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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: 2, Informative) by insanumingenium on Monday October 30 2017, @06:18PM (1 child)
Why can't we just treat all telecom services (including Internet) as we do most common carriers and give a legally recognised expectation of privacy?
P.S. If you run it over VoIP, you aren't HIPPA compliant anymore.
P.P.S. Yes I realize that spreading that legal fiction to Internet services won't reduce the need for encryption. Having that expectation of privacy would be a nice first step though.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 30 2017, @07:09PM
> If you run it over VoIP, you aren't HIPPA compliant anymore.
Quite true. But that didn't matter in the least, not to me. What mattered was that the bureaucrats at the big health insurer would accept it, whereas they would not accept the exact same document via email. They didn't ask what kind of line I was on, and I sure didn't volunteer that info.
One really funny thing in a sad way is that these were legal documents-- living will and physician directives kind of stuff-- that started with the quaint legalese: "know all men..." IOW, they were meant to be public.
I've gotten to where I really loathe the HIPAA excuse. Been used too many times as a barrier to deny services and in general make things difficult for the patient. It's the medical community's goto excuse for why they can't modernize their record keeping and get away from the ridiculous paper forms they still ask patients to fill out, why they can't tell you the results of the tests they ran on you, why they can't talk to a pharmacy, why they can't explain their prices, or whatever it is they actually could do but don't feel like doing.