Apple and Google are KILLING KIDS with encryption, whine lawyers Children are being raped, citizens murdered, and lost souls trafficked for sex and the police can't do anything about it thanks to Apple and Google, senior government lawyers and a top cop have claimed. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr; Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of …
"Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr; Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London Police; Paris' chief prosecutor François Molins; and Javier Zaragoza, chief prosecutor of the High Court of Spain, said that the current situation is unsupportable and legal changes are needed to keep the public safe."
Go fuck yourselves. We need to keep ourselves safe from *you*.
"Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr; Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London Police; Paris' chief prosecutor François Molins; and Javier Zaragoza, chief prosecutor of the High Court of Spain, said that the current situation is unsupportable"
rant/ Damn straight it is! If the NSA and others weren't so keen to siphon up details of personal lives from all and sundry, without due process or a proper warrant, then very few people would even be thinking about encryption.
Methinks the good gentlemen above should be directing their ire at the Five Eyes, whose abuses are totally responsible for the current mess. /rant
I appreciate your argument but as governments and law enforcement have proved time and again, they cannot be trusted to only use powers for good. Only the other day more stories about something as simple as CCTV operators abusing their positions again by watching and reporting things they have no right to.
Instead we know full well if we give them a "skeleton key" to unlock average desktop encryption mechanism, they will abuse the privilege and waste time pulling in easy targets like the spotty sod who sells £200 worth of dope or the granny who knocked a few movies off a torrent site, simply because those are easy nicks. They won't bother pulling the real filth who need to be removed from society, as they're harder to catch 'cos they know they're being watched and take extra precautions.
They won't bother pulling the real filth who need to be removed from society
That's because the "real filth who need to be removed from society" write and oversee and thus place themselves "above" the law.
They are certainly trying to protect someone but it's fucking obvious that that someone certainly aint "the children" and it certainly aint "us"
The "skeleton key" was very useful when Gordon Brown discovered the hot bed of international terrorism that was the Icelandic banking sector!
OK, not encryption related but just about the most egregious over reach of any law enacted for one purpose in another context. Give any one power and they will use it to the fullest extent they can - just because they can.
The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 contains many provisions not related to terrorism, including the ones used in connection with Iceland.
If Brown had acted under the similar powers when they were in the Emergency Laws (Re-enactments and Repeals) Act 1964 then perhaps Iceland (which was reneging on its agreed responsibilities for its banks) wouldn't have had such a PR coup.
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
PakBAwNtRCE45qIFUpCj3Pjh3jRoPVmiQOb8n5PuhipuIP4v6ANCboWnCUam7NGd
VHuU2OLX36QWOoPI5Ewl9xto+3iqjlclTaiRlHo0JHU8EOv75BpjahzKhDCV2lMQ
q9QOHBESsU9xhk/t7gnT2EfhxzPHTb2N7fkPRFqItMU949hSvaYtN3AA80qxjkic
EF6QQjrw38UNz2IZGplKHFKT39laI7NywviI7LmfJYHMoIFhdz97Woad1MCMPq/G
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
gpg --decrypt /tmp/tmp.gpg
gpg: invalid armor header: PakBAwNtRCE45qIFUpCj3Pjh3jRoPVmiQOb8n5PuhipuIP4v6ANCboWnCUam7NGd\n
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: invalid radix64 character 2D skipped
gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=3d)
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
You didn't say it right.
What's there to assume? If the Snowden "revelations" revealed anything new, it's that the governments are fully aware just how thoroughly they've fucked the ubiquitous "encryption" which they've spent every moment since using the NSA "NIST (honest!)" to shoehorn into abso-fucking-lutely EVERYTHING... and... furthermore, the disingenuous fucks are actively exploiting that wholesale fuckedupness of our crapto to practically universally spy on us. FFS!
Snowden proved that they know they're lying at us.
We know they know we know they're lying.
So what the hell are they trying to do? Do they think that if they just go on and on lying at us we'll eventually believe the obvious lies? Or perhaps they're curious to see if they can drive their credibility figures into negative numbers?
Baffled.
"Do they think that if they just go on and on lying at us we'll eventually believe the obvious lies?"
No, they *know* that 99% of the population will choose to believe the lies.
Just a few days ago I read a comment in a national newspaper saying that Jean Charles de Menezes (the guy who the police shot on the London Underground in 2005) brought his death upon himself by acting suspiciously, failing to stop when asked and running away from police. In fact Jean de Menezes did none of those things. He was sitting quietly in a train carriage with no idea that anything was amiss when he was suddenly grabbed by someone in civilian clothes and shot multiple times in the head with no challenges or opportunity to do anything about it. The comment in the newspaper echoed the lies that were spread in the initial aftermath to try to justify the killing, but which were since "corrected" and the truth was revealed in gradual stages. But people still prefer to believe the lies, presumably because the truth is such an "appalling vista" that it cannot be entertained. I suspect that the full story is even worse than the police had to eventually admit to, but the CCTV cameras were very conveniently malfunctioning at the time.
Correction:
The innocent man who the police murdered in a confused and panic, and then tried to frame by lying to the public, and deliberately misleading the courts and the IPCC investigation.
The Met were then convicted of breaching Health and Safety law - and the person in charge of the murder was promoted.
And they wonder why Londoners don't trust the police. The Met has many great officers, but their reputation has been destroyed by a few vicious individuals protected by incompetent management.
> "Do they think that if they just go on and on lying at us we'll eventually believe the obvious lies?"
Of course they do.
This is another 'big lie' exercise that has to be continually enforced. The tech-aware and the informed are anomalies and are not the target, the targets are the ill-informed on this subject, who, even if they are inclined to disbelieve the 'facts' presented by an 'expert', the same message repeated enough will eventually make them doubt.
The real experts will be expected to utilise doublethink and toe the line when popular opinion has shifted enough to allow the agenda to be followed through.
Yet governments and law enforcement will continue to want encryption to protect their interests, so that they cannot be easily held accountable for their systematic corruption and incompetence. My privacy is no less important than theirs.
In short, they can pull the encryption from my cold dead hands.
Sigh. Why don't the tech giants just each chip in a couple of million dollars and run a counter campaign asking if people really want the Chinese government to be able to read their medical records, or islamic terrorists to be able to access their children's school records? If the government are busy trying to appeal to the paranoid halfwit section of society, then you can quite easily turn that upside-down.
.. you best not start with a lie.
We support the privacy rights of individuals
Bwahahahahaha. Yeah, right. Next!
Here is an example of why not: OPM. You could not even be trusted with data that is so sensitive that it should have been at least two full tiers removed from the Net.
"appropriate balance between the marginal benefits of full-disk encryption"
Odd, pretty it's a requirement to have full disk encryption in order to comply with parts of the DPA.
Therefore PC plod, which law do I break in order to comply with the law?
really not that should be I think.
Apparently we privacy-minded people kill children, support sex-trafficking and actively endorse terrorism as well.
Like other articles already have stated.
For a fact: I do none of the above, I just protect myself against everyone who is without my explicit consent peaking into my private life.
I'd say that is a fundamental human right!
I never thought they were really so deficient in common sense that they'd actually resort to "Think of the Children". Did no one explain the world has moved on a bit since the 90s and it just reads as shorthand for "I'm lying through my teeth and not doing it very well"?
As for... "...marginal benefits of full-disk encryption..." Sorry, pulling the other one won't work either.
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"I notice that with Windows 10 uploading your recovery key to Redmond, they're not complaining about Microsoft."
That's optional.
I suspect the reason that they are not complaining about MS is that bit locker isn't available in the home edition of windows 10 which is the one most people will use.
It's also off by default on the pro and enterprise versions..
I think that you are wrong for two reasons.
1. I have home and bitlocker is not available.
2. I have pro on my other PC and bitlocker is there and has an option to upload to MS OR save as a file, print it etc.
You absolutely DO NOT HAVE TO upload your key to MS.
Just checked online and nope, no bitlocker in win10 home, and no need to upload your keys - do you work for apple?
www.technig.com/enable-bitlocker-drive-encryption/
is the message that Cyrus Vance Jr should be telling New York cops - ''get off your fat backsides and go and do real investigative work rather than sitting around''. The cops are getting lazy & fat: next up they will be complaining that criminals refuse to just hand themselves in.
Yer not kidding.
I was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard last week. President Obama arrived, and the Massachusetts State Police Motorcycle Unit was present to block roads so His Greatness could pass through, unimpeded by us plebs.
Every single one of those motorcycle cops could stand to drop 100 pounds. The amount of guttage was amazing. I mean, stereotype and all, but these guys must sit around the garage chowing down on Dunkin's finest for the entire shift, every single day.
Quote from original article:
"The new Apple encryption would not have prevented the N.S.A.’s mass collection of phone-call data or the interception of telecommunications, as revealed by Mr. Snowden. There is no evidence that it would address institutional data breaches or the use of malware."
So what are you complaining about, Mr Vance et al? If encryption doesn't stop the NSA snooping on our data, it won't stop law enforcement bodies doing so either. Sounds like phones aren't encrypted *enough*!
phones are, but that is just data at rest.
Transmission of data over the net, storage in "cloud" datacenters etc. etc. is not.
And I'm not even talking about the default 4-digit passcode protection most people probably still use.
Full disk encryption is a nice marketing selling point, but it's only part of the total story.
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"The new encryption policies of Apple and Google have made it harder to protect people from crime"
Not the crime of breaking the 4th Amendment by spying on people using a general warrant.
I'm sure there was some kerfuffle about a country using general warrants at some point in the past, anyone remember which country that was?
(Could only choose one icon; using this one in sarcasm; bear with me)
But the moment you invoke children and the future, then all bets are off, no holds are barred, no search is unreasonable. Which means the search is within the law. After all, without children, where will our country be in a few decades?
Crimes in which inability of law enforcement personnel results in failure to identify, arrest, and prosecute the criminal will be a tiny fraction of all crimes, and the one used as an example probably is not one of them. The great majority of arrests and prosecutions are of the obvious suspects, supported by witnesses and obvious physical evidence, sometimes bolstered by forensic evidence analysis. The article appears to be aimed at inducing a moral panic to support action that a great majority, if they thought about it, would think a bad idea.
While we're at it, we need to ban knives. And I'm not just talking big nasty hunting knives and machetes. Pocket knives, key ring knives, kitchen knives, table knives, scalpels, plastic knives and vaguely shaped items with a thin edge.
Why?
Because a tiny proportion of these items are used in crimes. People get cut and slashed. Kids are in danger. Only by banning ALL sharp objects will we remove the terrible overhead from the police of investigating these crimes and make the public safe.
You'd have thought they'd have banned them and box cutters already after 9/11. After all, there we have concrete proof of it being used to kill thousands of lives in a single day. Metal detectors, meet ceramic knives. Even with hardened cockpit doors, all that's needed is one slip during one of the pilot's snack or meal breaks and BOOM! the setup for 9/11 part two!
PS. And if that fails, there's always the dildo bomb (INSIDE a kinky woman; won't find it with anything short of a strip search) filled with homemade ANFO (like Oklahoma City). Good luck trying to stop a truly determined adversary from using things we need everyday to ruin civilization.
Charles 9 wrote:
Even with hardened cockpit doors, all that's needed is one slip during one of the pilot's snack or meal breaks and BOOM! the setup for 9/11 part two!
No hardened cockpit doors work extremely well - keeping everyone out, while a mentally unstable pilot flies in to a mountain.
Let's imagine that Apple & Google have provided back doors for LEA. In that case the authorities would obviously prefer people to use Apple & Google instead of other types of encryption that they cannot get into. A good way for the authorities to get people to trust Apple and Google encryption would be to moan and whine about how that encryption is really bad because it completely prevents them getting their hands on people's data.
This might have been posted before but also might bear repeating.
The phones that got the prosecutors all worked up were an iPhone 6 and a Samsung S6 Edge - neither of them a typical burn phone, so probably traceable to their owners without resort to decryption of the contents. My s3 has a barcode inside the back cover labelled "VZW' and the IMEI can be seen by lifting the battery. It would be harder with an iPhone, but I suspect that equipment available to law enforcement agencies could identify the carrier and implicitly the account without destroying the phone. Of course the account information, like the stored data, might be useless. The phones might have been left at the scene because the killer(s) stole them and found them useless due to the lock code. Hopefully the police didn't handle them so much as to destroy latent fingerprint information.
I also found annoying in the article the false statement that Google had reengineered Android encryption so that they - Google - no longer could to decrypt phone contents. Intentionally faulty data encryption, as far as I know, was a uniquely Apple failing.
But then, this was an opinion piece and maybe not subject to significant fact checking by the New York Times, bastion of journalism, with a masthead that still reads "All the News That's Fit to Print".
"Children are being raped, citizens murdered, and lost souls trafficked for sex and the police can't do anything about it thanks to..."
...The TPP treaty. Right? No?
Oh, its the TOTALITARIANS back at it again, destroying The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
This issue actually has NOTHING AT ALL to do with companies like Apple and Google who very kindly respond to their customer's wishes and offer (somewhat) iron clad services to protect customer privacy. IOW, #MyStupidGovernment is going about this issue in the WRONG WAY. The Fourth Amendment is specific about serving warrants to INDIVIDUALS who are suspected of crime. Blanket surveillance of any US citizen communicating on US soil is blatantly ILLEGAL. But the FUD mongering surveillance totalitarians find that's far too much work. It's better to surveil ALL of us ALL THE TIME and have us 'trust' them to honor and respect out privacy. Except, they've already proven their traitorous attitude toward our constitutional right to privacy.
Therefore: BZZZT! Wrong US surveillance hounds! You've destroyed any trust we'll ever have in you. Handing blanket surveillance tools to you folks is not going to happen. So please cut the FUD foisting and get back to doing everything constitutionally, ONE suspect at a time. Leave mass surveillance via the business world out of it.
[Sorry to do the 'shout' caps, but I know of no way to do italics or bolding here at ®.]
I'll just point out, any time someone talks about "appropriate balance", this means they want to take away your rights. I'm perfectly willing to take the odd chance that the occasional crim walks, if the alternative is to live in a totalitarian police state. I will not give up my encryption, and neither should you.
But what happens when essential liberty becomes an obstacle to safety, period?
It hasn't - that's an oxymoron... perhaps you don't understand the meaning of essential... but if you start to think it has then it's time to quit the coolaid, take a fist full of antipsychotics and a deep breath, and step back and attempt to engage your brain. Before you do something sdoopid.
Oh? Being free to speak allows you to shout FIRE in a crowded theater. Being able to defend oneself against a tyrannical government ALSO allows you to create an uprising against a good one. Freedom to travel means you can travel to meet co-conspirators. Presumption of innocence means one can create a perfect crime by destroying the proof, etc. The very freedoms we seek are also the ways we can be brought down, and they're part and parcel: impossible to separate. And since the average human is self-centered by nature, there will always be people who will try to subvert the system. So to turn Franklin's quote on its ear, perhaps the human race isn't ready for freedom, since that very freedom will probably destroy us.
PS. I speak this from a perfectly calm and rational mind. I just come to different conclusions than most, probably because I'm a realist who's been in the trenches of humanity. I mean, just look at 9/11, and we know there are people determined to ensure that if they can't win, no one will (meaning for them, MAD is a winning scenario).
Ho-hum...Eventually everyone will realize our information is either to be used for surveillance or for secure communications. There is no middle-of-the-road solution. Either one-way encrypt everything including cell phones or continually guard multiple backdoors against all forms of malevolent unknowns.
Those who say "Encryption is bunk, I've got nothing to hide" are forgetting that in some countries its impossible for plain citizens to live as openly as we do. When such “dissidents” are the only people using encryption then the government security apparatus can easily identify them. But if everyone encrypted then everyone is safe from targeted surveillance. Terrorists and criminals can create their own encryption. Does anyone think they would be stupid enough to leave a backdoor in that?
But.. but... butt... that'll leave less time for sitting in Dunkin diligently building their cases of atherosclerosis, type 2 diabetes and morbid obesity.
Since crypto tech is arguably a weapon owning and posessing it is surely a second amendment right (for US citizens at least).
Given their success in protecting the right to keep and bear physical arms surely we should enlist the NRA in protecting this digital right.
On the other hand given that over 10,000 homicides a year in the US are attributable to gun ownership maybe the 'saving lives' argument would cut both ways.
"Since crypto tech is arguably a weapon owning and posessing it is surely a second amendment right (for US citizens at least)."
...interesting... The US government classifies encryption code as "munitions" for the purpose of its patently demented "export restrictions" so it can't have it both way... oh wait...
"On the other hand given that over 10,000 homicides a year in the US are attributable to gun ownership maybe the 'saving lives' argument would cut both ways."
It would be pretty easy to say most of those homicides would occur anyway due to their nature and that the use of the gun is incidental in these cases. For example, a good chunk of gun-related deaths are suicides, and it's easy to think if someone didn't have gun they'd try other things the way the Japanese do (which have practically no guns AND a higher suicide rate). Another significant chunk is criminal-on-criminal (usually as the result of disputes and gang wars) which would care less about gun laws and, barring that, would use other means.
is the persecutor who had Sergey Aleynikov, 40 years old, arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation for allegedly stealing Open Source software from Goldman Sachs - the notorious shark company of Wall Street.
After two trials driven by Cyrus Vance, Sergey was EXONERATED by Appeal Courts. Sergey is now suing all concerned.
Read Flash Boys - A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis [EPUB] [MOBI] - a real page turned for even the slightest tech reader!
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