Rethinking Encryption

USB stick... I'm sure it'll work out great. What if you have to give it up with a gun to your head?

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Hand wavy as heck.

Then you meander. Not sure what you're responding to.

I was thinking about this subject today. If the US has laws that prohibit legitimate encryption and other countries do not... Is it fair to suggest that we are making ourselves easy targets to foreign nations who wish to practice privacy violations?

I don’t think about encryption as a method to protect myself from the US government (only) but from any entity that is local or foreign. I think everyone should have the right to privacy. To me this is more important than the right to guns. And no not because I want to have illegal content, I just want to keep my information secure from people who don’t have a right to my privacy.

What am I missing? Should we give up our rights because there are people who break the law? Aren’t they going to continue to break the law anyways? Including using encryption.

This is like CAPTCHAs. Punishing the majority for the crimes of a very tiny minority.

Is this really the only way to catch people who do illegal things or is this just the laziest way to do it?

Apple could, for example, switch out the version of an app on my phone with a backdoored version of the same app. The backdoored version could upload a copy of every message I send to law enforcement. It wouldn’t even be difficult - just a keylogger would do the trick, or the OS could periodically take screenshots of the app while it is open and send them somewhere nefarious. Those latter techniques would also work with web apps. If this sort of thing was done selectively, I doubt anyone would notice.

If the government passes laws requiring backdoors in WhatsApp, terrorists can use another app. If the government passes laws requiring Apple and google to add backdoors to their phones, it will be almost impossible to avoid government surveillance. (And if the approach of the Australian government is anything to go by, we won’t even be able to tell this has happened. Instead they’ll pass a law demanding backdoors on request, then legally forbid Apple et al from making any of the details public.)

This is one of the reasons I buy phones from Apple. Unlike Google, Samsung, Huawei, etc they have at least made their opposition to government meddling very clear. And as this article points out in detail, they have put their money where their mouth is. If some of the sales price of my iPhone pays for Apple lawyers to fight for my digital rights, that is a tax I pay willingly.

This guy is all about how much of a threat the expansion of Chinese hardware is but doesn't say a word about the same being true for American hardware. Chinese networking hardware may contain backdoors, American hardware has been confirmed to contain backdoors over and over again.

Re: the iPhone: when any country has the golden keys, every country has the golden keys. How hard is it to. Get that through your head. The moment the US demands golden keys, China is going to demand their own set of golden keys, followed by Saudi Arabia and any other foreign adversary. These keys are going to be used the same way the US is going to use them (spy on allies and enemies) as well as for seeking out minorities and problematic citizens.

As a foreigner, if something doesn't cross the US Senate of all bodies because of ethics or surveillance problems, that's really saying something. These are the people that brought us laws like the PATRIOT ACT and the CLOUD act, systematically expanding the reach of US law enforcement across borders. The EU, supposedly an ally, had to negotiate a quick, likely invalid or quickly overturned bandage treaty to make it legal to even just store personal data on US company servers. Is this what the US wants to become? A risk to their own allies?

Forcing weak encryption is not defence, it's offence. It's hard to believe that people like these aren't jealous of the spying network China has set up.

I'm confused at the assumption that you can prevent serious organized criminals from having access to strong cryptography simply by backdooring common communications apps.

The genie is out of the bottle: Powerful criminal enterprises will have no difficulty hiring people to build overlay tools that they can run inside their backdoored comms that will provide adequate (at least, if not effectively unbreakable) cryptography.

Even if we ignore the considerable first amendment barriers and there were an effort to outright outlaw strong crypto, steganography has become very strong and even if not quite sufficient finding out your comms were being monitored via a use of crypto charge is way better than having the attacker learn all your info.

In light of this, I find it difficult to see the goverment's position as seeking to widen infrastructure for the wholesale surveillance of the general public with claims of terrorist groups as a dishonest cover for the demands.

The old adage "If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns"-- has serious limits owing to the nature of guns as physical objects. The sentiment applies a million fold for cryptography, which is fundamentally a collection of ideas with a zero marginal cost of reproduction or execution, mass-less, volume-less, capable of being distributed around the world in a fraction of a second and implausible to silence even with great leap forward mass murder.

Actions to block access to encryption would severely degrade the security and privacy of the general public, on this point I agree with the author. But would it prevent pedophiles and terrorist from having access to encryption? Not likely.

Would pedophiles and terrorists occasionally screw up and use insecure means... sure, but they already do that today.