But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand.
The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence".
Access to all an individual's communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn't carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule.
The norm for centuries has been that if you're being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn't even the law of this country that the government couldn't intercept and monitor your communications by fiat, without a warrant. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn't choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them.
When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they're generally not talking about the status quo. What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen.
† (http://cryptopals.com, &c)
Good.
I mean, Bluffdale didn't get built for nothing.
1. We've been missing something fundamental about computer science for many decades and all the encryption we use everywhere is going to be broken.
2. Everything is going to be unbreakably encrypted by default and no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single emoji from a single IM.
Again: don't think about the status quo; think about 15-20 years from now.
3. "Enabling" (some kind of sabotage, infiltration, or collaboration) means a lot of things with a theoretically sound design are broken or backdoored in a way that is somehow hard to notice.
4. End-to-end encryption has a lot of UI inconveniences around key management, so it will only used for a small minority of communications.
5. The "Going Bright" paper's world in which it continues to be easy for governments to hack people. (However, the connection to the data centers isn't very obvious -- maybe for archiving stuff that was transferred with a non-forward-secret protocol, but why will things be transferred with such protocols?)
6. The fear about quantum computers is justified because they only cost about a billion dollars to reduce to practice at a level that can attack deployed systems. For some reason, the transition to post-quantum crypto is especially slow, difficult, or error-prone.
7. Crypto developers continue not to do Cryptopals and, for decades, continue to make frequent implementation mistakes that allow passive adversaries to defeat their systems.
8. There's going to continue to be an easy covert way to get in proximity of servers and read their session keys, but that way doesn't allow covert exfiltration of plaintexts from the servers so attackers need to record the ciphertext elsewhere.
9. The data centers are for recording metadata events, which are expected to become incredibly voluminous.
10. The Internet of Things industry still accepts second-class cryptographic mechanisms supposedly because of technical limitations of their devices, so uses smaller keylengths, no PFS, inadequate RNG, obsolete or custom ciphers...
11. People still use GSM phones with Kᵢ physically generated by their carrier as a basis for confidentiality of a portion of their communications, and it's still possible to attack the carriers' generation and distribution of these keys.
Forget about what random developers do with crypto. I agree: generalist developers will probably never get reliable crypto right. But they won't have to, just like they don't write their own TCP congestion control algorithms. Every programming environment available will provide unbreakable crypto by default without asking. You'll have to go out of your way not to have it; it'll be like raw sockets, where the environment sort of looks at you weird for even asking.
There are UX issues with strong crypto, but:
1. They're getting sorted out quickly.
2. They tend not to apply to the simplest and most common cases, which are actually the ones that matter most to public policy.
In the coin you've presented, certainly [1.] is the option we should all be expecting, sadly.
Option 2 sounds damn near utopian. I'll continue, as i mentioned before, to daydream about that one.
I looked only because I was trying to remember myself how to spell it.
One of the big drivers behind the American revolution was John Wilkes' diaries being seized by the government in 1763. This was done with a legal warrant, but it's still the reason why we have the 4th amendment today. So the idea that we have a tradition of the government being able to seize whatever they want with a warrant isn't entirely accurate.
The "every man's evidence" principle isn't just an English thing; it's been repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court, it's baked into our rules of evidence, and can easily be read out of both the text of the 4th Amendment and the actual actions of the framers once they actually put the Constitution into action.
The Wilkes thing in particular is a little more complicated than you're acknowledging, though I think you must know much more about it than I do. The warrant the King used against Wilkes was a general warrant, the kind the 4th Amendment was intended to forbid: those "warrants" were like a cross between a search warrant and eminent domain, allowing the government unrestricted access to all the property and possessions of its target. They were instruments of harassment, and their unpopularity was definitely a driver for the revolt.
I don't know that there are many exceptions once you have a warrant, but there is definitely a preference to use subpoenas when possible.
(I'll note though that I probably don't know more about this, most of my knowledge just comes from reading Jeffrey Rosen books on privacy law.)
I remember a conference where old crypto algorithms were mentioned. Unbreakable in the 80s or 90s but now trivial to decipher. The speaker implied that both Russia and the US would have carefully recorded and stored all of each other's communication and that we can bet that the content of these communications is still interesting today, not just for their historical interest.
We live old. Much older than the technologies we use. Now our gvt is doing to us what they would only do to foreign embassies.
Quite a bit of 90s crypto remains unbreakable, because the data is at rest and will never be put back into a circumstance that exposes the weaknesses of its cryptosystem.
In the past, ephemeral day-to-day communications were not accessible to the courts, because they were carried out face to face. These days, those same communications are carried out electronically. Similarly with storage - due to the complexity brought on by computers, there is simply much more to correctly remember in today's world, necessitating the use of auxiliary storage for one's brain.
The attack on encryption is a direct attack on whether individuals' computers should function as their personal agents (akin to lawyer and priest professional confidentiality), or whether individuals are prevented from personally wielding the amplifying power of computation and left at the mercy of powerful groups who do.
We limit the state's access to evidence through judicial oversight. We do not, as a general rule, allow individuals to further overrule that access.
* Everyone is going to use encryption by default, without trying or even knowing what cryptography is.
* That cryptography is going to be unbreakable, not just by today's investigators but possibly for millennia. Even if quantum attacks on crypto are possible, we have ciphers that will hold up, and computers are already small and fast enough to make their added expense a rounding error.
This is a very different situation than the Barksdale crew using a keypad code. 70 years ago, military grade crypto was crackable (and doing so helped us win World War 2). That isn't going to happen in 70 years, ever again.
I agree that they're likely to do a dramatically better job of it in the future than they could have before and that it will be easier.
As computer scientists, we know this can only lead to eventual contradictions. Old concepts are subsumed with new definitions in different abstractions. "Plan to meet up for dinner" used to mean a face-to-face talk when you bumped into someone on the street or, later, over two direct analog wires that were equally ephemeral as long as nobody was a priori recording. Now it means digital messages that are automatically stored indefinitely.
The right to privacy should apply generally to each definition, but when you analyze with local reasoning of course the latter message is voluntarily stored on a bazillion servers and sent over tapped fibre.
Which is why I gave some other concrete examples. Do a plain reading of the 6th and 7th amendments, and wonder why a speeding ticket does not result in a jury trial. But follow the path of legal reasoning that got us to the present condition, and you can see how the ideals were subsumed and discarded.
(There are places where you do have a right to full trial over a traffic fine, but you wouldn't want to avail yourself of that right).
I also don't see how a ~$1k punishment for a slight speed infraction is "petty".
Historic violations don't really counter my point - even in the past the map was not the territory. Finding one non-erosion (by virtue of it never have been applied) doesn't change the rights that have eroded.
Here is a LEO forum discussing jury trials for moving violations (running stop sign, etc.): http://forums.officer.com/t107818/
Also witness how the officers gleefully go about trampling the 5th amendment:
> Rejoice in the fact that, win or lose: ... It's still going to cost the violator more for the attorney than the fine will be.
Yet another example of the effect I'm describing - de jure it makes sense as it's one's own responsibility to pay for an attorney. de facto it constitutes an extrajudicial punishment that police directly acknowledge.
You and your wife could not be forced to testify against each other(Spousal privilege), but your private sms conversation absolutely could be. (What was possible as only a private conversation is now easily sent across the world, and as a consequence is sniffed and stored by potentially many parties.)
This is not a surprise for anyone who understands that they are sent in plain text, but from the context of people, those conversations would still be considered private communications between spouses.
I am not saying the law gives a shit about the distinction, but persons absolutely do. I hope you now understand the sentiment a bit more.
The problem is, no matter how we change the law, the law is going to demand a balance of interests. We can outlaw coerced production of personal communications between relatives and friends, but there are still going to be communications the public has a right to access.
The technology is not going balance those interests. It's morally neutral, and incapable of concerning itself with the needs of society to stop organized criminal enterprises.
Again: for me, the wins of strong crypto clearly beat out the losses. But it's not insane that people --- especially people who don't work in technology --- might weight the factors differently.
Back in the 1700s, if you wrote a private letter (on paper/parchment, with a feather ink pen as they had back then), in a foreign language, and the court system wanted to use this as evidence, could the government compel you to translate it?
Or, suppose you developed your own cipher (they had ciphers back then, I'm sure). Could the government compel you to decipher the message back then?
The use of encryption really isn't much different from this.
Basically, when most of your society is illiterate, they are not creating evidence for LEO to subpoena in the first place.
To me that seems like the key difference. If all but face-to-face communications are electronic, and no electronic communications can be strongly encrypted, then the private sphere is greatly reduced and many things once considered private become public.
But on the other side of things, with strong crypto many things once considered public would become private.
There doesn't seem to be an easy way around this choice.
Instantaneity can't be the fulcrum of this debate, because it's been the norm since the beginning of English common law.
There has to be some other principle at stake that can argue against decryption backdoors. And I think there are such principles! But I think it's important that they be articulated carefully.
Because much intimate communication has moved from in-person/on-telephone/other-instantaneous communications to asynchronous platforms hosted by third parties, in effect much that was "private" is now effectively "public". What once required a warrant now does not. Many things previously subject to protections against unreasonable searches are no longer so protected.
[1]: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question...
Nobody does that anymore. You're instead using a tool that someone else made, and either that tool or the other person is handling all of the hard work. Tools definitely can be regulated - I need a license to drive; I need to register my car; I need to go through a background check to own a gun; I can own a gun, but if I misuse it I go to jail; felons can't purchase guns legally; I can't buy a nuclear weapon or the fissile material needed to make own.
The questions that policymakers are fumbling through right now are things like "how (if at all) do we regulate tools and the companies that make/distribute them if those tools allow people evade law enforcement?"
Given technology evolution, we must constantly re-evaluate what is still legitimate and should be transposed to today and what is off-limits.
Let me give you what is (for us today) a ridiculous example to prove my point: imagine that in a couple hundred years, it becomes possible to scan anyone's brain with some sort of machine and determine what a person is thinking about?
But that's not what I'm taking issue with. What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence, as part of the social contract that animates the country, and that technology is in fact poised to overrule that entitlement without due process of law or politics.
It's a simple and sensible issue to have with crypto. Crypto is important and valuable technology, but that doesn't mean everything about it is good. It has downsides, too. We should be honest about them, and less shocked when people weigh the downsides differently than we do.
Unfortunately, you'd have to trust the government to keep their end of the deal...
But it is not entitled to the existence of evidence. It can only collect what still exists at the point of collection.
Using encryption keeps the plaintext of communication ephemeral, even if the ciphertext is persistent.
Mandating backdoors means mandating persistence.
The point is that even if a user intends to have an ephemeral conversation over an internet service all kind of middle-boxes may keep more persistent copies.
Something that normally does not happen with either face to face or telephone conversations.
With unencrypted digital communication on the other hand past conversations can be dredged up from all kinds of places.
End-to-end encryption basically abstracts ephemeral communication over channels with some sort of persistence.
I don't think many people have any significant objection to the state acquiring evidence, as long as proper procedure (warrants/etc) is followed.
While the repulsion is primarily over breaking encryption (key escrow nonsense, etc) and the damage that would cause, there is another problem with the Government's desire for "access" that I haven't seen much in the reprisal of the Crypto Wars compared to the previous round in the 90s.
The government is implicitly demanding additional work be done on it's behalf. Managing a key escrow system (or part of it) isn't free. There is a labor cost and a cost in damage to a business's market position and reputation (their product will be seen - rightly - as less valuable).
A warrant isn't a guarantee that a search will produce the desired evidence. It is unreasonable to demand that we (everyone, before any warrant is involved) should change our behavior and try to preserve evidence or compromise our own security to make it easier for the government at some hypothetical time in the future.
A warrant isn't an engineering technique or a mathematical axiom. It's a directive from a court that its recipient must comply with a demand to produce some information. Warrants are, in some sense, about people.
If you encrypt some piece of information such that you retain the ability to decrypt and recover it, then as far as the law is concerned, you're capable of responding to a warrant for that information. Technology is going to make it possible for everyone, not just the tech savvy, to refuse to comply with those kinds of warrants. Public policy will need to adapt. As I said, we may not like how it adapts.
IMO, a kill switch seems like a mild Pareto improvement to me.
Encryption is basically a branch of mathematics. Outlawing all mathematics that can be used for the purpose of encryption, requires to accurately describe the precise boundaries of this branch of mathematics. It is trivially easy to prove that this cannot be done:
You cannot construct a predicate function that accepts as argument another function and returns true/false if the argument is an encryption function, because it means that this function implicitly claims to be able to determine if such function will halt. The theorem of the halting problem precludes that a predicate function could exist that returns true/false if the function supplied as argument will always halts. Therefore, no function could ever be constructed that can generally determine if another function is an encryption function.
This means that encryption cannot be defined. Without definition, it is not possible to outlaw it.
> no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them ...
Warrants and judicial orders are just verbiage while encryption algorithms are machine-executable instructions. It is simply not enough to mumble verbiage. They will also have to speak in terms of machine-executable instructions, in order to overcome the encryption measures that they are facing.
Why would it be necessary to preserve the power of people who are only capable of mumbling non-executable verbiage? If their jobs have become obsolete due to progress in technology, they will not be the first nor the last ones that this happens to. Join the club.
This is the computer science version of the weed farmer's argument that the government can't regulate marijuana because it grows in the ground, man.
Please, sir, read the fifth amendment [5].
[5] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fifth_amendment
If the 5th Amendment doesn't protect your personal diary --- and it doesn't --- and it doesn't prevent the government from wiretapping your phone --- and it doesn't --- it's unlikely to bear heavily on this discussion either.
Yet, the fifth amendment allows an individual to not be a witness against their self; if an individual is a witness to evidence against their self, they may conceal it, per the fifth amendment.
I said nothing of personal diaries or phones.
I never argued for the existence of a 'general right to conceal evidence', only that, contrary to your very specific claim, the founders did allow for individuals to conceal evidence.
No. An answering machine tape is not a person at criminal trial.
> nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
You are talking about physical evidence; an answering machine tape, presumably recording some prior conversation, is a physical artifact that already exists. In no way can you construe examining a pre-constructed physical artifact as compelling a criminal defendant to witness against their self [It would imply criminal defendant is somehow the physical artifact itself.].
If I am not mistaken, 'witness' refers to making real claims about events at trial. Making real claims that one performed criminal activities at trial can be construed as evidence. An individual may conceal that evidence by not revealing it, and I don't believe US law allows any way to reveal such evidence.
> it's unlikely to bear heavily on this discussion either.
Why so much snark anytime someone disagrees with you?
> If the 5th Amendment doesn't protect your personal diary --- and it doesn't --- and it doesn't prevent the government from wiretapping your phone
You're interpretation is flat out wrong. Let me quote a few sections for you:
> nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Seizing someone's electronic communications certainly does make a great witness against oneself, especially when the communications were seized without a warrant.
> nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
Again, seizing communications en masse without a warrant for each communication is expressly against even the most rootementary interpretation of the 5th Amendment. There is no due process of law here. In fact, we know some people are in prison thanks to Parallel Construction - the exact opposite of due process.
I got snarky because of the "sir" in the parent comment. I SAY GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR.
Totally fair game to ding me for doing that, though.
You are correct - but only via due process (court order/warrant, etc..).
What we have here is not due process - but rather systematic bulk collection and inspection of all electronic communications from every citizen. These private communications are then sifted through, looking for anything of interest... and if found, we then (sometimes) go get a warrant to retro-actively wiretap your communications. That's not legal, but it's what's going on.
Regarding full-device encryption - it's the same thing. You need a warrant to compel me to turn over my device. No law makes it legal for the government to "hack" into your device remotely and inspect it's contents (unless you have a specific warrant). If the individual refuses to turn over the device or decrypt it, it's no different than someone refusing to turn over a written letter... and we have punishments for these actions. We don't need to ban encryption for this, we already have mechanisms in place to handle these situations.
Why do you keep trying to shut this down? I'm clearly arguing against points you have made in the quotes cited in my post.
> Abuses of systematic collection are a great reason to support universal encryption. Certainly, it's the primary reason I support it.
I think we finally agree here. I just don't know why you appear to keep making counter arguments if this is how you truly feel.
We have essentially a decade of evidence to show having access to electronic communications (both encrypted and not) has little to zero effect on law enforcement's ability to do their job.
Just recently, the Paris attackers use unencrypted cell phone text messages to coordinate and plan their attack. Nobody detected it...
Before that, the FBI successfully caught Ross Ulbricht, through good 'ol police work (because they couldn't beat his encryption and proxy usage).
We don't need access to private communications (both encrypted and not) in order to conduct lawful law enforcement -- we just need better law enforcement practices.
All this anti-encryption rederick put forth by the government is really just smoke and mirrors, covering up systematic failures of law enforcement.
No, everything they do will not be encrypted in 15 years. Most relevantly, except when the crime at issue itself is an act of communication, the crime won't be encrypted, or even subject to encryption, so all the usual police work that enables solving crime based on the actual criminal act and the evidence naturally attaching thereto will remain available.
Coming back to the encryption debate - if we cannot stop plots and crimes from taking place that were orchestrated over clear-text communications[2][3][4] - then there is practically zero hope of success by forcing everyone to not encrypt communications.
To say that better - if we can't stop crimes that are communicated in clear-text, then having the ability to decrypt messages does not change our probability of success.
Yes, encrypting all the things will provide some level of convenience for the "bad guys", but it also provides immense levels of security for the "good guys", as well as us regular people. Going back 15 years - we did not have capabilities to intercept and decrypt mass communications - yet we still caught the "bad guys". September 11th happened, and now we're all still whipped into a frenzy thinking somehow if we could just backdoor encryption, we would have prevented that attack (which is absurdly false).
The big point I'm making - backdooring/weakening/banning of encryption makes nobody more safe. Maybe we catch one or two plotters before they do something - but we also expose all citizens to online attacks on their identity, finances, privacy, and more.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-ter...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/signs-point-to-unencrypt...
[3] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/11/after-par...
[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/paris-police-find...
My issue is that universal default unbreakable encryption doesn't just break dragnet surveillance, but also breaks discovery and evidence recovery done under a warrant in routine investigations. It is in fact hard to break dragnet surveillance without harming routine law enforcement, and I think people should be clearer about that tradeoff.
It also isn't my contention that harming routine investigations means that crypto should be backdoored. Despite what you said upthread, I'm going to hazard that I've done more work to help foil attempts to break crypto than you have. My bona fides here are established, no matter how you choose to misread my comments. It really bothers me when people erroneously suggest that I support crypto backdoors. It doesn't help that the first thing I wrote on this very thread said exactly that.
> Please stop doing this
Most of your responses to myself and others begin with a line similar to this. It's meta in itself, but also puts people a little off. We're debating things here, and we seem to disagree on some points... but that's OK since that's really what we're here for. You can't ask people to stop disagreeing with you, but if you feel strongly, you may choose not to respond.
> It really bothers me when people erroneously suggest that I support crypto backdoors.
You have stated this several times, and I do believe you. The problem here is that we're not (and the government's not) just discussing backdoors, but other means such as purposefully weakening encryption, outright bans, or other methods of subverting strong encryption. Stating you don't support backdoors is only one small component of what's at stake here. It's almost a level of misdirection or a half-statement to throw this in whenever someone attacks your argument. In addition - you have made good arguments which seem to illustrate the problems with having universal default unbreakable encryption. This leads one to believe you are in opposition of such.
> My issue is that universal default unbreakable encryption doesn't just break dragnet surveillance, but also breaks discovery and evidence recovery done under a warrant in routine investigations.
This is an example of one argument that seems to favor subverting strong encryption by some means. If you do not support universal default unbreakable encryption, then you must be against it on some level. If you're against it on some level, then the logical conclusion is you support one or many of the government suggested solutions, such as banning/backdooring/weakening. As mentioned, you do not support backdooring, but that leaves two other options that are being actively pursued by the government.
> I'm going to hazard that I've done more work to help foil attempts to break crypto than you have. My bona fides here are established
This is largely irrelevant information. I am aware of your background - however one's professional view is not always the same as one's personal view. Being a security professional and thoughts on encryption are not mutually exclusive.
> no matter how you choose to misread my comments
I think this issue isn't really a misread, but rather the half statements about backdooring. I probably didn't articulate that difference properly, but I submit you failed to do the same.
In any event, it seems we mostly agree on this subject really, although we both argue it differently.
I'm not making half-statements about backdoors. There is no daylight that I can perceive between "backdoor" and "weakened encryption". When I say "universal default unbreakable crypto", that is exactly what I mean.
I think we agree on this point. The largest problem faced is making policy makers understand the ramifications of tampering with encryption in any form, be it backdooring algorithms, weakening the encryption, outright bans or some other method to subvert encryption attempts. It would be foolish to do any of the above, since the result is a less safe technology infrastructure for the country in whole.
> There is no daylight that I can perceive between "backdoor" and "weakened encryption"
When I say "weakened encryption", I'm referring to mandates on maximum key size, etc... similar to what we had back in the 90's. We learned through trial that purposefully reducing encryption strength has short term benefits, but leads to long term security problems (there's still a need for some to use SGC certs!)... why repeat this nonsense?
You mentioned something about due process and discovery in another post -- Me refusing to give the decryption key to my phone is no different than me setting fire to my "evil secrets" notebook... or refusing to give the combination to my safe. We already have laws in place that deal with this, and they work. The government doesn't need a secret key that can open any safe or door no more than they need a secret key that can open any encrypted file. Our problem is we have policy makers who fundamentally believe the government should have a master key to everything.
We should also remind our policy makers we're only discussing this now in the open because we caught the NSA red handed doing all of these things in secret, plus more. They paid RSA to deliberately weaken algorithms, they actively captured and attempted to break encrypted files without warrants, they engaged the private sector in both subvert and overt attempts to remove encryption, and when all else failed, they just circumvented the entire thing.
The public reaction to all this was to make the NSA's attempts to violate individual's privacy much harder. If the NSA had been a good citizen, people and companies may have been more receptive to working with them (although end-to-end encryption was still going to happen, because it's the right thing to do with a customer's data).
The biggest problem with the government's desire to weaken or ban encryption is the "bad guys" will still use strong encryption methods -- they don't follow the law by definition. Other nations will still develop and use strong encryption, so it won't disappear. This leaves only normal folks vulnerable to both government overreach, as well as to the "bad guys".
I don't see where I made that insinuation. I also don't see where you made that strong stand... so it doesn't really matter.
Please stop asking people to stop things - it's petty and annoying. Make your case clear, and knock off the half-speak.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_...
It's fair to argue that he overstates the benefit of surveillance to law enforcement or that it wouldn't be bad if law enforcement got harder or more expensive in various ways or that it's unfortunate that law enforcement ever came to rely on electronic surveillance in the first place, but I think he made very clear that he did not support limits on encryption, which makes it kind of unfair to challenge him on that aspect. He has been saying that he wishes fellow opponents of crypto restrictions would be more sympathetic to the view that easy availability of crypto has some disadvantages to society, so maybe it would be more helpful to engage on that point. :-)
I don't think it affects discovery at all: discovery relies on turning over responsive materials, not breaking encryption.
Anytime evidence doesn't exist or is difficult to interpret because it hasn't been deliberately created in a form which is readily interpreted by uninvolved third parties, it can impair the utility of search and seizure warrants to collect evidence. But this is unavoidable, and compelling affairs to be conducted in a manner which provides the most convenience for law enforcement after-the-fact is simply untenable in pretty much every area of life (encryption is not special this way.)
In the case of data/communications, if an untrusted third party can access your data/communications without your consent, many untrusted third parties can. A ban on secure end-to-end encryption (whether it take the form of mandatory MitM/backdoors, restrictions on parties that can be endpoints in secure end-to-end links, or whatever other form) means exposing everyones data to many potential attackers, just so that law enforcement might have convenient access later.
The development of pervasive electronic communication and data storage/consumption technology means one of two things, either:
(1) people are far more exposed to both criminal exploitation and government abuse of power, but routine, rights-respecting law enforcement is not burdened and, in fact, somewhat eased, or
(2) people are able to do far more without additional vulnerability, and perhaps with a net less vulnerability, to various forms of criminal exploitation and government abuse, but routine, rights-respecting law enforcement is made more difficult.
And the former option requires curtailing substantially the freedom of speech in electronic media (or perhaps all media) in ways it never was curtailed in other media.
Everything everyone does will be encrypted in 15 years -- and that's a good thing. It makes it harder for the bad guys to be, well, bad.
Identity theft happens to far more Americans every year than the number that have been involved in a terrorist attack since the founding of our nation.[1] Backdooring/weakening/banning encryption will literally make stealing people's identities far easier. We want to make the government's job marginally easier to spy on everyone at any time, but we're ignoring the major side-effects of doing just that.
[1] http://www.techjuice.pk/a-data-scientist-explains-odds-of-dy...
For extremely large values of "decade".
You have a right not to testify against yourself. You do not have the right to conceal or destroy evidence!
How do you compel the production of evidentiary, self-incriminating testimony?
Warrants have never had the power to do the impractical, much less the impossible.
What's important to public policy is what Apple and Google, and whatever their analogues in 2030 might be choose to do, and how they're regulated.
To provide default-unbreakable encryption requires a combination of commercial services that enhance the UX of using strong encryption, like web-of-trust features in communications software that make it impractical to MITM communications and key exchange, and non-commercial software that secures communications payload.
So any effective ban would ban not only an Apple proprietary system that was secure, but also those non-commercial components that are a necessary part of a truly secure communications system. That's where the overreach happens.
For them to play loosey-goosey with it and expect the normies to abide by it without question is ludicrous.
Cases of mistaken identity, action based on bad information, and people losing their lives or being incarcerated incorrectly as a result are in the news every day.
So, IMO, they're not entitled to fuck all anything ala this "social contract".
Of course if all communication is encrypted it would be harder for a government to get a warrant but I think that's probably more in line with the 4th amendment.
I think you're overestimating how much the public's indifference has to do with computer illiteracy.
That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
It's a completely valid argument in both cases. Banning only the scary-looking guns has no productive effect. And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no.
Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you.
If you ask whether large numbers of government employees and contractors should be able to know everything about your business and sex life if it would have the same effectiveness in catching terrorists as a variety of alternative methods that would shovel fewer tax dollars into the pockets of large government contractors, you get a different answer.
Disagree. The person imagines a constrained government, which would only be reading private messages when there is reason for suspicion. The only time another human would be invading their privacy is in an exceptional situation that happens to others (since they themselves are good), which can be just-worlded to the required degree. And of course mass media distorts their priors to think that suspicion strongly implies guilt - a TV show would be quite boring if there were no wrongdoing.
I suspect tech is so (relatively) resistant to mass surveillance because we've perceived how horribly wrong group dynamics go and, rather than accepting being compliant herd followers, found our own outlets and created our own kingdoms. We are the outliers - we will never have the majority on our side.
That's the point. People who support mass surveillance or encryption bans only do so because they're uninformed (or have been purposely misinformed by others). You teach regular people how it actually works and they change their tune.
On the subject of encryption bans and backdoors, I explained that this would make it easier for them to be the target of hacks and fraud. This concerned them, but ultimately they are under the impression that the people handling it know more than me and I can't be correct.
I don't think they are particularly out-of-the-ordinary, so I don't think the solution is a simple act of informing people. I think people who do care about this stuff largely need to accept the possibility that this isn't important to the majority of the population, and that it never will be (no matter how informed the public is). Instead, we need to continue build the tools and the infrastructure to secure ourselves regardless of policy and legislation.
But when I say the kinds of changes being proposed would fundamentally undermine the security encryption provides, they think I'm wrong. Like most of the current presidential-hopefuls, they believe in a magic-bullet that will give the government access but no one else. They think someone smarter than me will implement it, and that my concerns are misplaced.
Again, I don't see this as a strange viewpoint. I think, to some degree, it's what most people believe.
That's rather disingenuous, I am all for banning people buying howitzers and other artillery even if there just big guns. Yes, you can make them with a decent machine shop, but just because some nutjobs are highly capable does not mean they all are.
It is easier to carry out a door to door mass shooting with a pistol grip. This is why assault weapons have them in the first place. Sure, it might only save a few lives, but that would be meaningful for those who lived. ;0
</enough derailing>
IMO, none of that stuff was going to get passed, it's all about the political football. I am starting to think encryption may be the same game as it's a great way to drum up donations.
Granted, it's like banning the ergonomic snow shovel. Sure, it's slightly better, but it's generally not a huge difference.
Now, change it to "bayonet mounts", which is another feature that was listed on the "Assault Weapons Ban" law. How does having a bayonet aid someone in a mass shooting? In fact, when has a mass shooter ever had a bayonet mounted on his rifle? I'm not even sure why they bother with them any more; I've never seen any pictures with US military servicemen in combat in the last 20 years with bayonets mounted in their M-16s or M-4s.
Another thing was flash suppressors. How is banning those going to prevent mass shootings? The whole point of a flash suppressor is so the enemy on a battlefield can't tell where gunfire is coming from exactly. Someone walking into a movie theater isn't all that worried about return fire, and in a room that size when he enters through the emergency-exit door, it's not like he's going to be well-hidden.
But seriously, the whole thing is pretty dumb IMO. They tried to ban very, very minor features (pistol grips, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, etc.), but ignored the things that really made these weapons good at shooting lots of people, namely semiautomatic operation and easily-swapped magazines. If you want to make mass shootings hard, ban magazine-fed ammunition and semiautomatic operation. Of course, that'll bring you right back to Old West 6-shooters (well, modern .357 Magnum revolvers would still be legal too, but you could also ban that style of revolver where the cylinder is easily opened and reloaded with a speedloader; the Old West revolvers didn't have that, you had to reload them one at a time, very slowly). But of course they know that'll never work since people have had semiauto guns for a century or more now and aren't going to turn them all in, so they go for a feel-good measure that'll make ignorant anti-gun voters happy without actually changing anything substantive.
Yep, this is why so many polls are BS: the questions are worded in such a way to coerce people to answer a certain way, or options are left out.
It may not even be intentional; if you use the OKCupid dating site, they have thousands of questions you can answer so that it can match you up with people. I think a lot of these questions (probably most) were actually submitted by users, and many times they have terrible choices. For instance, there's one question about dogs: it asks if you want to own a dog or not. The choices are (I don't have the exact Q in front of me here) "yes, I do or would love to own a dog!", or "No, I dislike dogs". WTF? If you pick the latter, it makes you look like you hate dogs. But what if you like dogs just fine and are generally an animal-loving person, but you just don't want to own and care for a dog? I like horses well enough too, but that doesn't mean I want to buy a horse farm and fill the barn with horses. I think iguanas are cute, but I don't really want one as a pet. I think parrots are beautiful and interesting animals, but I really don't want to live with all that squawking (plus I think they should be left in the wild). But somehow because I don't want to take care of a dog, I'm suddenly a dog-hater according to this poll question.
The way a poll question is designed really reflects a lot on the bias of the person writing the poll; the only way to mitigate it is to have every poll question thoroughly scrutinized by a diverse committee. But they never are, they just run the poll, collect the data, and assume it to be gospel truth.
If there is a dodgy-looking guy staring at you when you go home, you get frightened. If he watching you through the CCTV then it's all fine. A bit like if you have a video of a guy getting killed on youtube it's horrible, but if it's a one liner in a newspaper about a drone bombing a house then it's ok. If there is a video of a guy killing someone with a knife in the street of London, it will be remembered for years as a horrendous terrorist attack. But if the police publishes statistics about knife attacks in your neighborhood then it's just a bunch of boring numbers.
- content holders want to make sure you're paying for every byte you consume [1]
- marketing intel and ad networks always need more about you by any means [2]
- contractors want to sell their data vacuums [3]
- law enforcement wants a precrime db even if it's illegal [stingray]
- government control of populace, yadda yadda [4]
- because encryption kills children [5], I'm not making this up
- congress critters need to appear to be doing _something_ about $threat even if they know it will be shot down later in judicial challenge
And arrayed against all that is one little tattered document from a bunch of idealists that only the People seem to read.
1. http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-vpn-access-lock-down-overse...!
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085650
3. http://maplight.org/content/73373
4. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/the-militar...
Even your average citizen understands encryption on the basic level and what the backdoor means. No, they don't understand the technical underpinnings of how it works, but they know it means privacy that cannot be bypassed, and many are willing to give up that privacy if it means getting what they want elsewhere. You can lob the scares of "are you sure you have nothing to hide?" to any proponent of encryption as much as you like, but in all honesty they've made the assessment already and have decided that it's worth the gamble. Proponents of encryption aren't the victims of some massive disinformation campaign, they're just making a really bad decision despite the available evidence, and it's turning out to be an overwhelmingly popular decision.
But it completely bypasses the 4th amendment either directly or in spirit. In most cases they don't even need to serve a warrant to the companies, and even if they do, I think that warrant should always be served to the individual.
It shouldn't be served to companies just because "it's easier" and because it happens that in the 21st century the data about our lives is stored on a third-party company's servers. If we just wanted to make things as easy as possible for law enforcement we'd have to do away with many more of our rights.
To see how out of touch governments can be, I think there are two stories, both unfortunately of a military nature.
One is Eisenhower's trek across the US in the interwar period, the thing ( along with the Autobahn ) that inspired the Interstate, and the story of the squad-level light machine gun in WWI, especially related to the Lewis gun.
Machine guns were not embraced until the Germans showed how effective they were in WWI. This really happened. Commanders were optimizing for damage per bullet long after they should not have been.
Be wary, but don't be frightened. I at least find it relatively easy to conduct my affairs such that I don't have to live in fear. So it can be done.
At least consider the possibility that the Snowden and Manning stories are stories about people who really didn't think it all the way through, if they didn't want to be hunted. There's an element of martyrdom and hubris to those stories.
In a way, much of the Nixon cases were about interpretations of telephone technology and wiretapping roughly 100 years after the advent of those technologies. The timescales here are glacial.
The debate is not about whether or not the state can look at your communication, the debate is how. When the state wants to look at your communications and has a warrant to do so, do they:
Demand your keys and lock you in jail indefinitely until you provide them?
Or retain permanent access to every communication and promise to never use it unless they have a warrant.