This is not the right question. It is the one they use but is not the right one.
"Do we want our citizen able to protect themselves" is the right question. And as most government have shown, they really don't want it. They want to be in charge of the protecting.
Once you see things from their perspective their position makes more sense.
From a european perspective it's so strange.
I'm not sure the metaphorical person on the street even knows encryption exists; if they do, it's only very vague and probably an entirely incorrect understanding of it.
As for people who are for one and not the other, even though I'm personally in favor of both the second amendment and encryption in the hands of people, it's not hard to see a meaningful difference between them that would make it reasonable to have differing opinions. Guns in the hands of the populace is a positive power to do harm, encryption in the hands of the populace is strictly defensive. Criminals can use encryption to defend things we'd rather not have defended, but that is fundamentally a different concern that criminals using guns to attack things we'd rather not have attacked.
I think the only weird case would be being in favor of gun rights but thinking the government should have back door access to encryption, on the part of someone who deeply understands both. That is to say, I'm sure you can find people who believe both those things, but I suspect the latter is mostly an un-thought-out instinctive reaction to generally trust authority figures who seem generally trustworthy to them combined with a lot of ignorance about what encryption is and how it works. Humans have an all-but-instinctual understanding of physical weapons, encryption is basically magic by comparison.
Fair point. Although that still does feel weird to look at the us from Europe where guns nor anti-encryptions are popular.
The person who actually believes what he espouses will actually work for that goal.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of politicians are the former rather than the latter, hence the popular perjorative "RINO". Maybe there's a similar thing on the Democrat side, but I can't think of one right now.
Agreed. To me, it seems that encryption should be uncontroversially accepted from the populations's standpoint, while gun policies have valid arguments for and against.
Basically: it's really hard to shoot someone in the face with pgp.
Well, anybody can hide their use of encryption by using steganography, [1]. E.g. you just piggy-back your secret file as noise on top of a legitimate file.
Hi Alice, I just did a billion coin-tosses, and the outcomes were:
HTTHHTHTHHTHHTHHTHHTTTHTHTHTTTHHTHTTHT ...
Regards, BobIf you consider police officers and judges to be that stupid, you don't even need that. You can simply say: "No, my hard drive isn't encrypted, I'm just collecting white noise."
The whole point of steganography is to not raise suspiciousness in the first place.
Answer: you can’t.
So it's business as usual. It's obstruction of justice. Book'em.
And of course, "I can't remember" is always the greatest defense.
This whole thing is about the government endangering the public in exchange for abusing their rights.
It's all bad. You could go as far as argue that the government is obstructing justice and endangering the public by denying basic security.
We already know the enemy will find ways to access all the data. Encryption is not the last line of defense. It's the only line.
This is what DoJ wants to close by making just possession of encrypted documents criminal.
(Note: not a lawyer.)
It is? I'm not sure how you'd disprove it. Anecdotally (which I suppose actually matters in this case!) I've had a case where a (fairly long, 26 character) password I used regularly suddenly (and thus far, permanently!) went out of my head. I can remember some fragments of the password but not the whole thing.
The only novel issues encryption brings to the table involve self incrimination, because, AFAIK, IANAL, etc., the only time an encryption key is inarguably protected by the fifth amendment is where the fact that the defendant knows the key is itself incriminating evidence, because the fifth amendment only applies to self-incriminating testimony, not other self-incriminating evidence in the defendant's possession (e.g., the contents of a hard drive, encrypted or not).
The problem with this of course is that its a truly horrible idea which defeats the whole concept of a private key. Another massive problem here is that you've just created the biggest target for hackers. once the keys are out... everyone is screwed.
No, it is incredibly simple. You have a master key and the government holds this key on a secure audited system which can only be used to unlock a device once a court order is granted.
The government's security for the master key will certainly be much better than the average user's password security so this will not decrease the average user's security in the least.
You would also make the master keys expire regularly (maybe daily) so as long as a user updates their phone they will get updated with the new keys to protect against a leaked key.
What would the logistics of this be? Would the government need to store all master keys to be able to decrypt an old message? How would you know you're using the right key to decrypt a message? What happens if all the old keys leak?
What about foreign communications? You can't compel foreign actors to encrypt with your algorithm. What if I'm storing foreign data which is encrypted with illegal algorithms, is that going to be illegal? If so, then goodbye hosting services in the US. If not, how are you going to differentiate between foreign data and local data?
What about the transition period? What do you do with legacy encryption? What about people who haven't received the newly updated government-sanctioned encryption yet? What about old devices that can't run your encryption algorithm, closed systems, etc?
I don't think it's as incredibly simple as you put it.
Yes it will. A single user being careless with their password only exposes that user. Leaking the master key (and it will leak) exposes everyone. The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys, the risks are immense.
I agree that it should be assumed that the key will leak but there are plenty of ways to practically mitigate the usefulness of a leaked key.
I mentioned expiring keys already, which is obvious, but there are more sophisticated protocols that can be put in place.
> The target is much bigger, the payoff is much bigger for the bad guys
I don't think this is true. These keys would only be usable with physical access to a device. If you have physical access to the device its hard to imagine a scenario where the easiest route to cracking it would be penetrating a secure government facility.
Let me add that you have to think about security in relative and not absolute terms.
If you trust the government to secure a massive stockpile of NBC weapons, if you trust the government to manage a massive state security apparatus with hundreds of thousands of armed agents deployed domestically, then it is a little silly to draw the line at trusting them with your facebook feed.
Physical security and digital security are very different. Someone stealing a bomb is still only one bomb. Securing that bomb involves fortifying a well-defined local border. Attacking it requires personal risk that is hard to parallelize.
Digital networks can be attacked at any time from any number of opponents. These attacks are usually automated without the risk of being found by a guard with a machine gun. Stealing the escrow key database isn't merely a single bad event; it would allow access - possibly retroactively - everything supposedly protected by those key, which is presumably "everything".
> key
You seem to be using "key" to mean several different concepts.
It's foolish to assume this after Snowden was able to walk away with his archive of classified documents. In his case, storing that many documents within the reach of one person risked losing the entire archive, which is exactly what happened. If literally everything depends on a government held escrow key, You've painted a target on a huge single-point failure.
care to provide any evidence for that claim?
> ("once a court order is granted") can't be implemented technically
we live in the real world. if you can't trust your judiciary then your precious little algorithms aren't going to save you. (sorry to be the bearer of bad news)
Yet, it's very possible to share a copy of every user key using methods like Shamir's secret sharing - therefore requiring P out of N entities agreeing on allowing the decryption to happen.
The secrets can be shared in advance with attorneys, civil rights groups, government entities and allows a democratic-ish process around decryption.
all of the security experts advising law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and politicians seem to think it is pretty reasonable.
care to share any of your reasons for disagreeing with them?
I am not sure that this argument is simple at all.
Encryption only provides theoretical security. In practice even if strong encryption can't be broken it can almost always be bypassed rather trivially if data is being accessed on a regular basis.
If data is encrypted and left cold then that can be difficult or impossible to retrieve if a secure key is used and that key has never leaked anywhere but that is a pretty limited use case.
For average people encryption provides very little real world security because their data is online on buggy insecure devices all the time so there are always easier ways to compromise their data than breaking crypto.
Sophisticated criminals also don't trust encryption and don't use digital devices at all.
The only security you have is the fact that there aren't nearly enough criminals to exploit all of the info that has already been stolen so there is a very low chance that you will be a victim of identity theft, but it has nothing to do with transport layer encryption.
It may not be in everyone’s threat model, but it is definitely very important and provides real world security.
This is pretty much the case, to include security vulnerabilities in most systems as well. Most just are not exploited because their arent enough criminals with enough time.
Encryption is the only way to secure information. This is true for criminals and non-criminals alike. To deny encryption is to deny security to everyone.
Presuming it's the criminals who will look to exploit these vulnerabilities, denying security is making every non-criminal susceptible to attack.
So the only question that needs to be answered is this. Do we want to protect our citizens? The only answer is yes. The only solution is encryption.
The problem with strong encryption is that it already exists. Even if strong encryption were made illegal, criminals will be the one's securing their data despite the law. To deny citizens the right to protect themselves is just putting them all at risk. It's disarmament.
Under the law, all the police should need is a warrant. It's not even an exception to any rule.