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The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

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Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#71

Post by poundofshrimp »

Deestan wrote: post #4
cies wrote: post #3

I dont understand why the US people still trust these agencies. FBI, CIA, NSA have all shown to act against the democracy in many cases. If they could be trusted, they could be trusted with a backdoor. Since they cannot be trusted, the backdoor only makes them a more dangerous enemy of the people.

Nobody can be "trusted" with a backdoor, because it isn't really a valid concept. A backdoor is a vulnerability that doesn't care who you are or what your purpose is or who pays you. If you found the backdoor it is open to you. However hard the backdoor's security is, an insider recruited by Swedish intelligence (or Russia whatever the bogeyman du jour is) will leak the key at some point. Now all your "secure" shit c…

Just give the government a copy of the private key. What could go wrong? It’s not like anyone is hacking into the government these days.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#72

Post by boomboomsubban »

DocTomoe wrote: post #9
cies wrote: post #3

I dont understand why the US people still trust these agencies. FBI, CIA, NSA have all shown to act against the democracy in many cases. If they could be trusted, they could be trusted with a backdoor. Since they cannot be trusted, the backdoor only makes them a more dangerous enemy of the people.

This is a wrong premise. The US people don't have to trust them, ultimately, their opinion is not important. What is important is that whoever currently is in power considers them useful - which is easy to achieve. And no political candidate who is likely to take office will take a stand against what in the end will be the tools they use once they are elected. For the citizenry, the only way to deal with this situati…

I disagree that the elected officials are the ones that ultimately hold the power here. Part of both the CIA and NSA's job is to control elections, any candidate truly opposing them would have to overcome that.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#73

Post by tremon »

sodality2 wrote: post #62
jrsj wrote: post #53

Just wait until they tell us that encryption back doors are necessary to stop racism and watch as half the population claps excitedly for the total elimination of privacy in the U.S.

I don't believe that is true (and pray it isn't). I don't think the populace is that stupid. Also, unnecessarily political. I could replace "racism" with "immigration" or "socialism" just as easily, that doesn't make it true.

Why not? "We need lie detectors to stop communism" worked fine before, didn't it?

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#74

Post by mFixman »

_wldu wrote: post #20
cm2187 wrote: post #8

Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now. I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person…

15 years ago, if I had said that society would build a tracking system and that most people would happily carry a tracker in their pocket and pay monthly fees to support the tracking networks, I would have been laughed out of the room. But that is what happened, and most people are oblivious to this fact.

15 years ago was 2006. Almost every adult carried a cellphone everywhere back then.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#75

Post by XorNot »

HenryBemis wrote: post #19
biafra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you can turn them off depends on your operating system. Most of them allow you to turn them off. What are you using? And if it really bothers you, why don't you switch?

The point XorNot made (and I agree) is that "it is switched on by default". And then you need to go to 5 different settings to switch them off (OS update, App update, iCloud login, iCloud sync of Backup-StockApps-Messages-etc). The "welcome" should not be "all your data are belong to us". It should be "Hi, iCloud-Y/N, AutoUpdateOS-Y/N, Backup Message-Y/N, Backup Notes-Y/N, etc.). I get it that for MANY reasons Apple…

Honestly it's more that there's no reason to think any of those buttons do what they say they do. Why should they? I haven't inspected the source code which controls them, I didn't build the firmware images which go on my devices.

Without reproducible builds from multiple sources, how can we be sure of anything?

If there's a service we have a desperate need for, it's a change in ecosystem priorities that core functionality - OS's, chipsets, etc. - are open source, and updates go out as inspectable patches which get pulled into reproducible build farms and bittorrented out to users.

Start with C compilers and work your way outward from there, but I should be able to cryptographically prove to myself that the firmware update going into my Android phone was independently reproducible from public source code from users in a few different nations.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#77

Post by drummojg »

throwaway53453 wrote: post #52
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the balance of power argument before and, well, you were already granted this wish ( and I would argue that you had it granted twice ). Both China and Russia are very capable adversaries at this time and US is slipping from its top dog position. It is genuinely sad to watch.

Russia isn't a threat to the US. Foreign policy maybe, but not existential like China.

Russia is a terrible threat to the US. How much/many of their disinformation and memes (in the traditional sense) are correlated with disrupted political discourse, extremism, and disunity in the US? They don't sponsor squads of disinfo/misinfo actors just for giggles. It has a profound destabilizing bang for their buck.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#78

Post by sodality2 »

tremon wrote: post #73
sodality2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that is true (and pray it isn't). I don't think the populace is that stupid. Also, unnecessarily political. I could replace "racism" with "immigration" or "socialism" just as easily, that doesn't make it true.

Why not? "We need lie detectors to stop communism" worked fine before, didn't it?

I'd like to think that it wouldn't work now, given the interconnectedness of the world today. I also wouldn't be very surprised if it did work, though.

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#79

Post by sneak »

XorNot wrote: post #7
HenryBemis wrote: post #5

> When the FBI says it’s “going dark” because it can’t beat encryption, what it’s really asking for is a method of breaking in that’s cheaper, easier The way I see it, authorities all over have zero difficulty in breaking into devices (deus ex Cellebrite). I always believe that any password we use (computers, phones, etc.) is only to protect us against the common criminal . Someone who will take your phone, and a str…

App updates has always struck me as the big one. I can't turn them off, I can't easily validate them, and there's little preventing an update just for my device being shipped.

You can indeed turn them off, at least on mobile devices.

Desktop apps are much worse in this regard.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4578

https://github.com/bitwarden/desktop/issues/552

Re: The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption

#80

Post by marcosdumay »

_wldu wrote: post #20
cm2187 wrote: post #8

Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now. I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person…

15 years ago, if I had said that society would build a tracking system and that most people would happily carry a tracker in their pocket and pay monthly fees to support the tracking networks, I would have been laughed out of the room. But that is what happened, and most people are oblivious to this fact.

15 years ago people did carry a tracker on their pocket already.
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