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Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

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Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#151

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mattnewton wrote: post #121
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, you can also destroy evidence! This is already a crime we deal with. That is just assuming the premise. Destruction of evidence is a crime, but destruction of private lawful communications is not. The FBI has no right to a married couple's sexting. The usual case for destruction of evidence is one of two things. Either they produce some emails where you're conspiring to destroy evidence, or that they catch yo…

The fact that the FBI has no right to a couple sexting without a warrant is exactly why encryption is fine. When they present evidence to a judge that there is something they need in those conversations to prove a crime, and get a warrant, then it becomes evidence in a criminal investigation. IANAL or law enforcement, but I don’t see the problem with this system.

The problem is that you may not be able to decrypt it.

It's like finding some footage that you drove into and out of a place where there was a murdered body during the same time that the body went missing. That's circumstantial evidence you might have moved it, and it might convince a judge to issue a warrant and have the police search your residence for evidence. But if they can't find anything it's not reasonable to charge you with destruction of evidence for not producing the body, because they haven't proved beyond a reasonable doubt that you could have.

People forget passwords all the time. Sometimes the police find the phone of somebody else who left it in your car and you didn't even realize it was there, and now you think they planted it and they think you won't unlock it, and the person who knows their phone is missing would rather see you in jail than claim the phone and end up there themselves. Higher level paranoia security systems can make unused space indistinguishable from encrypted data, or send cover traffic when there is no real traffic, and there is no way to decrypt it because it's not actually encrypted data to begin with.

There is no way to prove you can't decrypt something which means it's unreasonable to demand that somebody do it when they may not be able to.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#152

Post by slg »

lisper wrote: post #129
slg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your initial comment seemed to imply that a warrant to break the encryption was "government overreach". If not, I don't see how what you originally posted is an argument against ways around encryption. The question is whether the government should be able to access this information and not whether the government can be trusted with access to that information. If your argument is the latter, than you are arguing again…

> Your initial comment seemed to imply that a warrant to break the encryption was "government overreach". I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion. My initial comment did not contain the word "warrant". By "government overreach" I mostly meant spying on me without a warrant, e.g. the activities brought to light by Edward Snowden, and the common practice of seizing devices at the border.

Not including the word "warrant" is exactly why I thought your problem was with warrants specifically.

From you original comment:

>The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and the ninth amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the people retain un-enumerated rights. I, as a citizen of the United States, maintain that one of those unenumerated rights is my right to employ technological defenses against government overreach.

I read two ways to interpret that:

- "Government overreach" is to include even searches authorized by a warrant in which case you are defending unrestricted use of encryption.

- "Government overreach" is to only include warrantless searches in which cause you are only defending using encryption in a manner in which a warrant can break the encryption.

Considering the second option is basically the government's position and the rest of your post seemed anti-government, I thought you were advocating for the first interpretation.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#153

Post by masscrypteria »

There’s no discussion of how to build exceptional access encryption that solves the weakening issue, just that it “can’t be done”.

The spirit of this initiative in 2019 is likely more about stopping strong encryption at scale, which is certain to be a frustrating black hole for LEO and the IC.

Perhaps HN would do well to ask how to solve the problem from a technical perspective, given the requirements. This includes both how to build a better mousetrap (one that doesn’t have a “backdoor” or significantly weakens the encryption mechanism), and how to solve concerns about abuse of exceptional access.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#154

Post by mandevil »

thetrumanshow wrote: post #114
MrLeap wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested. Especially here, where people actually give the idea merit. It makes me miss oldschool /. where 100% of everyone was on the same page. Your point illustrates a huge reason as to why. Backdooring stupid.crypt and forcing law abiding people to use it just insures that big badguys will use any other kind of encrypt…

> This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease. Hmm, then wouldn't some people just make their own firearms, just as you are describing with encryption, right?

Being physical objects, gun distribution is much much more difficult than encryption distribution.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#155

Post by yawboakye »

redisman wrote: post #122
me_again wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can issue as many decrees as they like but they can't solve the problem with decrees any more than they can decree that water is dry. All they can decree is that it is illegal to use effective encryption, which would be, um, unfortunate.

Breaking encryption would cause breaches orders of magnitude more catastrophic than encrypted communications between bad guys.

See it this way: we have to know what the bad guys are saying in order to be able to protect the public. The way I see it the US government (and governments around the world) will make this a non-negotiable objective. There's not a lot of pressure now because, as Barr said, the event that will turn the public against encryption hasn't arrived yet. If the parties involved don't find a solution in the meantime they'd be forced to weaken encryption for everyone when a catastrophe happens. The public is fickle. Our safety is paramount.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#156

Post by 40acres »

In general, I agree with the government stance that "warrant proof" communication is not in the best interests of US citizens. I believe that there is some precedent and established law that can be built upon to provide a compromise that allows for encryption to remain a strong privacy tool for society but one that does not hinder the state from lawful access.

I believe that the US should establish a court similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court created under the FISA Act. The government must make a case to a judge establishing probable cause, and if approved a warrant can be issued to a 3rd party communications provider to disable encryption on suspected devices such that lawful interception (i.e wiretap) can be executed.

Warrants are subject to renewal every 90 days and access to encrypted communications prior to the date of warrant approval and not provided by the platform specified in the warrant are prohibited (ie, obtaining a warrant to disable and intercept WhatsApp does not mean you can disable and intercept Signal as well).

I believe this balances the interests of individuals, governments and communication providers evenly.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#157

Post by braythwayt »

cortesoft wrote: post #107
daveslash wrote: post #71

Modern encryption is really just math. Cryptography in consumer and off-the-shelf products (which Barr is targeting with his discussion) theoretically _could_ be modified in such a way that the government could decrypt it. The two ways of which I can think are (1) Encryption "backdoors" -- fancy math known only to the government; this would require new encryption ciphers or (b) key escrow. Both approaches have their…

I totally get what you are saying, but it is quite the rabbit hole if we determine that 'we can't have any illegal number... everyone should be able to share any number with anyone else' That basically means we have to entirely get rid of copyright, since all data (books, movies, software, corporate secrets, state secrets, etc) are just very large numbers. Do we believe that there should be no restriction on the shar…

We don’t need to use copyright as an example.

Words are just data. Are there illegal combinations of words to exchange? The law says, YES. Some speech is absolutely illegal, including making credible death threats, conspiring to break other laws, or disclosing certain state secrets to foreign powers.

Very few people argue that since words are easily available to everyone, that it is futile to make some combinations of words illegal.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#158

Post by dewaine »

inetknght wrote: post #144
dewaine wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You better believe I would start streaming random data all over the internet just to be an asshole

Then, in the US, you have obstruction of justice and/or interference with police/peace/public officer.

I think it's more of a protest, or am I not allowed to email myself numbers?

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#159

Post by lisper »

slg wrote: post #152
lisper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your initial comment seemed to imply that a warrant to break the encryption was "government overreach". I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion. My initial comment did not contain the word "warrant". By "government overreach" I mostly meant spying on me without a warrant, e.g. the activities brought to light by Edward Snowden, and the common practice of seizing devices at the border.

Not including the word "warrant" is exactly why I thought your problem was with warrants specifically. From you original comment: >The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and the ninth amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the people retai…

> the second option is basically the government's position

The second option is the government's ostensible position. But you seem to have forgotten the central point of my argument which is that the government is not trustworthy. Just because the government says that it will only use its decryption keys when it has a warrant, history shows that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word on matters like this. The government does end-runs around Constitutional rights regularly. Therefore, the power to enforce the Constitution's constraints on government action cannot be entrusted to the government. It must remain with the people.

Re: Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security

#160

Post by newsreview1 »

There is absolutely no way for the DMCA to keep up with the growth that may flow under it! How anyone expects the AG to prosecute every illegal infringer or posessor of illegal numbers is beyond me. There is a good article at https://www.natlawreview.com/article/digital-millennium-copy...
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