Do these guys seriously not realize that "the terrorists" will use end-to-end encryption whether it's legal or not? This literally makes no sense to me unless "the terrorists" is code for "the local weed dealer".
Whoops, so did I.
Remember that they decide who to murder using metadata. A world where only "evil people" used encription would be ideal: they would know who to bomb right away!
Once you outlaw encryption all encrypted communications will be illegal and the people that use them terrorists.
This is how it begins.
I believe it may be incorrect because in my (limited) understanding, good encryption is indistinguishable from random sequences of characters.
How can you tell a string of random characters is simply random, or is an encrypted message, unless said encryption includes some kind of header or marker information?
I may simply be wrong but I'm curious about the answer too.
How much would you bet against "the bad guys" already using those as steganographic comms channels?
Using software?
Why are you in possession of random data on a hard drive? A prosecutor will be happy to spin theories about what it might be.
How do you hide the possession of software you use to acess it? If you manage that, how do you hide the forensic evidence of "file access in random data consistent with evidence of hidden data or a hidden filesystem", in your OS or on your storage device?
I very much want to live in a world where these tools are legal. Otherwise, in the same sense as "lying to the FBI", they will be used as a weapon by law enforcement when none other is handy.
Just spitballing here but what if the software decrypted something as a side effect of doing something else like watching a movie. After all, buggy software is everywhere, perhaps that is just a bug.
What if that random file was a test input for a software fuzzing test. Is that not a plausible enough excuse?
What if the system periodically accessed data files [that had random data] to verify their integrity, you never know when data corruption might sneak in after all.
I totally agree that anyone trying to plead this case in court would likely fail miserably but the though experiment is interesting.
DRM movies are already encrypted. The DMCA does not seem to include an exception for law enforcement or intelligence gathering.
We just need an easy DRM format that allows content producers to licence and make available for viewing (but not arbitrary copying) custom content for specific viewers.
No it isn't. Encrypted data is indecipherable from random noise.
Which makes it noticeably different from all other (plaintext) communication.
Or compressed, so you'd need to be able to detect every compression format ever created. I imagine that any time somebody serializes a succinct data structure [0], you're going to have to add a signature for that as well. I'm not confident that even an organization with the resources of the NSA would be able to keep up with that, you'd have to make illegal the writing of data structure libraries. Of course, the optimistic bureaucrat would see this as an opportunity for the creation of another federal entity, like the patent office, where code can be submitted for registration and approval. The Department of Circumlocution™.
If you want to get a taste of how difficult it would be to implement some method of detection, with a useful detection rate at scale, try to write some software that can detect localization encoding of strings on a binary stream. There is a reason why automatic translation of unknown localization doesn't really exist, there have been plenty of attempts, but nothing that results in a definitive answer.
I once wrote some software that would parse very poorly written csv files, it was one of the most frustrating projects I've ever done - and taught me the value of standards conformance. Basically, if the data source is non-cooperative, you aren't going to be able to reliably use the data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_Persian_mathe...
A ban of end-to-end encryption will need to be enforceable. What will LEO do, if I come up with it? Bust my house? That's unthinkable in Europe. Enforceability also means that all communcations must go unencrypted. This merely would kill all online commercial activity.
Then you have the massive cost of re-issuing all the keys.
Moreover, organized crime groups, which in real life are much more serious problem, are quite adept with advanced technology. They set up their own radio communications networks and use aerial and submersible drones.
Well, sure, in that terrorist organizations are, by definition, a subset of organized crime, so that the problem they pose must be strictly less than that of organized crime more generally.
...get elected as politicians or use their cash for more productive uses such as regulatory capture.
> Moreover, organized crime...
...simply used their captured politicians to make their activities legal. Why use cloak-and-dagger tricks when it is cheaper and easier buy the organizations that get in your way?
Since you brought it up, I wonder if encryption and compression aren't both instances of a common mathematical phenomena. They seem very similar to each other.
We might as well say that not consenting to a search is probable cause for a search warrant.