81–90 of 221 posts
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With cash, unless the wallet in which it resides can be obtained, that is not possible. I fail to see the difference.
The law does actually have ways of extracting cash from people even when it can't locate the cash in question. It's harder, and less effective, but overall it works more than it doesn't.
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Part of the way the legal system deals with fraud is by recovering money (where possible). With bitcoin, unless the destination wallet can be obtained, that is not possible. With cash, you seize the cash. Bank accounts can be frozen, Credit card transactions canceled, wire transfers flagged ( http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/29/464859624/episo... ).
With cash, unless the wallet in which it resides can be obtained, that is not possible. I fail to see the difference.
So what does he suggest? I think we are supposed to read between the lines, but I am not sure what that is yet. Is it just pointing out an interesting contradiction and we should enhance and improve existing products, or there a message about moving back and reverting to using weak encryption like before or treating it like "munitions" for purposes of export control. So you you end up in prison just as long long for…
I think the larger implication of the essay is to consider addressing privacy from a systemic/game theory perspective. The underlying threat isn't technological, but in the response to technological capabilities. Encryption is just another capability that provokes a response.
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It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. But that's the point: we've seen that this balance doesn't exist, because if the service providers have access to the plaintext, the State will not contain itself to issuing case-by-case warrants - see Room 641A, "SSL added and removed here", etc. The current move to encrypt everything is a r…
You're arguing with something different to what I said. I pointed out that it's easy to design cryptosystems to be unbreakably strong against all adversaries except governments, and indeed can be unbreakably strong against mass eavesdropping by governments, yet still provide access on a case by case basis. And in fact this is the outcome of all kinds of natural and widely adopted designs. You're arguing that governme…
Is it? How? Because that's certainly not the default that you referred to.
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Presumably "no precedent" means "relating to privacy and security". To the extent that there are legal wins there, they were either extracted by technical means (e.g. the crypto wars) or effectively meaningless (e.g. 'oversight' of bulk surveillance).
I think the point is that privacy and security are physical as well as digital and if political engagement made one prevail, why not the other? We have more privacy protections now than we did 100 years ago due to political engagement, there is not reason to believe we cannot continue that effort into the digital realms.
There's absolutely reason to believe that the effort can't be smoothly continued into digital realms. First, because interpretations of how existing progress applies to digital issues has consistently minimized privacy and maximized institutional power. Second, because it's not clear that government oversight or legal protections are actually working when they are obtained. We have a long tradition of using activism to produce legislative wins, but on digital issues we constantly see those wins being ignored or circumvented (e.g. illegitimate takedown requests and unapproved domestic surveillance).
I don't think giving up the political fight is a good idea, but it's always jarring when I see people say "crypto nuts should turn to politics instead!" The people pushing strong crypto have historically also been the ones seeking political progress with minimal results.
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a) I don't want to comment on that intercept piece because there is clear bias there and I don't have all the facts. b) I think actually the FBI is mainly talking about the defaults in software, like how Apple enabled strong encryption for any user. Defaults matter when you consider the 95% of people who would not otherwise use encryption, including all kinds of criminals. I think everyone realizes you can't remove e…
B) The FBI is certainly not talking about only defaults. They have said that they don't want unbreakable encryption anywhere. > They aren't meant to have their own will and goals like "power". Yet they undeniably do. Pretending that they don't is sheer naivety. I'm not much of a political theorist, but we have government because we tend to trust them more than the average mob. They aren't infallible though, and we ne…
You are right that considering the whole history of encryption and the FBI, they don't want it anywhere, but as James Comey has himself said, this debate kicked into high gear late 2014 when Apple started with the default encryption, and law enforcement saw an increase in devices they couldn't get into. I think if strong encryption had been on the outliers as it was before that time, we wouldn't have seen this issues raised by the FBI in this manner. I think it is undoubtable that the default is a big reason for this because if many companies start to follow suit, it can have real consequences.
Even though James Comey's proposal of wanting "both strong encryption AND government access" probably came from a place of ignorance of the technology, I do think there is a debate to be had there about securing servers with keys or whatever else just like Google and Facebook and Apple are expected to secure all their other data. Right now, it is completely out of the question when you ask a tech person, because of lack of trust.
> They aren't infallible though, and we need checks and balances to keep them in place.
Absolutely, the way I like to look at it is basic costs and benefits, pros and cons.
There are real harms to strong encryption, whether one would like to admit it or not, so the point is to weigh the costs and benefits and go from there. Right now encryption seems more like a religion, a last bastion of freedom or something. Maybe there are other ways to have accountability.
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No its not. The reality is the biggest threat to privacy is due to political engagement. Stronger encryption that no one can break is really the only viable option.
You don't need to break the strong encryption, when you can break the kneecaps of people using strong encryption.
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I'm actually curious: can anyone cite a serious win for privacy that was wholly political? I frequently see pieces criticizing over-reliance on crypto as solutionism and political apathy, but I don't understand what they expect. The people fighting for strong cryptography have also led the political fight for privacy, but their nontechnical efforts have been ignored or circumvented at every turn. At this point it's h…
How far back are you willing to look? "The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) was a bill passed by the United States Congress in 1988 ... to prevent what it refers to as "wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records..." Congress passed the VPPA after Robert Bork's video rental history was published during his Supreme Court nomination." [1] I thought there were also some U.S. privacy laws around library r…
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You don't need to break the strong encryption, when you can break the kneecaps of people using strong encryption.
Breaking kneecaps is expensive though. You can't just set up a ring of roadblocks around a city that kneecaps everyone passing through as a matter of course.
Once you establish the willingness to break kneecaps, the number of kneecaps you actually need to break is fairly small.
> Slapping unbreakable crypto onto more and more packets is just going to make matters worse. The only way to retain any amount of electronic privacy is through political engagement. While political engagement is an alternative to "slapping unbreakable crypto" onto things, this article establishes no precedent for political engagement actually helping! I see the technical as political, direct action as engagement. An…
I do IT for a think tank in DC. I've seen people across the political spectrum fail to enact their particular agenda for their entire multi-decade careers. Changing policy is slow and, quite often, impossible.