a question of time until it is found and publicized. Why would it not be possible to create a system that required several manual and offline steps in order to break the encryption? For example (and perhaps similar to offline cold storage of bitcoin) why couldn't a system be designed whereby 3 or more people in geographically diverse areas were in a position to agree that a request for information was legitimate (by court order) and thereby produce what is needed to unlock certain information? So one person would not have the key or access. After all right now you have a case where a single person (the owner) is able to unlock information. The feeling is a back door can be hacked. What if it's not a back door though?
  • btilly 7y ago
    Shamir secret sharing allows for that on paper. The problem is that to be useful for law enforcement, any local police department has to be able to go to any local judge and get a warrant and then get access. There are approximately 30,000 state judges with fairly high turnover in that list. If you can compromise one, or successfully get yourself added to that list, you can then get access to whatever you want. That's way too many people to trust. This is not a hypothetical weakness. I personally know someone whose physical location was compromised through a court order obtained by bribing a judge. How many cases are there where similar access was gained but the victim doesn't know how it happened? And the better the access that you can get, the more incentive there is to get it. (There is no shortage of reasons why a motivated party would want such access.)
    • skybrian 7y ago
      This is basically what happens when law enforcement uses a search warrant to get access to user data from a tech company. While this process does have weaknesses, it is still the difference between a legal process overseen by the courts and one based on espionage where agents do whatever they want without oversight. Note that strong network encryption is essential for ensuring that they have to get a warrant. I don't think anyone has come up with a better system than judicial oversight that still allows law enforcement to do their job?
• chaostheory 7y ago
  > Law enforcement wants to be able to break security, and promises that their super secret, super safe system will provide everyone else protection from evildoers while letting law enforcement find the bad guys Wasn't this how Google, Adobe and several other tech companies had a major security breach about 5-7 years ago? They provided the DOJ backdoor access.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    > They provided the DOJ backdoor access. If you're thinking of PRISM, no, at least not in the voluntary, intentional sense of the word "provided". Many of the major tech companies had non-public backbone fiber, and links across that fiber were unencrypted. The NSA tapped this dark fiber to read unencrypted traffic. This famously hit Google, which subsequently moved to encrypt all internal traffic, even traffic that would never leave its networks.
    • wrboyce 7y ago
      Wouldn’t tapping dark fibre be a bit useless? Or were the links tapped while dark waiting for the target to start using them?
      • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        (Context: the original comment mentioned dark fiber, but I changed it to be more precise to avoid exactly this confusion.) Dark fiber is a bit of a misnomer and term of art, IIUC. The way I've had it explained to me, dark fiber is not necessarily dark. It's just not on the public internet. When you lease dark fiber, you presumably do so to put your own signal on it, making it no longer dark. But folks still call it "leasing dark fiber" and still refer to the fiber, once lit, as "dark fiber." I'm not a networking expert so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
        • elithrar 7y ago
          You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s a “technically wrong” term that conveys enough meaning: unlit fibre you buy and light up yourself (usually).
• solotronics 7y ago
  For me at least this is the thing that will push me to leave and renounce citizenship. I am sure I represent an insignificant minority to them, but I can't live somewhere without my own security on my data and cryptocurrency. Over the last few years I moved basically all my assets into Bitcoin and have left the legacy banking systems behind. With a few keystrokes they can lock you totally out of all your funds and you can do nothing about it except complain. This is totally unacceptable to me. I still pay taxes and have a salary job of course. But I don't trust the banks at all.
  • Karunamon 7y ago
    I don't mean this to sound snippy, but where would you go? Most non-US countries I'm aware of have even worse restrictions around speech, encryption, and so forth.
    • Retric 7y ago
      New Zealand has stronger free speech protection than the US and no encryption issues. More freedom of the press and even ‘free’ heathcare for citizens or permanent residents make it a solid contender.
      • Acrobatic_Road 7y ago
        https://www.computerworld.com/article/3468958/the-uk-and-nz-laws-inspiring-australia-s-encryption-crackdown.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3468958/the-uk-and-nz-... >New Zealand’s Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act was introduced in 2013. >On receipt of a warrant from a surveillance agency, a network operator – defined as a public telecommunications network or a telecommunications service – must “decrypt a telecommunication” on their network or service, but only if it has “provided that encryption”.
      • Mirioron 7y ago
        Are you talking about the same New Zealand that literally has a government position called Chief Censor? The same New Zealand that tried to censor sites after the attacks? The same New Zealand that then went on to push for weakening free speech protections online?[0] New Zealand is at the bottom of the list for me when I consider western countries that protect free speech. [0] https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1905/S00277/new-zealand-pm-leads-global-internet-censorship-campaign.htm https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1905/S00277/new-zealand-pm...
• dkdk8283 7y ago
  Watching old movies from 60s/70s sometimes have scenes where the characters are worried about calls being recorded or otherwise having no privacy. The typical response is “What is this, Russia?” or something similar. Privacy is really important. I will always error on the side of privacy even if that means not everyone bad is caught.
  • hitpointdrew 7y ago
    > I will always error on the side of privacy even if that means not everyone bad is caught. Reminds me of something my dad always told me, "I'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free, than have 1 innocent person in jail."
    • BubRoss 7y ago
      I'm not a historian, but I don't think your dad came up with that first...
      • PopeRigby 7y ago
        They never said he did. Just that he said it.
    • TooKool4This 7y ago
      Blackstone’s ratio is where that principle originally comes from, at least in modern law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
  • heartbeats 7y ago
    Freedom isn't free. I think people have just ought to realize that. People have this idea that free countries are more efficient, which is probably true in the long run, but it's a cop-out to just call it a day there. Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for questioning and asked them what they were doing there. The president later said: "We have rigged the latest election. 93.5 per cent have voted for Lukashenko. But they say it is not a European outcome. We have made it 86 per cent." But it does work. I was at a restaurant there. Some girls are chatting, and they walk away to go get something, and just leave their bags there unattended. Why? Because it's an authoritarian country - people aren't going to steal stuff there. This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been. EDIT: I don't mean to praise authoritarian countries, on the contrary. We should support human rights even if it is less efficient, because the object of governance is not to strip people of their freedoms for pennies on the dollar.
• Mirioron 7y ago
  If the NSA can't keep its employees from abusing their spying tools to spy on their neighbors then what chance does law enforcement have?
  • AWildC182 7y ago
    I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of these jobs, both tech and government, are low key treating non public data access as a perk. For context, I interviewed with a company that had police videos stored on their systems and were using them for entertainment, to the point of showing me one at the beginning of the interview for grins
    • foota 7y ago
      This is possibly true at smaller companies, but this kind of thing does not fly at larger tech companies.
      • AWildC182 7y ago
        I've worked on both sides of that, I think you'd be surprised. I also suspect that it's worse at the TLAs and any organization with access to FBI, license plate and various criminal databases. Obviously CCard databases and stuff are off limits as their use is outright fraud, but stuff like traffic cameras, imaging systems, etc.
        • distances 7y ago
          I don't know about US, but many European countries have access logging in police and health databases, which checks to see for unwarranted snooping. With actual convictions taking place when someone gets too interested in, say, the behind-the-scenes data of the latest celebrity news.
          • SkyBelow 7y ago
            Many times that are implemented so that IT isn't monitored, and the staff who is monitored can have selective enforcement. This allows for people to be fired for abusing their access when in reality they are being fire for some other action that isn't nearly as PR friendly to state.
• SomaticPirate 7y ago
  I find it hilarious that RSA Security campaigned against the Clipper chip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Backlash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Backlash) when they were subsequently found to also be compromised. Seems like open-source and peer review is the only way to ensure that crypto is not being hijacked.
• frandroid 7y ago
  It's not because they have been trying to forever that they aren't going for another big push right now. Attorney General William Barr is spearheading an active campaign on this, it was headline news here a few weeks ago. Don't be complacent.
• propogandist 7y ago
  it's an election year, might as well try to link all this to Trump! (although, as you've noted this has been happening for quite a while across all parties)
  • PopeRigby 7y ago
    He didn't start it, but he isn't stopping it either. In fact, he's making it worse.
• matheusmoreira 7y ago
  > And the back door doesn't even have to be found to be abused. The government itself is likely to abuse such back doors. LOVEINT is a documented practice. Meanwhile governments throughout the world are mandating the use of Signal for communication. Common folks are not special enough to justify strong encryption but it's totally valid for government use. Helps hide their corrupti-- I mean state secrets.
• anonsivalley652 7y ago
  Yeap. Lazy cops' leadership would rather trade in everyone's rights to make their jobs a little bit easier. TBH, we already exist in an inverted totalitarian regime that is risking becoming worse than Orwellian like China if the DOJ gets their way. I do not consent.