Attorney general: Americans should accept security risks of encryption backdoors

It's strongly possible the causality goes the other way.

I can't tell if you're for or against backdoors with that statement. Either way, I disagree. I don't think those for or against it are dumb people.

They're just in a different position... In the DOJ, encryption gets in the way of their job--catching criminals... while the penalties for a backdoor fall on others (those responsible for the data). There's no downside to them personally (and very little for the DOJ itself) for getting a backdoor.

The opposite is true for those not in the DOJ... the protection for our data is compromised.. and in exchange, the DOJ is able to prosecute some criminal we've never known, met, or had any contact with.

To those in the DOJ who deal with criminals everyday, their ability to prosecute criminals is of the upmost importance to them personally... and for the rest of us, unless we're a victim of a crime, there's only downsides to a backdoor.

Being a cop (at any level) does very much bias your view of things. Nobody calls the cops (or the FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc.) when things are great. Police tend to only see the absolute worst of human nature and the worst things that people do and develop biases accordingly.

I've known a few cops and they all have stories that are hard to hear and are worse than what you hear on most true crime shows. I assume access to high level intelligence involves endlessly seeing cases where people were caught attempting to purchase weapons grade nuclear materials, endless plots that never happened but are very scary to read about, etc.

That being said, it is bias and it shouldn't be allowed to unilaterally influence politics. Banning strong encryption is both impractical and destructive to our society and economy.

They think that if they can jail people for using encryption then one of two things happen: terrorists stop using it (with the presumed good that entails) or terrorists don't stop using it. If the latter, they hope they can jail the terrorists for the use of illegal encryption - maybe even before any successful attack - without the need to show anything but the use of illegal encryption. If all you're focused on is short-term tactical progress in fighting terrorism, it's a win; I don't think it helps our argument to pretend like that's not the case.

The majority of terrorist attacks in America in the last ten years were carried out by lone wolf attackers who were mentally ill or motivated by extreme political ideologies. They didn't use encryption because they weren't talking to anyone.

Do terrorists even use it now? As far as I'm aware, the 2015 Paris attackers used unencrypted SMS and burner phones. Despite France supposedly being on "high alert" over Charlie Hebdo, they still evaded detection. But the anti-encryption handwringing brigade didn't let truth get in the way of a good story.

> the deadliest attacks really are coordinated through end-to-end encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp?

Most of the recent attacks in America were carried out by lone-wolf far-right extremists. Some of the ones who were caught were actual government employees.

Furthermore, there's more to fear than someone spraying bullets into a crowd; ICE is performing 3am Gestapo raids and imprisoning citizens.

So you bet your ass I'm more afraid of the government than a guy driving a semi-truck. The government can hurt more people in a day than a terror group can in a year.

I think the usual devil's advocate argument is that those attacks are not a practical concern at all to anyone's life (except the extremely unfortunate — thoughts & prayers). It barely registers when compared to boring old regular crime and homicide, all of which is of dwarfed by road accidents. All of which combined is itself still single-digit chances of dying, the rest being cancer, disease and strokes.

So the argument goes, you should focus on the much more direct and practical impact that laws & politics can have on your life.

You might need a source showing that attacks would be stopped by backdoors in encryption, since anyone could make encrypted communication using software off of GitHub.

A OTP is extremely easy to use for a terror network (just distribute several GB of pad on a thumb drive, have a shared secret for pad generation, etc) and completely unbreakable in the perfect use case, and feasibly unbreakable before an attack in the lazy-use case.

Just because they opted to go with low-hanging fruit doesn't mean the fruit needs to be low-hanging for them to make use of it.

You mean the governments of Western nations who let the evil Nice dipshit into their country?

"We need pervasive surveillance to protect you from the cannibals we imported to lower your salaries, peasants."

On the face of it, I'd sort of agree with you, but a government wanting the ability to spy on anyone and seeking bans on technology that enables private communication should be terrifying. That's an enabling step for totalitarianism and should be treated as a red flag.

It might be less of a red flag if regulation was likely to be able to prevent terrorists from using encrypted communication technology, but that's absurd as long as we have general-purpose computers and access to the open internet.

>> It is fair to assume that the general public knows very little about how many dreadful criminal activities they were able to avoid because they could tap into the conversation early on

I'd like to see more of that made public.

> It is fair to assume that the general public knows very little about how many dreadful criminal activities they were able to avoid because they could tap into some conversations early on

Sure, because we're never told. And you know what? Maybe there's good reasons. But "we can't tell you why, but trust us, it's super effective!" isn't enough of an argument.

> It is fair to assume that the general public knows very little about how many dreadful criminal activities they were able to avoid because they could tap into some conversations early on

Aren't the ones we hear of are the ones where the FBI set the whole scenario up?

Cryptography and secure messaging systems are not all under US jurisdiction. If access to backdoors alone has kept multiple massive criminal activities from being executed, then surely we should see some being successfully executed by the groups not using backdoored encryption.

The fact that we don't suggests either that (1) backdoors aren't that essential to thwart them or (2) there are no such regular massive attacks.

Further, as people like the US Attorney General helps to publicize those backdoors, more criminals will choose alternative messaging systems (fewer of which are backdoored), making the US less safe.

Do we?

Law enforcement seems overeager to label anything and everything terrorism if they possibly can. For instance, someone at my previous workplace vandalized prod in a fit of rage when he left and they called it terrorism because the system had utility companies as customers. Why would law enforcement be so interested in juicing their terrorism numbers if the real thing was plentiful?

My hypothesis: real terrorism isn't plentiful, but the budget to go after it became plentiful after 9/11, and the people who benefit from the budget do what they can to keep it that way. Erosion of freedoms and judicial overreach are side-effects.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume that at all. Without evidence, I’m unconvinced the governments need for information access is motivated by justice rather than the interests of a few.

Renewing the Patriot Act and other such laws is easily explained by self-interest.

Renewal: The best case is it foils a terrorist attack. The worst case (Snowden) has already occurred.

Nonrenewal: The best case is no terrorist attacks. The worst case is a terrorist attack that may have been prevented with Patriot Act level wiretapping.

No one wants to be blamed for a terrorist attack at the next election so the Patriot Act is renewed.

It should be very difficult to prosecute, convict, and land someone in prison. I say that as a victim of a violent crime. It’s a huge parasitic drain on the entire country. It’s peddled under the guise of justice.

The Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is setting a fine example we all need to take note of.

A lot more. Despite the fact that the US already imprisons a disproportionate percentage of its populate, AG Barr is a vocal advocate of vastly increasing the use of detention. https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/w...

What was the phrase before the election? “But her emails”? I’m not American, but that phrase seems to have shown up a lot and been about inappropriate storage of classified material.

One can store material inappropriately even without authorisation.

I'm really struggling to understand how you can think that.

The launch codes are used by the president. If a party has access to data then that data can be replicated and stored anywhere else that party can access.

The president is the authority that decides how the codes are stored, they exist primarily for his use.

It's not hard to imagine him snapping a picture with his phone.. you know, just in case.

Keywords being "essential" and "temporary" in the original quote. Granted, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but Franklin was not advocating doing away with, for example, law enforcement.

Though I would agree it's a quote of triteness and "just so" convenience that gets massively abused.

"All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

He also didn't think much of private property.

[1] http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12....

Correct, I just roll my eyes whenever this is quoted

But if people disagree they can go ride a bike without a helmet, people in the transplant list will thank you.

Benjamin Franklin is a Founding Father and has been generally accepted as an authority for more than 200 years, especially on the subject of freedoms and rights. He was a renown political theorist, politician, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat in his own day, not to mention the fact his reputation has stood the test of time.

William Barr is none of these thing.

Says the rhetoritician; cleverly trying to blur the issue. Opinion or no, the principle is consistent through much of the intellectual environ's of the time. If both statememt's are read as opinion's neither wins. If both are construed as statements of fact, Franklin's still holds the more portentous conclusion. Namely that the being willing to sacrifice his capacity to guide himself to live longer , will inevitably result in neither goal being attained. Everyone dies.

So that's really a bit of a non-starter. I would say that Franklin has more credibility however; if only because of the man's legendary common sense.

I'll also point out, Franklin's sentiment can be traced back to the principle that "Vigilia aeterna est pretium libertatis". A consequence of which is, sorry Mr. Barr. Tell your police to do some actual investigative work. It is not the job of the populace to relinquish essential liberty to make tyranny in the making that much further realized.

It is what we do with our Liberty that elevates us as angels, or drops us to the level of daemonic debasement.

Law enforcement needs to understand their job should never be made trivial as their very existence in and of itself is as the sole means to rescension of that which culturally we value most; hich should absolutely be as burdensome a process as possible in the light of what is being taken.

Never mind that making unbackdoored encryption illegal just adds a token charge to a long list of other charges, which to me is an absolute anti-pattern, of the same level as most firearm regulation in light of the second amendment; which I'll admit to being a bit of a hard-liner on.

My 2 cents.

Thanks. A little context goes a long way!

Same exact reaction here. Had to re-read it several times. For anyone else confused: I think by "security" he's referring to infosec and by "safety" he's referring to physical safety. (As opposed to my initial reading, where I thought "security" meant physical security and "safety" meant online safety.)

If you really think that we aren’t facing the same problems today, that didn’t exist 300 years ago; you need to take a far harder look at the problems.

Even with end to end at some point the information needs to be displayed to the user and especially on Android at that point you can collect anything you'd like. Unless there is some way of encrypting data all the way to the display controller I don't know about. But that will never happen as it would be the end of so many other features.

So he's right theres no such thing as true end to end on common cell phones.

I most certainly do. CarrierIQ (former name) negates it. HTTPS and GPG can't hide anything from it. Any phone app will be entirely transparent. There are other debug apps embeded in different phones that can be triggered to start gathering data in the background. They can even tell the velocity you swiped in what direction and what angle you were holding the phone.

For those interested: here is one of those posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240626

I think the point is that the govt can sidestep https by just going to the bank; as they can to most services.

It doesn't matter if the apps try to be secure. If any point in the communication holds the key-data in memory and is not on a //user// trusted device then the key is compromised.

Since cellphones have a BMC that isn't user owned, which does have access to the full system memory (rather than being an isolated peripheral modem), and since OTA firmware updates can be pushed by the "infrastructure" (including fake 'towers' setup by TLAs, criminal hackers of other sorts, and hobbyists) containing code to compromise and silently ex-filtrate any data (including those keys, or even just the conversation directly); it is an inherently insecure environment.

Apple showed that they are capable and willing to perform silent over the air updates to operating systems to address security concerns. The specific incident I am referring to is with Zoom.

If you can read your message history from an iPhone, Apple is just one silent update away from reading it as well.

Not sure why this comment by robdachshund is dead: "Why bother trying to break encryption when you have backdoors in the hardware and OS? It's far easier to just use a keylogger on your OS keyboard, take a screenshot, access RAM buffers, etc."

To answer to that. Maybe the problem is in those hardwares and operating systems that do not have backdoors?

You're missing that Apple has the ability to put backdoors in kernel updates, and these can reach right into process memory and get your unencrypted messages.

I'm pretty sure he's just referring to the fact that if someone can push an ota update and you have something like iMessage that has encryption keys on the device, there's nothing stopping a company from pushing an update out that compromises your security. End to end isn't compromised, it's potentially compromised. Smartphones are the schrodinger's cat of security because while they're considered "secure" right now, they could be blown wide open via automatic update any second. Telegram is encrypted end-to-end, but if you have automatic updates on, there's nothing from stopping the developer or rogue actors (or states, like russia) from pushing an update out that uploads all of the encryption keys to their servers and decrypts everyone's messages. Automatic updates are fundamentally insecure because they can instantly compromise your security. If you want true security, go with open source and review (or wait for reviews) of all code changes that happen in the apps you use, and you want a distro that either doesn't have an os ota system or allows you to disable it. Also, there is potential for baseband attacks because we're all at the mercy of telecoms and no one runs custom firmware or opensource code on their baseband processor so who knows what vulnerabilities lie there.

Right especially given their 20-year advance understanding of differential cryptanalysis ...

My impression is the NSA of today is very different than that of the 70s and 80s.

You completely missed my point. It's not a quote

Government officials still have their bank accounts with privately-owned institutions, which wouldn't have these non-backdoor versions.

Also ban hashing algorithms ?

Ban random data ?

And ban the universe from being quantum ?

Because then I need a way of giving you my key that doesn’t give the bad guy the key.

It's useful to have a master key that decrypts everything. For each message that means encrypting for two keys - the recepient and the master key.

The obvious drawback being the huge damage when a master key is inevitably leaked.

> Of course, nothing stops you, a hacker, from using non-backdoored encryption, but government is fine with that, as long as Google, Apple, Facebook etc. are forced to use backdoors.

Which just goes to show that this isn't actually about catching hardened criminals (who will just use non-backdoored encryption, either alone or layered on top of the compromised channels) but rather about enabling pervasive surveillance of ordinary citizens.

> Government generates a public/private key pair Gpub/Gpriv [...]

Isn't that exactly the Clipper Chip scheme? The arguments against it are as valid now as they were then. If you haven't seen them before, they can be found at the 1997 paper "The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption", and its 2015 followup "Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications".

More importantly, I don't believe we could prevent another 9/11 even with government mandated backdoors.

In all probability, some sort of 9/11 will happen again and this is the question that will be asked.

They already had all the pieces to the puzzle when the first attack happened, and they failed to prevent it. Allowing pervasive surveillance of our private communications would throw magnitudes more hay on the stack. So, this is probably not the way to go about it.