The typical response is “What is this, Russia?” or something similar.
Privacy is really important. I will always error on the side of privacy even if that means not everyone bad is caught.
Reminds me of something my dad always told me, "I'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free, than have 1 innocent person in jail."
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Marathon Man (1976)
Sneakers perhaps.
Anyhow, I think you're missing the context of what happened in the 60's and 70's that stoked paranoia in the culture and in fiction.
1. CCTIFBI
Only because some morally-flexible activists broke into an FBI field office did they uncover COINTELPRO and quoting Chomksy "40% [of FBI work activities] were devoted to political surveillance and the like"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-bre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Inve...
Furthermore, in modern times, there is:
- warrantless mass surveillance (NSA)
- license plate readers (LPRs)
- cellphone tower/position tracking
- Ring and other IoT devices recording to cloud providers evidence of technical crimes. All it takes is law-enforcement getting access for something else and digging around with automated tools in data to round up bodies to prosecute. For example, a small child escaping from a bath without clothes in front of an always-recording security webcam is considered child pornography.
- No-name webcams and other IoT being hacked or manufacturing backdoored to be used for spying, malware injection, packet sniffing and who knows what else.
- As revealed by Snowden, various secret watch lists containing the names of over 2 million Americans.
Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for questioning and asked them what they were doing there. The president later said: "We have rigged the latest election. 93.5 per cent have voted for Lukashenko. But they say it is not a European outcome. We have made it 86 per cent."
But it does work. I was at a restaurant there. Some girls are chatting, and they walk away to go get something, and just leave their bags there unattended. Why? Because it's an authoritarian country - people aren't going to steal stuff there.
This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been.
EDIT: I don't mean to praise authoritarian countries, on the contrary. We should support human rights even if it is less efficient, because the object of governance is not to strip people of their freedoms for pennies on the dollar.
Chances are high that you could do the same in most European countries. Just like in the Soviet Union, thieves exist in Belarus. People's perception might be that they're safer, but that doesn't mean they actually are. Just like during Soviet times, people felt safer, but crime still happened. It just wasn't talked about, because it makes the state look bad.
Poor example. The anarchy that attended the collapse of the Soviet system brought about a dramatic increase in crime. And while reported petty theft was arguably a reporting problem, the dramatic rise in homicides was not.
For the record my mother-in-law lived in St Petersburg at the time. And her anecdotal reports were that crime that she and friends experienced rose dramatically.
It almost reminds me of some my parents' peers yearning for the good ole days of communism, cuz riffraffs would not dare to talk back to a cop.
edit: It is hard to argue with that kind of sentiment. It is technically right.
People have no qualms about stealing umbrellas?
I mean, if you leave something that's a strong temptation (like a big pile of cash) it'll eventually disappear.
Yeah, if you go in to one of the inner cities, your stuff will get stolen, but otherwise, generally nah.
Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail.
The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount of sexual violence in the world.
Whether or not this applies to rape is a question of debate. However in Pakistan it certainly has been interpreted to so apply. Which means that it is very hard for a woman to prove that she was raped.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudud#Requirements_for_convict... for verification.
> Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail.
Friendly reminder that the US has the highest incarceration rate of all countries.
> The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount of sexual violence in the world.
Is this according to their official statistics? How do they know they're accurate and comparable? For instance, is rape within marriage considered a crime and regularly prosecuted there?
That is a different thing.
[1]:https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/05/30/encryption-debate-i...
[0] https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1905/S00277/new-zealand-pm...
>New Zealand’s Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act was introduced in 2013.
>On receipt of a warrant from a surveillance agency, a network operator – defined as a public telecommunications network or a telecommunications service – must “decrypt a telecommunication” on their network or service, but only if it has “provided that encryption”.
Sadly, that same world leader is the strongest anti encryption and censorship advocate.
You do realize this is the same country which made it punishable by up to 10 years' prison to have a specific terrorist's manifesto on your computer?
Denmark has been illegally requiring all telcos to monitor everything for years, and nothing has changed. No one is willing to change anything or impose any consequence for it. It's even gotten people falsely imprisoned due to complete reliance on location data from mobile phones.
Sweden is not much better, and just passed legislation allowing law enforcement to hack people's phones.
I'm almost certain that Norway, Finland and Iceland are no better.
For context, I interviewed with a company that had police videos stored on their systems and were using them for entertainment, to the point of showing me one at the beginning of the interview for grins
TBH sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory. And for what it's worth, at least in Finland getting caught snooping isn't cause for firing people, the convictions have been fines.
Seems like open-source and peer review is the only way to ensure that crypto is not being hijacked.
The government itself is likely to abuse such back doors. LOVEINT is a documented practice.
Meanwhile governments throughout the world are mandating the use of Signal for communication. Common folks are not special enough to justify strong encryption but it's totally valid for government use. Helps hide their corrupti-- I mean state secrets.
Why would it not be possible to create a system that required several manual and offline steps in order to break the encryption?
For example (and perhaps similar to offline cold storage of bitcoin) why couldn't a system be designed whereby 3 or more people in geographically diverse areas were in a position to agree that a request for information was legitimate (by court order) and thereby produce what is needed to unlock certain information? So one person would not have the key or access.
After all right now you have a case where a single person (the owner) is able to unlock information. The feeling is a back door can be hacked. What if it's not a back door though?
The problem is that to be useful for law enforcement, any local police department has to be able to go to any local judge and get a warrant and then get access.
There are approximately 30,000 state judges with fairly high turnover in that list. If you can compromise one, or successfully get yourself added to that list, you can then get access to whatever you want. That's way too many people to trust.
This is not a hypothetical weakness. I personally know someone whose physical location was compromised through a court order obtained by bribing a judge. How many cases are there where similar access was gained but the victim doesn't know how it happened? And the better the access that you can get, the more incentive there is to get it. (There is no shortage of reasons why a motivated party would want such access.)
While this process does have weaknesses, it is still the difference between a legal process overseen by the courts and one based on espionage where agents do whatever they want without oversight.
Note that strong network encryption is essential for ensuring that they have to get a warrant.
I don't think anyone has come up with a better system than judicial oversight that still allows law enforcement to do their job?
Do libraries not keeping records of who has read what books not allow law enforcement to do their job?
Do prohibitions against arbitrary searches not allow law enforcement to do their job?
Does having to make a plausible argument in front of a judge not allow law enforcement to do their job?
Do individuals not having a number tattooed on their forehead not allow law enforcement to do their job?
Law enforcement continually frames any pereceived difficulty as if it is prevents them, which is utterly disingenuous. Law enforcement's "job" is to operate within the constraints of a free society composed of innocent people, in spite of the extra work from not being able to just shoot the bad guy like in the movies. When they don't respect this, they're merely another criminal element.
In the US, the idea of the publicly funded law enforcement officer can trace its lineage back to antebellum slave catchers.
Much like they now (and forever) frame any perceived difficulty as preventing them from doing their job, they've successfully re-framed their role in society as protecting and serving (people) instead of protecting and serving (property rights), despite that obviously not being the case.
Compare this to the situation in Europe and Asia (or at least the civilized parts like Japan), where it's perfectly acceptable and normal to ask a policeman for directions. And where their role is indeed to protect and serve people (not property).
"Police have the role of protecting and serving people" really does not feel like such a controversial viewpoint to me.
In fact, these high profile cases the FBI et al attempt to use as wedges generally involve someone who has already been caught with plenty of evidence, but the authoritarian impulse still demands more.
As far as laws that can only be enforced/observed by reading people's private thoughts and communications, then yes indeed, why have those at all?
Law enforcement agencies send legal requests to Google and Facebook all the time, and the sky hasn't fallen.
Actually, for all X where X exists, the sky hasn't fallen :)
I think we can agree that, say, putting a chip in everyone's heads that transmits their thoughts to the government would indeed, as you put it, cause the sky to fall. I'm not trying to suggest that outlawing encryption is the exact same thing, but I do believe it would cause much more injustice than it would prevent.
Which is another reason why consolidating everyone's data into a few centralized locations is also problematic.
> While this process does have weaknesses, it is still the difference between a legal process overseen by the courts and one based on espionage where agents do whatever they want without oversight.
But that's not what we're talking about here. The question isn't whether the police should need to get a warrant, it's whether the government should be able to prohibit technology that preserves privacy because some criminals might use it alongside all the law abiding citizens.
And encryption doesn't "prevent law enforcement from doing their jobs" -- that's just a trope. What it does is make their jobs more expensive. Even if they can't just get a copy of all your communications from a megacorp by filing some papers, they can still get a warrant and then plant bugs or guess your password or plant bugs that allow them to observe you entering your password etc. It's not impossible, it just takes more resources to do it -- which prevents it from happening at a massive scale.
That's a feature, not a bug. It still lets them solve murders, because murders are serious and uncommon and can justify the expense of a real investigation. It may make it inexpedient to spend those resources to catch every last hooker and pothead, but so what? Sometimes it's not worth the candle. If you think it really is, give them more money instead of giving everyone else less privacy. But sometimes it just isn't. Sometimes it costs more to solve a crime than to not solve it.
Meanwhile (this is the feature) it doesn't make it too easy for them to identify all the people in group X and give the list to Joe McCarthy or round them all up and put them in internment camps. Law enforcement should have some friction, because when it happens too fast at too large a scale, history shows this to be Bad.
There is no principle that says governments (as representatives of the people) can't regulate what technologies people can have. Sometimes we decide that yes, the government should do this. Consider how the FCC regulates electronic devices to prevent radio interference. Enforcement is lax and as a hobbyist you aren't likely to get caught, but devices aren't commonly found in retail stores that don't have FCC approval.
There are many practical issues, of course, including making sure there is a balance of power and that law enforcement powers aren't abused. I agree with that part.
My take is that even with a warrant, law enforcement's reach into private data should be limited for a free society.
I guess if you're preparing for the apocalypse you don't count on that, though?
The Supreme Court just ruled that you can’t sue law enforcement for civil rights violation - including killing people unjustly.
Sure, a system could be designed where the “master key that unlocks everything” is distributed - that makes the problem of the attacker who wants to get his hands on that key slightly harder, because now he has to compromise three systems instead of one, but that doesn’t change the fundamental risk, which is that he can do that in the first place. Remember, you’re talking about one piece (or three pieces) of information which can be used to decode every single secret in the United States - this isn’t limited by technical feasibility, this is the explicit end goal that you’re asking for. If Russian hackers got a hold of it undetected, they could decrypt everything for a very long time. Even if it were revealed that it were compromised, everything that was encrypted using the old key would have to be re-encrypted somehow, and the old copies destroyed somehow.
Judge, Jury & Encryptioner: Exceptional Access with a Fixed Social Cost
https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.05620
> We present Judge, Jury and Encryptioner (JJE) an exceptional access scheme for unlocking devices that does not give unilateral power to any single authority and places final approval to unlock in the hands of peer devices. Our scheme, JJE, distributes maintenance of the protocol across a network of "custodians" such as courts, government agencies, civil rights watchdogs and academic institutions. Unlock requests, however, can only be approved by a randomly selected set of unlock delegates, consisting of other peer devices that must be physically located to gain access. This requires that law enforcement expend both human and monetary resources and pay a "fixed social cost" in order to find and request the participation of law abiding citizens in the unlock process.
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/lawful.pdf
Lawful Device Access without Mass Surveillance Risk:A Technical Design Discussion
> This paper proposes a systems-oriented design for supporting court-ordered data access to “locked” devices with system-encrypted storage, while explicitly resisting large-scale surveillance use. We describe a design that focuses entirely on passcode self-escrow(i.e., storing a copy of the user passcode into a write-only component on the device) and thus does not require any changes to underlying cryptographic algorithms. Further, by predicating any lawful access on extended-duration physical seizure, we foreclose mass-surveillance use cases while still supporting reasonable investigatory interests. Moreover, by couching per-device authorization protocols with the device manufacturer, this design avoids creating new trusted authorities or organizations while providing particularity (i.e., no “master keys” exist). Finally, by providing a concrete description of one such approach, we hope to encourage further technical consideration of the possibilities and limitations of trade-offs in this design space.
Make a door, it won't stay secret. And you can't assure that there won't be bad actors involved in any number of parties that have to agree.
The whole backdoor system, once it exists, is open to subversion and/or misuse. The only way to not have the problem is not create the door in the first place.
No matter what "offline" and "manual" steps you propose, they can be made online and automatic after a one-time compromise of the system. And if a single system is protecting the secrets of literally everyone, the incentive for compromising that system is unlimited. There's no attack too impractical when the stakes are so high.
It's not feasible to ban people from using their own encryption unless you plan on severely restricting their freedom.
The article below argues that the real use case for breaking encryption is to catch everyday criminals, not to go after shadowy Bond villains. Would the public still go for it, if they looked at it this way? Probably not...
The Encryption Debate Isn't About Stopping Terrorists, It's About Solving Crime https://www.lawfareblog.com/encryption-debate-isnt-about-sto...
Edit: And most everyday criminals are not technologically savvy. Half of them probably have a hard time using Telegram safely.
In practice even the tech types weary of using and maintaining truly secure solutions. So if they outlaw backdoor-less solutions then companies won't support them. And without commercial support the options will dwindle.
And even donation supported projects like Truecrypt will fold under pressure.
Crypto isn't a one-person job
Example: None of us case about midget porn. If we all agree that banning midget porn will not have an impact on anyone, government then quickly moves on to octopus porn. Now, on a matter of principle you will find your position weaker and weaker.
Cant fix technology problems with people processes.
https://www.cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/paper-key-escrow...
And this from 2015:
https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/1/1/69/236706...
See also https://cdt.org/insights/the-nsas-split-key-encryption-propo...
I think the history of crypto exchange hacks should be of interest here.
Take Bitcoin cold storage: People use offline storage and specialized hardware wallets to store their keys more safely. Now imagine there were some privileged keys that would allow the holder to just take anyone and everyone's bitcoins. It doesn't matter how geographically distributed it is, how elaborate the key ceremonies and oversight is. The system could never be trusted if such a backdoor existed.
When done correctly and with everyone's knowledge and consent, this is a form of key escrow. But there's some simple math at play here - the more unlock options there are, the more points of vulnerability and failure. https://haveibeenpwned.com/ lists 8 breaches of my data and I'm aware of more they don't list - the industry can't even keep my data under lock and key without adding more points of failure via key escrow as another thing they can fuck up.
> For example (and perhaps similar to offline cold storage of bitcoin) why couldn't a system be designed whereby 3 or more people in geographically diverse areas were in a position to agree that a request for information was legitimate (by court order) and thereby produce what is needed to unlock certain information? So one person would not have the key or access.
Bitcoin is a great example, in a way - there are several stories out there of exchanges fucking up and losing access to their coins or having their coins stolen, even when they were using cold storage. All 3 people will likely be duped by the same fradulent (or just overreaching) LEO email, in part because of the all too human tendency for each of them to assume that "one of the other two would have caught it if it was fishy, right?"
> After all right now you have a case where a single person (the owner) is able to unlock information. The feeling is a back door can be hacked. What if it's not a back door though?
The label you use doesn't matter - the more people who can unlock things, the more points of failure you have, and the more likely things will end up hacked. The industry struggles enough to secure things even when it takes a hard line approach and espouses end-to-end encryption. Defending against abuse by insiders/employees usually means going through a bunch of trouble to lock your own employees out of customer data - or making it unavailable to the company in the first place - not giving them more tools to access it.
Governments already have more than enough tools to completely pwn my privacy if they actually need to. Convince a judge to sign a sneak and peek warrant, have law enforcement covertly install a hardware keylogger, and I'd wager you'll pwn most people - even if they're tech savy. But that requires pesky things like indivudalized suspicion, "checks and balances", actual work, and involving multiple people (your landlord or a locksmith for the keys or entry access, your security company to silence the alarms, a judge to sign off on the warrant and a leo to execute it) so it's harder to run a long term secret warrantless suspicionless mass surveilance dragnet as a rogue employee or agency. But not impossible, as certain three letter agencies have shown.
Wasn't this how Google, Adobe and several other tech companies had a major security breach about 5-7 years ago? They provided the DOJ backdoor access.
If you're thinking of PRISM, no, at least not in the voluntary, intentional sense of the word "provided". Many of the major tech companies had non-public backbone fiber, and links across that fiber were unencrypted. The NSA tapped this dark fiber to read unencrypted traffic. This famously hit Google, which subsequently moved to encrypt all internal traffic, even traffic that would never leave its networks.
The NSA placed key people into companies like Google who had security clearances that specifically forbade them from saying exactly what they were doing to higher ups. They then created systems for extracting data in an automated way based on requests from the NSA. All that executives knew was that they were doing something important for complying with law enforcement requests.
The CEOs of these companies learned about the existence of the back doors from public reporting based on Snowden's revelations. When they first heard, they issued public denials that were, as far as they knew, truthful. Their subsequent actions upon finding out that they were wrong strongly suggest that they wouldn't have approved the programs had they known what was happening.
I see this claim is made in the Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)]: "PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6]" but the cited source [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...] does not support this assertion; on the contrary it explains "[NSA] has secretly broken into [...] Yahoo and Google". It certainly doesn't make the stronger claim you seem to suggest here that PRISM is limited to FISA requests.
Because that's when Trump came into power and nothing bad ever happened under the Obama admin.
Take marijuana enforcement as an inverse example. The federal law around marijuana hasn't changed, and it's as illegal in 2020 to use, grow, and sell as it was in 2004. But the Obama administration made clear to the DEA and FBI that pursuit and enforcement of that law in states that had passed their own laws to legalize it would be a career-limiting move, which gave the states breathing room to experiment (and allowed hard evidence to gather that allowing medicinal and recreational use wouldn't cause societal collapse or, really, almost any negative outcomes).
This aspect of the intersection of law and executive enforcement is why the Trump administration is correctly condemned for worsening the situation regarding immigration in the US. Most of the laws the administration uses have been on the books since before 2016. This administration chooses the harshest and cruelest ways to interpret and execute on those laws.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obamas-w...
https://swampland.time.com/2012/05/03/what-is-president-obam...
This was a big deal back during his term which I feel like people are already forgetting.
The Obama administration did exactly nothing for prison reform, which coincidentally is probably going to be a big part of Trump's legacy (he's done more on this than any other President), and nothing for situations where marijuana possession suddenly makes other things criminal (like owning a firearm _and_ marijuana).
For as poor as Trump's record with women is, it's pretty shameful for everyone else that he's the president that made sure tampons are widely available in women's prisons.
Ok? So that should counteract the behavior.
> This aspect of the intersection of law and executive enforcement is why the Trump administration is correctly condemned for worsening the situation regarding immigration in the US.
There is an element of "outrage" culture that means to ascribe new fault, in the established pursuit of a "federally safe" cryptography, to the administration as a proxy for other wrongs. This is not relevant to the issue of original fault.
They have been pushing for some variation on this since basically forever. I first became aware of it back under Clinton with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip. And the debate has been essentially the same since.
Law enforcement wants to be able to break security, and promises that their super secret, super safe system will provide everyone else protection from evildoers while letting law enforcement find the bad guys. Cryptographers have maintained that when you create a back door, it is a question of time until it is found and publicized.
And the back door doesn't even have to be found to be abused. Because it will be made available to law enforcement and the courts. Which are surprisingly easy for third parties to subvert. And which are happy to build programs for themselves that break the rules that they are supposed to follow. (Snowden anyone?)
Success has gone to both sides. But on the balance, the cryptographers have been right.