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The EFF addresses some shortcomings in the recent report to policy makers by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) on encryption.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a much-anticipated report yesterday that attempts to influence the encryption debate by proposing a "framework for decisionmakers." At best, the report is unhelpful. At worst, its framing makes the task of defending encryption harder.
The report collapses the question of whether the government should mandate "exceptional access" to the contents of encrypted communications with how the government could accomplish this mandate. We wish the report gave as much weight to the benefits of encryption and risks that exceptional access poses to everyone's civil liberties as it does to the needs—real and professed—of law enforcement and the intelligence community.
The report via the link in the quote above is available free of charge but holds several hoops to hop through between you and the final PDF. The EFF recognizes that the NAS report was undertaken in good faith, but identifies two main points of contention with the final product. Specifically, the framing is problematic and the discussion of the possible risks to civil liberties is quite brief.
Source : New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @05:49AM (2 children)
It's referring to NAS report, not EFF's.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:48AM (1 child)
So something produced with my tax dollars then?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:59AM
Well if you want to take that argument to its extreme - all the intelligence gathered by your agencies is also funded by your tax dollars. Do you think that you should give free access to all Americans to that data? How secure would that be?
Now, I'm not arguing against the need for good encryption for everybody, but it would be easy for the high and mighty that you dislike so much to discount your argument simply because there is a need to secure information and keep it on a very limited distribution. It affects your national security and safety. The true argument is that it does not apply to your "private" data. You have a right to secure communications just as much as they have. You need secure comms to do your banking, to purchase items over the internet, to submit you tax forms etc. And as a result, you can also use secure comms on your phones. That is what they don't like.
But they should ask themselves a simple question. When, during the WW2 they didn't have the ability to break enemy codes, did they simply stop fighting and go home? No, they continued to fight. And that is what they should be doing to combat terrorism. Not crying themselves to sleep because Joe Public doesn't want to hand over all the details of his private life. And there is no way that they can enforce such a law on the entire world, so how do they expect to stop encryption simply within your own borders?
If you sent random data by phone to another person in the US, would you be guilty of breaking a law simply because the NSA didn't know what the data meant? It is not encrypted, but they do not know that. There is no key for them to find, none for them to try to force you to give up, and you have paid for your phone bill so you can send any text that you like. Or are they suggesting that it has to be in English. Why not Navajo, or some strange dialect used by a group of pygmies somewhere. What they ask for is entirely unreasonable and I don't believe that any such law would stand up in court to a logical and well-reasoned defence. They know it too...