'If people can encrypt their cell phones, what's stopping them encrypting their PCs?' This week NASA showed off its plans to lasso an asteroid, researchers mourned over a bug-riddled Chrome browser, and RSA banned buxom booth babes. Here are some, er, titillating quotes from the week: Fadi Chehade, president and CEO of ICANN, did not mince his words when discussing the committee behind the IANA body. He had …
While he seems like the sort of person who would get his secretary to type his E-mails, it seems to me that he didn't do that bad. People can encrypt their hard drives if they're so inclined and still use their computers. Also, he seems to have predicted the existence of what is known as ransomware. This is pretty good guessing for someone who doesn't seem to know that this sort of stuff is going on already.
You might have a point there actually, judges are hired for their understanding of the law and ability to interpret/apply it and will hire specialists to explain things like encryption if it's not something they've had experience of. He seems to have twigged on to what most people who are more tech savvy are already aware of and has thought through the logic of it to the last point, and there's legal precedent for that which he'd be able to read up on if it ever actually came up in his court room.
What's worrying though is that not a single person in that room apparently was aware that it already exists and was willing to explain it to him. Instead someone just said "I knew we'd get some wisdom from the judge" and then moved on, either betraying an ignorance of the subject which is frankly astonishing or brushing off concerns of someone who at some point is very likely to need information on that subject in order for the law to be correctly enforced
and will hire specialists to explain things like encryption if it's not something they've had experience of.
... should hire specialists to explain things ...
The Dunning-Kruger effect is powerful...
Vic.
This post has been deleted by its author
Windows 2K had some kind of encryption I recall. It was notable as, in common with most consumer-grade encryption at the time, it had, on examiniation, huge gaping holes. In order to allow the Administator to recover data, the encryption key was stored in a recoverable form.
The next version did not store the encryption key in recoverable form, and the Administrator is not able to recover data if the key is lost.
Everyone is jumping on the Congressman's utter lack of any and all technical knowledge. Rightly so - the man is spouting off about things of which he is ignorant - but I think this misses the larger problem, which is that he evidently believes there is some kind of innate right that allows governments to spy on the people and that anyone opposed to that is instantly suspicious and likely up to no good.
This is a depressingly common belief of our collective politicians and one that is shared even by those among them who are passably aware of the technology.
" which is that he evidently believes there is some kind of innate right that allows governments to spy"
He's from TX which from my limited experience seems to have rather a lot of people in it with more than the usual mutually exclusive ideas within their belief system. Couple that with a frontier mentality and big guns - what could possibly go wrong?
I'm being very unfair to the vast majority of Texans, but they still managed to elect at least one Congressman who lacks some pretty basic knowledge of the world post 2000. 2000? - maybe 1900 ...
There's a difference between the government spying on someone and a judge issuing a court order for the purposes of pursuing a criminal investigation. If the FBI has a particular document which they want you to hand over, the court can subpoena it and/or issue a warrant to search your premises for it. This isn't considered an infringement on privacy as it's supposed to be targeted, and from the way he describes things in the video it sounds like this is what he's concerned about being blocked rather than spying.
Essentially he's asking how he's supposed to handle a case where they literally can't obtain data which they know is in the possession of the defendant, and even know where it's stored (he used the analogy of an unbreakable safe)
@SolidSquid
Well, if they KNOW that the defendant has the files then, while there is nothing definitive yet, case law is building here and it has been held that the authorities would be allowed to order the defendant to decrypt the device without violating 5th amendment rights.
This is - at least in most legal eyes - different to a search that is being conducted where they do not know of the existence of some data or other and are searching for something that will incriminate the defendant.
In this instance, 5th amendment protections are more likely to hold, though again there is nothing definitive and one suspects that a Supreme Court ruling will be required to clarify exactly whether someone can be compelled to hand over their decryption keys in such a situation.
So, the point is that if they KNOW about the data, case law is with them and they can order the defendant to produce the keys and decrypt the PC/phone/account/data. That neatly handles the situation you are talking about and so encryption is therefore not a significant barrier.
What encryption will hinder, however, is the DIGGING for evidence that is not already known, and that is a different story and it can be argued that this goes to the heart of the the right not to incriminate oneself so if this is what the Congressman is worried about, then his problem is the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, not encryption. Which is fair enough - apparently the only important part of the whole thing is the 2nd Amendment anyway.
Also the congressman hasn't twigged that his laptop is probably much better off encrypted in case it's lost or stolen and the only thing you can do with it is return it to the owner or hand it over to the police. He believes it's better to have constituents and government data in plaintext and sold on eBay.
Yes, I always prefer having a 'conversation' via email versus phone. After all, when a customer calls me I can usually settle all questions in 4 to 6 minutes.
Versus:
- replying to a (supposedly) business email where the question is worded like a Tweet,
- I don't know to whom I am connecting with as they all believe that I should automatically recognize a header of "Hello" and "Thanks, Jessica" with not a single reference to their business association, and
- where my first email reply gets 3 more email questions in return, with each email sent individually in intervals of 5 to 20 minutes, extending the 'conversation' from a 3 minute analysis and reply to 2 hours of back-and-forth text negotiations
Or, conversely, a personal SMS text when my SO sends me 10 messages spaced over the course of 10 minutes, each one holding 160 letters, in order to tell me a story or ask me a question that 90 seconds of talking would handle quite easily
I'm SO FUCKING HAPPY when people send me texts and email to UTTERLY WASTE MY TIME that I just want to slit my wrists in drunkenly ecstatic fucking JOY!!! [/s]
The reason we have to encrypt my communications and storage is that since the beginning of the digital age you ignorant bastards and your stooges in the military and law enforcement have completely failed to protect our data. Worse, you've actually compromised our security by actively working to subvert the protections we had to come up with when you failed to do your jobs.
As one former lawyer to another I respectfully suggest that you do what I did: take a few months off and go through a bunch of tech boot camps, beginning with Microsoft's Academic curriculum (suitable for High School juniors and seniors -- you should be able to handle the math there, if you need help with AND-ing operations I have a good cheat sheet I can share with you) and finishing off with the full RHCA/RHCE course and exams. Then spend at least a few months in my shoes, as a working sysadmin for a big multinational. I don't expect that to make you an expert, it took me almost 20 years to accomplish that, but maybe you'll at least begin to know the right questions to ask.
Frankly, Congressman, I've have lost all patience with you and your useless colleagues. Please, get up to speed or get out of the way so someone with real competence (and a more serious work ethic) can take your place.
Joe Sysadmin
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