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Trump's Department of Justice is trying to get a do-over with its campaign to get backdoors onto iPhones and into secure messaging services. The policy rebrand even has its own made-up buzzword. They're calling it "responsible encryption."
After Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein introduced the term in his speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, most everyone who read the transcript was doing spit-takes at their computer monitors. From hackers and infosec professionals to attorneys and tech journalists, "responsible encryption" sounded like a marketing plan to sell unsweetened sugar to diabetics.
Government officials -- not just in the U.S. but around the world -- have always been cranky that they can't access communications that use end-to-end encryption, whether that's Signal or the kind of encryption that protects an iPhone. The authorities are vexed, they say, because encryption without a backdoor impedes law-enforcement investigations, such as when terrorist acts occur.
[...] "Look, it's real simple. Encryption is good for our national security; it's good for our economy. We should be strengthening encryption, not weakening it. And it's technically impossible to have strong encryption with any kind of backdoor," said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), when asked about Rosenstein's proposal for responsible encryption at The Atlantic's Cyber Frontier event in Washington, D.C.
Source: Great, now there's 'responsible encryption'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @10:45AM (7 children)
Sure, because the bad guys will not ever learn how to get safe encryption anyway.</sarcasm> The cat is out of the bag, you can't get it back in. And if you try to detect it, they will just add a layer of steganography to the mix.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 30 2017, @12:24PM (6 children)
You think you mean 'the cat has bolted, too late closing the stable door'
Because 'letting the cat out of the bag' [wikipedia.org] means to 'reveal something nasty which was previously hidden', not 'solve the problem too late'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2017, @01:32PM (1 child)
can we just say "the sources are on github, no way you can delete all the clones" instead?
why do computer people need to use expressions that grew up on a farm anyway?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 30 2017, @02:16PM
Better "the project was forked"
Because they grew on a server silo? The next generation will be even better, they grew in the cloud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday October 30 2017, @05:58PM (1 child)
In this case I like the phrase "Pandora's box is already open."
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Osamabobama on Monday October 30 2017, @09:02PM
Well, we can hope there's something that didn't get out.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by fyngyrz on Monday October 30 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)
No, it doesn't. It means to reveal facts that were previously hidden. Read the whole wikipedia article, which indicates the etymology you cite has no known basis.
Besides... the primary reason a cat would be nasty in that case is because you were idiot enough to put it in the bag. Which makes the nasty entity... you.
Encryption's not like that. Putting things deeply and blackly in the encryption bag is a good idea. Putting cats in a bag, definitely not.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 30 2017, @10:59PM
In the context of non-tangible things, it's the same
Speaking of the use of encryption, of course it is a nasty thing... for spooks
(the fact they want it now backdoored being the 'cat that bolted out of the bag').
Which doesn't make anyone using encryption an idiot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford