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With the devices so closely integrated into the cloud we are already close to the "day every iDevice was wiped irreversibly and huge part of the world stopped". Let's not make it closer.
So the FBI would only be able to wiretap suspects who are either too dumb to use encryption — in which case they ought to be easy enough to catch without wiretaps I think the author under-estimates the difficultly of catching criminals.
The bigger problem is not 'catching' them, but prosecuting them effectively. This requires prioritization of limited resources based on severity of offense, availability of sufficient evidence, and difficulty of prosecution. The last is ugly because it's almost directly economic, in that the ability to afford legal counsel creates some level of inequality.
d) all of the above?
i guess they don't care about anything else as long as they can do their job
I say all of the above. There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. People who are attracted to these things are susceptible to logic failures in pursuit of their interest in exerting Authority and Power.
>> There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. I'm against government surveillance, but your statement is way too broad. Only one reason? Really? You don't think anybody goes into law enforcement to protect others, curb violence, and generally do good for the world? I doubt you'd want your profession to be slandered so casually.
The last line is the most important: if there is a backdoor (that is the Lawful Interception interface) there is no guarantee that it won't be used by unauthorized third parties. Anyone could have predicted that something like the Google hack was going to happen. I also seem to remember that there was a similar incident involving the cellphone network in Greece.
"Trevor Timm: Well, yeah. They’ve been complaining about this “Going Dark” problem for years now and we’ve never really seen any actual evidence that this actually exists. The FBI or the DOJ has to report the number of times they run into encryption when they ask for surveillance. Every year they have to report back how many times they ultimately couldn’t get the information they sought; the number is always 0—for the last 11 years."
He shared this on twitter a while ago: https://twitter.com/trevortimm/status/331985318620327936
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> failing to prevent the Boston bombing OK, you're in charge of the FBI now. There are tens of thousands of public events today in tens of thousand of venues. Protect them all. Go.
No I am not. I can't protect them so I wouldn't try to become the leader of the FBI. I also can't do surgery but if I come in to have some work done on my hand and leave with a foot chopped of I am going to sue the doctor.
"Find the person who committed crime X" is more like your surgery example: a task law enforcement can often accomplish. "Protect everyone all the time" is as impossible for law enforcement as "grant immortality" is for doctors.
Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption? I was trying to do this by piping the output of my webcam to openssl and then to netcat, which sends the packets to a publicly addressable server (Amazon instance) that relays the encrypted packets to another computer behind a firewall, that decrypts the video stream and plays it in MPlayer. It works, but the latency is about 10 seconds. To reduce the laten…
WebRTC clients should be encrypted and secure, since it's P2P communication.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications" I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitim…
The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermedia…
Even with a restaurant, you're relying on someone present giving evidence to law enforcement. That works just the same with encryption -- if you have an encrypted chat room with five people and one of the participants sends the logs to the FBI (or is an undercover agent), the FBI will have the logs. If no one does, the FBI will not, which is the same as it is when co-conspirators meet in a restaurant.
>That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.
The FBI has plenty of tools available. Even if data is encrypted, law enforcement agents with a warrant would still be able to obtain information from ISPs as to who is communicating and when. In the most serious cases trotted out to justify new powers, the FBI can install a listening device or put a trojan on the suspect's communications device.
The way to strike the right balance here is to make wiretapping extremely technologically difficult but not impossible. That makes it very hard for criminals or anyone without government-level resources, and makes it very difficult for governments to engage in unjustifiable dragnet surveillance of innocent people, while still allowing governments to capture the communications of suspects in the rare and most serious cases where the existing evidence justifies that extraordinary level of invasion into the private communications of citizens.
I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission. Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use enc…
The resources spent on combating terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the threat presented. The FBI may see this as the best way to combat terrorism, but it's an unworthy goal, and it's bad for them to potentially cause so much damage in pursuit of it.
Maybe another alternative should be presented: "solving the wrong problem."