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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

The specific point of bridging is that technology corporations and the federal government should both care deeply about making consumer and corporate technology as secure as possible, given how much of the nation depends on it.

On paper, the right federal agency for this should be the Department of Homeland Security. In reality they have neither the technical expertise nor the political "juice" to compete with the intelligence and law enforcement agencies--who care much more about access than security.

Until this balance is corrected at the federal level, it's going to be a mess. On balance, the government essentially WANTS technology to be insecure right now, so that intelligence and law enforcement staff can do their jobs more easily.

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The government isn't a single entity with a single goal. There already exist federal agencies with the goal of increasing security (see http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/), while others like the FBI have vested interest in increasing their powers of investigation. The executive branch has already made their stance clear, weakening encryption should not be the goal of any federal agency:

"We recommend that, regarding encryption, the US Government should:

(1) fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards;

(2) not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software; and

(3) increase the use of encryption, and urge US companies to do so, in order to better protect data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in other storage."

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/nsa-sh...

It just seems like federal folks working on security are currently outgunned by the federal folks working on access.

For example where were the pro-security quotes from NIST in all the FBI-Apple stories? I'm sort of kidding--obviously there weren't any--but the reality is that NIST can't stand up to the FBI and that's not their role anyway. They set standards not executive priorities.

If we think of the federal govt as a multi-armed see-saw, where points of view oppose one another from various agencies, then right now the arms in favor of access have a lot more "weight", so the overall system tilts toward them. This was visible in what the Presdient said at SXSW.

What do we see? Pro-encryption messages come from private groups, but pro-access messages come from federal executives. Why wasn't there a senior federal appointee telling Congress that hacking the iPhone was a bad idea? That the FBI had not fully considered all that consequences? Who would that be? The head of NIST?

> It just seems like federal folks working on security are currently outgunned by the federal folks working on access.

I'm not the least bit happy about this, but it's been that way for the entirety of the computer age -- it's not a new development.

I agree. But I think that as computing makes its way into more and more of our lives, it becomes less and less excusable.

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