Blackberry CEO says Apple has gone to a “dark place” with pro-privacy stance | Hacker News Reader

Blackberry CEO says Apple has gone to a “dark place” with pro-privacy stance

arstechnica.co.uk

20 pointstosh9 comments

"However, our privacy commitment does not extend to criminals"

Here, let me fix that for you, Chen: "our privacy commitment does not extend to the accused". No trial has yet taken place in the described circumstances, so the owner of the phone isn't a criminal just yet.

But overall it sounds like Chen is trying to have it both ways ("no government backdoors"), while not entirely pissing off the government so as to cling to the thin hope that some government contracts might come their way and keep them afloat.

What's a blackberry again?

The most hilarious comment in the article is Chen's claim that

   "criminals would simply write
   their own encryption apps"

Yeah, good luck with that. I bet people at NSA, FSB, GCHQ et al. are literally ROTFL at how well that would turn out.

Could you elaborate on the point you're trying to make ?.

I think the implication might be that one doesn't ever write their own encryption. Well, duh, but there are plenty of libraries out there that have been vetted and are easy to pull into your project. I mean, plenty of us do that every day, I don't see why a criminal organization can't do the same and have a relatively secure app. What, you think they have some caricature from a mobster movie whip something up in VBScript using ROT-13?

"Criminals" don't even need to write their own, just use some pre-existing encryption tool (e.g. PGP/GPG) with their own pre-shared private keys. By separating the transport service from the encryption tool, you eliminate the most direct route for an NSA backdoor, and change their problem from one of pressuring communication providers for keys to one of obtaining access to an individual's private keys or breaking the encryption algo. At least that should be marginally more difficult for the NSA to achieve, given that pressuring most companies to install backdoors seems to require approximately zero effort.

(Yes, this requires some level of sophistication among criminals, but many criminals are part of a larger, somewhat sophisticated organization.)

The NSA/GCHQ/etc could crack a random person's attempt at "encryption" in hours. Even if they were to use AES or some other algorithm that actually works, getting end-to-end encrypted messaging right is hard.

Making it user friendly is typically the hard part.

Has anyone ever shown PGP/GPG encrypted messages (let's say over email, but even an encrypted file is equivalent) being cracked?

Note to self: never, ever buy or use a Blackberry.

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