Just think of the outrage if the government required master keys to everyone's homes?
I know there is a difference, but it's not a huge leap to compare the two. We don't want the government to have such easy access to our homes because we can't trust every government employee not to abuse it. I think the same goes here. No mater what safe guards you put in place it's a scary thought that you simply can't keep the government out of your affair's. Sure now you think you have nothing to hide. But what if your political views become criminal, what if your religious views become hate speech? We're not there yet but times can change quickly.
Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
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Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#22This is not a battle they can win. Most American's DGAF if their shit is encrypted, until the PSA campaign fighting against laws like these tells them the government is taking away their rights and able to snoop on their lives. Just like SOPA and others this will be defeated.
I would not be so sure of that. I really believe the President's guiding principle is to do whatever it is that will enrage liberals the most. If Republicans see that liberals want strong encryption, they might decide to oppose it just to piss off liberals. It's amazing to me that a lot of the same people advocating gun rights are also the ones that support government mandated encryption backdoors.
Eh.. it's messy isn't it. Politically motivated libertarians strongly support both 2nd amendment and oppose back doors. Generally speaking, the govt is always seen as the biggest threat to guard against.
Probabaly the ones supportive of backdoors are as you said, simply "trusting" of the current leader they voted for but would immediately oppose the same policy coming from a Democrat.
...which is the exact impulse and logic that should push all partisans to distrust government power to snoop on communications. There will always be someone in charge somewhere that you don't trust.
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#23The irony here is that simple one-time-pad solutions (OTP) will continue to be available to securely encrypt the sort of messaging that's of use to terrorists (relatively short infrequent messages), instead it's the general communications (including for banking) that the rest of us perform online that will be made vulnerable. You don't even have to program or use a computer to create these OTP solutions, for limited…
Convenience really does play a part here though. The easier it is to be secure the more people will take advantage of it. Good for the most part - but bad from the FBI's perspective when a criminal uses it to hide their misdeeds. The likelihood for a criminal to use a one time pad is extremely low. The likelihood of them having an encrypted cell phone with useful information is much higher. It would be tough to argue…
> The likelihood for a criminal to use a one time pad is extremely low. The likelihood of them having an encrypted cell phone with useful information is much higher.
Maybe that's the case right now, but how can you be so confident that these actors won't switch to OTP if such a law is enacted?
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#24> ... "protected being being stolen." repetition error.
Deploying an update to remove the duplicate word now. Thank you.
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#25The irony here is that simple one-time-pad solutions (OTP) will continue to be available to securely encrypt the sort of messaging that's of use to terrorists (relatively short infrequent messages), instead it's the general communications (including for banking) that the rest of us perform online that will be made vulnerable. You don't even have to program or use a computer to create these OTP solutions, for limited…
>But very short messages (in an unknown format) aren't generally breakable, anyway, and that's the likely case. Hell, in most cases they wouldn't be detectable! With so much random data flying around today, you could encode short messages in just about anything. comments on reddit or hn or one of the alternatives, image metadata, etc... If you are looking to hide data on the scale of kilobytes, your options are basic…
For example, such covert channels as packet timing.
Edit: On a 5 Mbps video stream, that could give you 5-50 kbps bandwidth.
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#26This is not a battle they can win. Most American's DGAF if their shit is encrypted, until the PSA campaign fighting against laws like these tells them the government is taking away their rights and able to snoop on their lives. Just like SOPA and others this will be defeated.
I would not be so sure of that. I really believe the President's guiding principle is to do whatever it is that will enrage liberals the most. If Republicans see that liberals want strong encryption, they might decide to oppose it just to piss off liberals. It's amazing to me that a lot of the same people advocating gun rights are also the ones that support government mandated encryption backdoors.
Those who fought against having strong encryption classified as a munition for purposes of export were on the wrong side of the issue.
They didn't realize that one day they would need the second amendment to protect their right to such "weapons".
-- this post is a poor paraphrase of a comic I saw once.
Edit: turns out it's a relevant xkcd™ https://m.xkcd.com/504/
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Convenience really does play a part here though. The easier it is to be secure the more people will take advantage of it. Good for the most part - but bad from the FBI's perspective when a criminal uses it to hide their misdeeds. The likelihood for a criminal to use a one time pad is extremely low. The likelihood of them having an encrypted cell phone with useful information is much higher. It would be tough to argue…
> The likelihood for a criminal to use a one time pad is extremely low. The likelihood of them having an encrypted cell phone with useful information is much higher. Maybe that's the case right now, but how can you be so confident that these actors won't switch to OTP if such a law is enacted?
Because prior to cell phone total encryption (less than 10 years ago) we did not have a pandemic of criminals using one time pads.
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#28Access is under no risk whatsoever. Encryption is math. It is open source. It will always be there. What is at risk is the legal right to use it, the government's permission for the public to use that math. My point: people with good reason to fear the government will still access and use encryption. This therefore isn't about terrorists. It is about watching the everyday people who want to abide by the law.
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#29Bernstein v. United States
Re: Americans' Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress
#30Wait does he have a Masters in Information Security from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology???! Joking aside, unfortunately it takes deep problems to motivate people/the US to change. It'll swing this way, and there will be dramatic consequences. Only then will things swing back the other way. It's too bad there isn't any balance here -- it does make sense in many situations that the poli…
Hey, so you could write an even more credible letter :)
Also, data does have "weight". The more data that you move, the more obvious the movement is. And the more you obfuscate the connection, the less bandwidth you have.
But yes, Pelosi is clueless.