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Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by chaostheory on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:23PM (#22426307)
> 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

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.

Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by asdfasgasdgasdg on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:42PM (#22426492)
> 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.

Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by jsn on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:57PM (#22426669)
You are mistaken. PRISM is specifically a program that "collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies" [em. mine]. NSA wiretapping the non-public links of Google et ol was not PRISM (I'm not even sure that the name of that program was ever disclosed).
Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by btilly on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @03:11PM (#22426820)
Not as mistaken as it appears.

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.

Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by arebop on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @06:34PM (#22428690)
[citation needed]

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.

Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by wrboyce on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:49PM (#22426585)
Wouldn’t tapping dark fibre be a bit useless? Or were the links tapped while dark waiting for the target to start using them?
Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by asdfasgasdgasdg on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @02:54PM (#22426634)
(Context: the original comment mentioned dark fiber, but I changed it to be more precise to avoid exactly this confusion.) Dark fiber is a bit of a misnomer and term of art, IIUC. The way I've had it explained to me, dark fiber is not necessarily dark. It's just not on the public internet. When you lease dark fiber, you presumably do so to put your own signal on it, making it no longer dark. But folks still call it "leasing dark fiber" and still refer to the fiber, once lit, as "dark fiber." I'm not a networking expert so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash... by elithrar on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @03:05PM (#22426752)
You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s a “technically wrong” term that conveys enough meaning: unlit fibre you buy and light up yourself (usually).