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Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

feinstein.senate.gov

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Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#171

Post by wfo »

antillean wrote: post #22

It feels like everyone would be better served if the tech community admitted the legitimacy of the government's (and many, MANY people's) security concerns and stopped pretending that the right to privacy always trumps the right to security of the person. (All occurrences of the string "secur" in that EFF letter[1], for instance, are in reference to data and computer systems. Not one is in [direct] reference to peopl…

I don't agree with you but the downvotes for disagreement are very inappropriate, this is a contrarian position to the party line around here but fairly well put and helps to further the discussion beyond some sort of echo chamber.

Remember right now a huge proportion of the US population does NOT agree with us, no matter how many facts you explain to them.

Telling, for example, president Obama that he's an idiot and doesn't understand technology is both a lie and not helpful. He has hundreds of advisors who each know as much as the smartest of us here.

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#172

Post by loup-vaillant »

abfan1127 wrote: post #169
loup-vaillant wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Dunno what's in the book) I hear hand guns in particular are quite accident prone. Even if there's less crime , we might still have more deaths .

I'd check your sources. Hand Guns are no more accident prone than long guns.

Well, it was hearsay anyway. Not reliable at all.

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#173

Post by studentrob »

vox_mollis wrote: post #126
callcallcall wrote: post #91

Instead of complaining into the echo chamber of comments, here are some things you can do to fight back: Donate to the EFF: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/button Call your Reps: http://TryVoices.com Petition the President: https://savecrypto.org/

I am gobsmacked by the tenor of comments here. At what point will HN posters finally realize that participation in the democratic process does precisely nothing against naked power?

It is ironic to comment that comments have no influence upon others.

Personally I like to comment on this issue because it's about free speech and I like talking about that with people who are willing. Also I think technologists have a good chance to practice speaking up about this issue and be heard. Normally we are back-office people =)

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#174

Post by rayiner »

mangeletti wrote: post #74

Government is trying to make it illegal for one person to keep secrets and whisper them into another's ear. We can argue all day about how the law doesn't prevent criminals from using technologies (it doesn't, which makes the law idiotic, from a logic perspective), but that's not the important part. The important part is that this group of folks we're calling Government is trying to prevent us from being allowed to h…

> Government is trying to make it illegal for one person to keep secrets and whisper them into another's ear.

That is already the case. If you whisper a secret into my ear, the government can subpoena me and force me to tell a court what you said. They can force you to tell a court what you said so long as it's not incriminating to you, and even then they can do it if they give you immunity.

We can debate about what the law should be, but for the last several hundred years, the law has not really contemplated people keeping secrets from the Government. "Privacy" as it has been understood to date means protection from the government fishing for evidence without probable cause, not an absolute right to keep secrets.

Pervasive, unbreakable encryption is a game-changer that requires rethinking the existing framework. We're not just talking about not being able to get data from a terrorist's phone. We're talking about the bread-and-butter of many sorts of criminal prosecutions being opaque to the government. Good luck convicting someone on insider trading when all the relevant communications are opaque to the government.

I happen to think that the benefits of encryption outweigh the challenges to law enforcement. But its disingenuous to pretend that the government is trying to "take away" a right to "keep secrets" that you already had. Our whole legal system is built on being able to get whatever evidence is relevant wherever it may be found, with extremely narrow exceptions.

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#175

Post by fluxquanta »

MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #12
coroutines wrote: post #3

Feinstein is just the worst. She is the equivalent of Mitch McConnell for the Democrats. She fully understands exactly what she's proposing and she's the biggest hypocrite for it.

It's pretty remarkable that Texas and California seem to elect the scummiest people possible to the Senate. I guess that's what happens when you have a massive population of mostly apathetic voters? I really think this country would be better off if CA and TX were not allowed representation in the Senate (and I say this as a Texan).

>I really think this country would be better off if CA and TX were not allowed representation in the Senate (and I say this as a Texan).

Removing national government representation would be more antithetical to democracy than anything that's going on now. A better solution, in my opinion, would probably be new state redistricting. Voters are apathetic because they feel their votes don't count due to overwhelming concentrations of opposing viewpoints, which probably should be split off into their own states (Bay Area, New York City, so on).

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#176

Post by [deleted] »

spdustin wrote: post #160
ewindisch wrote: post #104

What this does and doesn't do: This bill effectively makes it illegal for US companies and persons to build or use secure enclaves / TPMs and to publish cryptosystems without either including backdoors or retaining and storing keys. It also implies that companies would need to store keys indefinitely, otherwise they would not be able to decrypt data, as no time limitations are set on the capability of accessing data.…

Respectfully, I disagree WRT SSH/TLS Section 2 (4) spells it out: communication service and software providers. That's the maker of every app on your phone, the phone manufacturer, your phone company, emails provider, retailer (they're communicating your data to their data warehouses). The summary clearly says "software manufacturers" (aside: manufacture software? facepalm ), "providers of wire...electronic...[or] re…

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#177

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rayiner wrote: post #174
mangeletti wrote: post #74

Government is trying to make it illegal for one person to keep secrets and whisper them into another's ear. We can argue all day about how the law doesn't prevent criminals from using technologies (it doesn't, which makes the law idiotic, from a logic perspective), but that's not the important part. The important part is that this group of folks we're calling Government is trying to prevent us from being allowed to h…

> Government is trying to make it illegal for one person to keep secrets and whisper them into another's ear. That is already the case. If you whisper a secret into my ear, the government can subpoena me and force me to tell a court what you said. They can force you to tell a court what you said so long as it's not incriminating to you, and even then they can do it if they give you immunity. We can debate about what…

With a subpoena or warrant, yes. But not pervasively.

And while we're at it, why is the existing state of affairs not good enough? Why the attempts to subvert the message pipe? After all, the govt can still compel people to talk, and its people receiving those secret messages.

The reason is, to my cynical mind, that they're interested to avoiding the work of warrants etc. They'd like to sidestep privacy entirely, and just record everything in the pipe. Not entirely cynical; its exactly what they've done with the tools they already have.

In my mind there's an enormous gulf between subpoenas of a person for information, and the ability to get that information secretely and continuously.

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#178

Post by giaour »

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems like complying with this law would preclude compliance with HIPAA, ISO 9001, various NSA-IAD directives, etcetera. Compliance with standards like those is often written into government contracts and sometimes required by statute or policy.

If this law passed in its current form, wouldn't entire industries have to choose which laws to break when storing data?

Re: Intelligence Committee Leaders Release Discussion Draft of Encryption Bill

#179

Post by onetwotree »

So I work for a company that sells a security related appliance. We sell to mid to large sized enterprise customers.

We made the decision to go with an appliance over hosted services because this way if we get hacked, our customers don't.

Part of our product is a secure secret store, and of course we use encryption for many other purposes. Our customers use our software (or standard tools) to generate their own key material to encrypt their secrets.

Very importantly, we can't help the government, or anyone else, get access to our customers secrets. We can't reasonably be asked to backdoor the software, because many of our customers do code reviews and audits on it before buying.

Can someone help me understand how this law would affect my company and others like it, our customers, and their users?

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