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

justice.gov

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

#81

He claims encryption is "warrant proof" which is not true. You can have a court order someone to open the lock. They want the ability to dig through people's stuff without them knowing. That's what it's really about.

Sure, but I can just refuse to decrypt my data. They can just break physical locks.

Encryption is nothing like a lock. We should stop using that analogy.

Encryption relies on a secret. It's like burying a treasure in a place only you know, and keeping the location a secret (e.g. in your head). Encryption just gives you a huge digital space where you can bury your treasure instead of a physical space where you can bury it.

Sure, people can just search everywhere for your pirate gold (brute-force attack), use advanced reasoning to narrow the search space, like "you lacked the means to 'bury' it in solid stone" (cryptanalysis), develop technology to speed up the search like ground-penetrating radar (e.g. GPUs, asic, special purpose programs) or try to coerce you to reveal the location (monkeywrench-to-knee passphrase cracking).

What the governments wants is that the maker of the shovel you used to bury your treasure not only has to track where you took that shovel but also has to tell the government that information without you telling the government got the information.

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

#82
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I can just refuse to decrypt my data. They can just break physical locks.

This is what a lot of people in our community seemingly refuse to recognize. For all intents and purposes, encryption is a unbreakable lock that can serve to perfectly hide valuable criminal evidence. Such a thing wasn't possible when our laws were written and has never before been possible in the physical world. Its existence has potential to be a huge shift in how we enforce the law. Regardless of our views on encr…

I recognize this, and I embrace it.

Cryptography is the one thing in the world that isn't easily defeated by the absurd amount of violence States are willing to commit in the interests of controlling society.

That's a feature, not a bug.

I for one am tired of using coercion to define society and we would do well to embrace anything that disempowers violence.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure you can be compelled to remember something you forgot. And nobody can tell you if you remember or not, or if you will ever remember again. So no, some judge may try to hold you in contempt of court, and it may work for a while, but at some point -- if you have a good lawyer it will turn in to a civil rights issue. Also, you could plead the 5th as well. NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and these are just my opin…

Courts have ruled that providing a password to decrypt something is not in itself testimony and isn't protected by the 5th amendment. Judges can certainly hold you in court indefinitely on a contempt of court charge as well. Considering the nature of the charges that this typically comes up in (see Francis Rawls) I wouldn't count on trying to make it a civil rights issue doing much in your favor.

But what if someone really does forget the key? They are just jailed forever?

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

#84
post #55
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what a lot of people in our community seemingly refuse to recognize. For all intents and purposes, encryption is a unbreakable lock that can serve to perfectly hide valuable criminal evidence. Such a thing wasn't possible when our laws were written and has never before been possible in the physical world. Its existence has potential to be a huge shift in how we enforce the law. Regardless of our views on encr…

Fine. Here's my contribution to the conversation: Mr Barr, your entreaties in this regard are based on the presumption that the government can be trusted. But our nation was founded on a mistrust of government, and your own actions demonstrate that the government cannot be trusted. Your own special counsel has issued a report that implicates the president in a felony (obstruction of justice) but you have failed to fo…

The problem with this line of argument is that it is a general argument against government and not specific to this issue. You could use the exact same argument for why you shot a police officer who broke down your door after securing a warrant. It would quickly be dismissed in that instance so it should carry little weight in the discussion of encryption. If you want the government to completely give up this line of thinking, you need a way to explain to them why a digital lock/encryption should be treated different legally than a physical lock.

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

#85
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I can just refuse to decrypt my data. They can just break physical locks.

This is what a lot of people in our community seemingly refuse to recognize. For all intents and purposes, encryption is a unbreakable lock that can serve to perfectly hide valuable criminal evidence. Such a thing wasn't possible when our laws were written and has never before been possible in the physical world. Its existence has potential to be a huge shift in how we enforce the law. Regardless of our views on encr…

Well no, here's another inaccessible bit of information: face-to-face conversations where there are no recording devices present. Hence the importance of testimony in a criminal investigation.

Should we now require all buildings to, by law, record audio conversations in case such conversations might one day be "needed" by law enforcement? Or perhaps there are other ways to perform targeted wiretaps?

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

#86
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isnt that a bad example though, because the counter-terrorism policy was already prewritten before the event. it wasnt a hasty reaction.

The hasty reaction was the panic that led lawmakers to grab for the most sweeping policy option they could find. What looks like prudence and caution in normal times looks like half-measures and cowardice in the heat of an emergency. Those policy proposals would have continued gathering dust forever, had not 9/11 provided a political moment that transformed things that everyone had considered faults into something th…

When a bad event happens, whatever laws you have already, no matter how strict they are, are always seen to be not enough, because people buy into the idea that if they were enough then the bad thing would not have happened. Putting into place strict laws before an event does not stop over-reaction after it.

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

#87

He claims encryption is "warrant proof" which is not true. You can have a court order someone to open the lock. They want the ability to dig through people's stuff without them knowing. That's what it's really about.

With how prevalent parallel construction has become it seems obvious that any encryption backdoor would be immediately exploited as soon as law enforcement had even the slightest justification to poke around. If they find something, you can be sure they'll come up with a legal way to arrest you for it. If they find nothing, oh well, better luck next time. Not like you'll ever know they were even there (probably).

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

#88

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…

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 encryption. All you've really accomplished is adding an extra charge of illegal encryption use at the expense of security for every human.

This potentially creates all sorts of pathologies. Is it illegal now for me not to update an old computer? If your backdoors are implemented in hardware, is it illegal to use old computers?

When people are against gun control, a common thread is "make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns." This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Not so with encryption. Other, more free countries will constantly be developing better security methodologies, and reproducing those methods is effectively free. "Fuck up encryption, then only bad guys will have encryption" is a much stronger argument, because it's emphatically true.

The ignorant hubris of this is massively disheartening.

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

#89

If the US Government succeeds in requiring a backdoor then so will every other government. Does anyone really think China won’t immediately demand backdoors?

I thought they already did, but in the layers they control, like Chinese apps and telecoms.

So, not that different from AT&T's infamous Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A).

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

#90

The cat's out of the bag. All this would lead to is law-abiding citizens having their information at risk while criminals continue to use crypto without backdoors.

I wish laypeople hearing this stuff realized how easy it would be for the "bad guys" to use one time pads.

It would be trivial to have terror cells be distributed a USB with several GB of a OTP, and that would be unbreakable even into the age of quantum computing if used properly.

Thus isn't at all about terrorism or the "really bad guys." It's 100% about accessing the average Joe Blow's communications.

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