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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

They looked into whether it could be done and then decided that doing it was not worth the controversy it would generate. This seems like a good thing, I'm not sure why WaPo went with such a sinister sounding headline. More accurate would be "Obama administration rejects several proposals to bypass smartphone encryption".

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> They looked into whether it could be done

Before that, they first had to deliberately ignore that that the government already "looked into" trying to require key escrow. At least that time they had an actual proposal (Skipjack/Clipper Chip) instead of dissembling about "golden keys".

A lot of people in government have been acting as if the this is a new argument, when the backlash already happened. The idea that someone needed to "look into" this to find out if there would be a backlash only makes sense if they were somehow ignorant of the 90s crypto wars.

After sending an RFP. I think that's the point.

As I read it, it was to access encrypted information on a suspect after a warrant or court order has been issued. If you have something in a locked room and the police have a warrant to search it, they can cut the lock off and search it, that's perfectly legal. The trick with encryption is to find a way to do that without rendering every other lock in existence worthless, and I think that's what they're looking for.

Maybe some three-key encryption, with the third key escrowed for judicial purposes.

The escrow there would make me very nervous, as it becomes a very juicy target.

Give it to the Office of Personnel Management, they are charged with holding some of the most sensitive information the US Government has.

A 3rd key would have to be kept secret forever but still available easily. How long before this gets leaked? One thing everyone can learn from the Snowden leaks is that governments are rubbish at keeping secrets for long periods of time. Bear in mind that the 3rd key would have a serious financial value and could be sold semi-anonymously.

I assumed it would be a unique 3rd key per user/transaction. It increases the burden of the escrow-holder (by vastly increasing the number of keys to manage), but has the benefit of allowing granular access to data, rather than compromising all of one service if a warrant is served for a single user's information.

So which governments get access to the 3rd keys?

Good luck forcing people to use deliberately broken encryption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Clickbait and sensationalism is a thing in journalism. It is morally wrong because it spreads disinformation and is harmful to both individuals and democracy, but it is legal and profitable, and we haven't done enough to shun it, so it happens.

What's sensationalized?

  The approaches were analyzed as part of a months-long government 
  discussion about how to deal with the growing use of encryption 
  in which no one but the user can see the information.

Using OUR money, they looked into ways to compromise technology that keeps OUR information private. If you claim you're going to be the most transparent administration, the public ought to hold you to that claim. Without leaks and whistleblowers, and reporting like this, we'd be clueless.

The headline 'Obama administration quietly rejected ways to bypass smartphone encryption' would be more true and less sensational.

I said nothing about not reporting. It's the distorted headlines laced with innuendo that are damaging.

Your headline would also only tell half of the story, because we don't know whose "ways" the administration rejected. They, the administration, spent time looking into something that they later concluded was wrong. Right?

WaPo's headline was in the past tense and doesn't state anything else, so obviously nothing went beyond exploring. It's not distorted at all.

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