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FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

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Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#171

Post by mucker »

jdietrich wrote: post #168
merpnderp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those cops were very brave, but you're going to be hard pressed to find even a tiny minority of Americans willing to put cop lives in that kind of danger.

The British approach is safer for both officers and the public. By emphasising containment and de-escalation, British officers avoid the kind of chaotic and unpredictable confrontations that lead to fatalities. Only one British police officer was killed in the line of duty last year - PC David Phillips, who was run over during a pursuit. In the same year, eight American officers were killed by vehicular assault, 36 w…

And the police of Britain are so anaemic that they let _THOUSANDS_ of children be abused rather than risk confrontation.

You are not selling me.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#172

Post by [deleted] »

mucker wrote: post #171
jdietrich wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British approach is safer for both officers and the public. By emphasising containment and de-escalation, British officers avoid the kind of chaotic and unpredictable confrontations that lead to fatalities. Only one British police officer was killed in the line of duty last year - PC David Phillips, who was run over during a pursuit. In the same year, eight American officers were killed by vehicular assault, 36 w…

And the police of Britain are so anaemic that they let _THOUSANDS_ of children be abused rather than risk confrontation. You are not selling me.

[deleted]

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#173

Post by thatcat »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #161
duaneb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so economists agree that "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available". Thankfully, economists don't run our country. How does this support the statement "Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones."? Quantity and quality of housing are arguably much less important than ensuring there is a viable working class—just see how terri…

There's two different questions that policies should answer - what sort of stuff do we get out of it, and who gets that stuff. These are often referred to as allocative and distributive, though I'm remembering the precise technical wording from memory so I could be wrong on that. That's the distinction that drove me to make the political versus economic benefits distinction. Rent control as a whole makes things worse…

>pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls

The economic gains from lifting rent control are going to go to slumlords, not just get dispersed to everyone. Also, housing isn't an elastic supply market. when rent goes up it doesn't necessarily mean the quantity of housing will increase as a result since housing is often limited by zoning, drainage, and many other things than profitability of rentals. Also when you consider the destabilizing effect of people having to move every few years due to rental price fluctuation, it's not really a clear cut benefit to "bribe current residents to lift rent control" if that were even an option.

>we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage

but this is how democratic communities work... local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#174

Post by euxneks »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #49
krzrak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting article. I find amusing this (quite popular) type of argumentation: > "This is a serious security breach," said Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens), who heads the Council's Public Safety Committee. "We know terrorists are planning to attack our subways, and the MTA and NYPD better find these magical morons quickly, and then make them disappear for a year in jail." Like the only thing between terrorists an…

But that is so revealing of the mindset. * We can have strong encryption just for the good guys * We can have master keys that only approved staff will use * We can block all the bad things on the internet and it'll be like they don't exist * If we have a back door into an encrypted device, only the good guys will use it It's like no politician ever read about crime. Staff can't be blackmailed or bribed. No one worki…

It's basically the "us vs. them" attitude - i.e. dehumanizing the "enemy". As soon as everyone realizes that it's just "humans vs. humans" we'll get more intelligent discourse, and, perhaps, some sort of actual progress.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#175

Post by rurban »

beeboop wrote: post #106
redahs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption policy will ultimately be resolved by the legislature and not the president. The only presidential candidate who was on the record as explicitly against encryption backdoors was Rand Paul, but that ship has sailed: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/13/rand-paul-sa... > “The head of the FBI came out with this recently. He says, ‘Oh, we’re going to ban encryption.’ And it’s like we want to build a…

The issue is that the NSA, FBI, etc are essentially controlled by the President. These groups have and will continue to have extremely creative interpretations of the law, to the point of essentially ignoring it and doing whatever the fuck they want without repercussion. Legislature can pass whatever they want, but three letter orgs will continue to have secret courts, secret laws, and secret operations that operate…

The first sentence is a very naive point of view. Most people argue that it is the other way round. People who worked there.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#176

Post by kenshaw »

stegosaurus wrote: post #133

Here is the source code for the Linux Kernel including dm-crypt: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.... Here is the source code for cryptsetup: https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup Here is the source code for GnuPG: http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi I have these files on my hard drive. There are probably cryptographers that can recite the RSA/AES algorithms from memory. We have the…

What most people probably don't realize is even if the government was somehow able to successfully outlaw cryptography and eliminated it completely from the face of the earth, it would do absolutely nothing to prevent future marathon bombings. The two simply aren't related, and there is nothing on this phone that is going to magically help the FBI, NSA, or any other TLA find and stop terrorists from acting.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#177

Post by tjgq »

graycat wrote: post #167
tjgq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then they will outlaw the possession of said standard C software, as well as of computer hardware that does not comply with government-mandated eavesdropping. And then they will pass laws that force you to give up the encryption key to that Base64 data or face imprisonment. Even if the Base64 data is just a sequence of completely random bits - because who would keep sequences of random bits around, unless they're…

> And then they will pass laws that force you to give up the encryption key to that Base64 data or face imprisonment. IMNAL, but my understanding is that such a law would run into rock solid, granite hard, iron clad parts of a little issue called the US Constitution. E.g., if the cops ask you a question, then you don't have to answer. The person's lawyer can just tell the cops that "My client has no idea what that ba…

> IMNAL, but my understanding is that such a law would run into rock solid, granite hard, iron clad parts of a little issue called the US Constitution. E.g., if the cops ask you a question, then you don't have to answer. The person's lawyer can just tell the cops that "My client has no idea what that base 64 gibberish is."

The US Constitution hasn't helped prevent the PATRIOT act, or the TSA's unreasonable search powers.

> A huge fraction of all Internet data is sent as base 64. So, base 64 data alone is nothing suspicious.

There's a difference between Base64 that decodes into a harmless cat picture, and Base64 that's apparently random. Unless we make it normal for everyone to have encrypted, random-looking data lying around, the few that choose to have it will be increasingly harassed by the government, even if they're not doing anything wrong.

Re: FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

#178

Post by ThrustVectoring »

thatcat wrote: post #173
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two different questions that policies should answer - what sort of stuff do we get out of it, and who gets that stuff. These are often referred to as allocative and distributive, though I'm remembering the precise technical wording from memory so I could be wrong on that. That's the distinction that drove me to make the political versus economic benefits distinction. Rent control as a whole makes things worse…

>pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls The economic gains from lifting rent control are going to go to slumlords, not just get dispersed to everyone. Also, housing isn't an elastic supply market. when rent goes up it doesn't necessarily mean the quantity of housing will increase as a result since housing is often limited by zoning, drainage, and many ot…

>local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

Local optimization is not the best strategy, even according to the those doing the local optimizations. Both participants in a Prisoner's Dilemma are better off if they hand their decision-making over to a third party, conditional on the other person also doing so. The Bay Area as a whole wants affordable housing, they just don't want to make the Bay as a whole better off by making unfair sacrifices in their neighborhood.

It's a classic coordination problem, caused in large part because decision-making is too local compared to the regional benefits of housing construction.

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