101–110 of 139 posts
But the arguments against this aren't that difficult... so I have to guess it's the evil. Power corrupts.
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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 an…
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 gov…
Disclaimer: I agree with you but I always struggle to convince people that this line of reasoning makes sense. The government can already enter anybody's home upon receiving a warrant to do so. If you don't let them in, they can bust through a door or tear down a wall. We trust the government not to do this without court oversight. We trust courts to provide good and honest oversight. It is far from a perfect system,…
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Government already has master key to anyone's home. They'll just break the door, it can be done easily. Proper encryption is a different beast, you just don't have that option to break the door.
Maybe there needs to be a publicly accessible/downloadable/searchable registry to which all warrants issued by any court in the us gets logged? Who has the mandate to create such a requirement?
Black bag operations have always existed, and will always exist, despite legislation or other rule-making to the contrary.
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>Personally I think you can make it a crime not to produce a key if a warrant has been issued to search what ever you've encrypted. Personally, I find that suggestion repugnant.
How is this different to getting a warrant to search say a safe deposit box at a bank? Is there something about encrypted data that should be beyond the reach of the law?
I did my Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) [1] on this issue, and it actually surprised me how many people think that the governments are right in this debate. When presenting the work, I had a chance to ask ordinary people, and they all pretty much agreed that the government should be able to "break" encryption with a warrant. This is a scary prospect, and I feel that educating citizens as well as the government…
In theory, being able to break encryption with a warrant is exactly the right scenario.
In practice, if you an break it with a warrant, someone else can break it without a warrant and can do so without your knowledge.
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>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.
Does anyone here remember the clipper chip? If you don't, I'd recommend boning up on this chapter of the crypto wars. The 'because terrorism' excuse falls a bit flat with me. Thought experiment: how hard would it be for a terrorist organization with access to 100's of millions of dollars (eg. ISIS) to come up with a secure communications scheme? One time pad. A reasonable cipher that hasn't had any 'help' during deve…
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Exactly what? My point is that encryption is fairly common right now, even for average consumers. If political activists use Tor and Signal quite regularly, why wouldn't criminals do the same? I still don't quite understand why you're comparing what criminals did back then to what they could do right now.
I'd expect that currently, most criminal use of encryption is accidental. That is, everyone switched from SMS to whatsapp, criminals just did what everyone did. Sure, there might be exceptions for high-level criminal conspiracies. But most crime isn't of that kind. For terrorist, I imagine there is a large spectrum of covert abilities.
How are you so confident that this was what happened? Do you have some concrete data and/or stats to back this statement? What if most criminals are using something like Signal? Besides, I personally wouldn't trust WhatsApp if I were partaking in illicit activities.
I did my Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) [1] on this issue, and it actually surprised me how many people think that the governments are right in this debate. When presenting the work, I had a chance to ask ordinary people, and they all pretty much agreed that the government should be able to "break" encryption with a warrant. This is a scary prospect, and I feel that educating citizens as well as the government…
They're right, they just don't understand it doesn't really work like that. In theory, being able to break encryption with a warrant is exactly the right scenario. In practice, if you an break it with a warrant, someone else can break it without a warrant and can do so without your knowledge.