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Apple may have said that it opposes the idea of weakening encryption and providing governments with backdoors into products, but things are rather different in China. The Chinese parliament has just passed a law that requires technology companies to comply with government requests for information, including handing over encryption keys.
Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the controversial law is the Chinese government's attempt to curtail the activities of militants and political activists. China already faces criticism from around the world not only for the infamous Great Firewall of China, but also the blatant online surveillance and censorship that takes place. This latest move is one that will be view very suspiciously by foreign companies operating within China, or looking to do so.
http://betanews.com/2015/12/27/china-passes-law-requiring-tech-firms-to-hand-over-encryption-keys/
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday December 28 2015, @08:33PM
If there was a chance this could be contained to China and other unfree hellholes, I for one wouldn't care. More like "Duh, what part of unfree hellhole had you idjits been missing? Totalitarian sorta communist police states are gonna police state." But of course it won't. All of the 'powers that be' want to both wield unbreakable crypto themselves while denying it to most everybody else. In the end it will shake out that the governemnt and the carriers will get to use it, some of the big data silos will get a limited access if they share and everybody else gets hosed.
Why do you think every single handset has a locked bootloader, even ones sold unlocked and supposedly open? The bootloader might be 'unlockable' in that you can have it load whatever OS you want on the application processor but the bootloader itself is always locked tight as is the communication processor's software. Even if based on open software, the source to most bootloaders are closed. If nothing else they have to comply with the CA regs on remote wipe/lock so there must be a secret closed section remaining somewhere even on an 'open' unit. And once you have a secret untouchable backdoor there is no way to resist the temptation to add more features to it.
The carriers love locking things, even when there is no business case for it. Think they reason they should always lock things just so customers never realize there is even a different option. They don't want people to ever experience an unlocked device to have a point of comparision. Microsoft is already locking all phones and tablets and reserves the option to lock desktops, an option they will soon exercise. While there was enough backlash to get music sold without locks, that victory was shortlived when they simply decided to phase out selling music entirely and move people to pay a monthly fee to stream. And good luck streaming to anything but their closed, spying, ad infested app. Anybody want to bet how long they allow the apps to run on 'insecure' platforms such as rooted handsets/tablets? Probably about the time Windows drops the DRM hammer on the desktop since that will stop the grumbling about that exception.
They really resent losing the Clipper War but in the end it didn't really matter. Yes we have PGP/GPG but nobody actually uses it. They use public key crypto against us far, far more than we use it.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday December 28 2015, @09:56PM
I agree with this.
My summarized view is that this is a harbinger of what is yet to come.
Unlike DVD regional zoning, we can presume the firmware or what have you in China with the hardware unlocks... simply won't be removed when regional languages are changed on the menus. As we have all seen, we get all the languages installed anyway... it's a matter of turning it off or on in a menu not necessarily accessible by the user. (just check a few application folder for help files, assuming any were installed. megabytes of languages you likely can't use in addition to yours).
Instead of being able to send private messages to one another, with the government/advertisers/power you don't like/mom and dad being unable to read the secrets, it will be that anyone using a non-sanctioned method of sending notes will immediately be flagged for review, and then later accused of terrorism or child porn (or perhaps both).
I mean -- both terrorism and child porn have been used to demand access to contents. The drug war is becoming a bogeyman that doesn't resonate as much with the parents of today, and so that is getting the back seat unless its tied to terrorists and porn somehow.
I sometimes do not entirely agree with jmorris (and its mostly philosophical), but this is something I'd beat the same drum regarding. Simply using another type of encryption is becoming less of an option; if there is only one store to get your encryption programs from and they are all rooted by the government as a matter of the vendors being allowed to operate as a business... then it's a matter of business to violate your privacy in adherence to a matter of policy. You won't be able to take your business somewhere else in protest if they are all required to do it.