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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, @05:06PM (2 children)
I'm assuming you are an American. If not, then your opinion about US policy and doing harm doesn't mean much, as those agencies are supposed to cause harm to US enemies.
I don't know all the stuff the NSA does, as most of them are US government secrets. However, think about two worlds:
1) The US government has no organization which handles computer security and espionage. Everything is done piecemeal, through individual departments or outsourced contracts.
2) The US government has an organization which handles computer security and espionage.
The first world seems a lot more dangerous to the US people than the second one does. So overall, I imagine the NSA has been at least neutral, despite the bad things they have undoubtedly done.
(Extending it onward, when I personally do the same exercise for the TSA, I think the first world is better so the TSA should be abolished...)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday October 30 2017, @05:55PM
There is very little evidence that the NSA has done anything to improve security in the last decade. The amount they have done in the last three decades is dubious. They appear to have concentrated so much on espionage that they've either ignored or intentionally weakened security with every decision they have made or policy they have promoted.
I'm not really of the opinion that the NSA should be totally abandoned, but I think it should be split into two agencies, one for security and the other for espionage, and that the security should get between three and seven times the budget of the espionage agency. And that they should have entirely separate reporting and management chains of command. The spooks have proven too willing to use subterfuge to be trusted with even an indirect say in the policies of the security agency.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday October 31 2017, @12:29AM
They cause harm to to the US itself by violating the highest law of the land. The people in these organizations who violate the Constitution and the ones who are responsible for their treacherous actions should be in prison, or they would be if our system made sense at all. Mass surveillance should be completely banned in all circumstances, as not only is it a violation of people's freedoms (whether foreign or not), but it makes it impossible to avoid collecting the data of actual citizens given the global nature of the Internet.
The problem of the government violating the Constitution inherently does far more damage than any amount of terrorists or foreign powers could ever do, so the mere fact that the NSA is violating the Constitution makes it evil to me.