SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Like other politicians and government officials, President Trump's nominee for the position of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wants to have it both ways when it comes to encryption:
At his confirmation hearing, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, however, he took a much clearer position:
Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people's' digital security?
Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations.
Despite Sessions' "on the one hand, on the other" phrasing, this answer is a clear endorsement of backdooring the security we all rely on. It's simply not feasible for encryption to serve what Sessions concedes are its "many valuable and important purposes" and still be "overcome" when the government wants access to plaintext. As we saw last year with Sens. Burr and Feinstein's draft Compliance with Court Orders Act, the only way to give the government this kind of access is to break the Internet and outlaw industry best practices, and even then it would only reach the minority of encryption products made in the USA.
Related: Presidential Candidates' Tech Stances: Not Great
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday January 25 2017, @06:39PM
I used to set up FreeSWAN tunnels for my work back in the late 90s. The project rules were such that no American was allowed to contribute due to the laughable "weaponized encryption" laws back then. No restrictions on usage, though.
I think those laws were repealed or scaled back some years ago.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:09AM
Canada is one of the few 'green' nations in the chart on
http://infogalactic.com/info/Restrictions_on_the_import_of_cryptography [infogalactic.com]
(or wikipedia if you prefer, but fsck supporting Wales and his financially motivated 'non-profit')
along with Ghana and a few other places you wouldn't think of as freedom loving utopias and paragons of democracy :)
In fact most of the 'free world' looks decidedly unfree based on the restrictions noted in that chart.