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DOJ made secret arguments to break crypto, now ACLU wants to make them public
Earlier this year, a federal judge in Fresno, California, denied prosecutors' efforts to compel Facebook to help it wiretap Messenger voice calls. But the precise legal arguments that the government made, and that the judge ultimately rejected, are still sealed.
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union formally asked the judge to unseal court dockets and related rulings associated with this ongoing case involving alleged MS-13 gang members. ACLU lawyers argue that such a little-charted area of the law must be made public so that tech companies and the public can fully know what's going on. This element of the case began in August 2018, when an FBI special agent told the court in an affidavit that "there is no practical method available by which law enforcement can monitor these calls" between suspected MS-13 gangsters. Authorities already had traditional wiretaps and were able to intercept written messages between the defendants, who are now in custody.
While traditional telecom companies must give access to police under a 1990s-era law known as CALEA, Internet-based calls are exempt, despite the government's previous efforts to change the law. Prosecutors seemingly argued that Facebook nevertheless had to comply with the government's request. The judge reportedly denied the government's efforts during an August 14, 2018 hearing. In their new filing, ACLU lawyers pointed out that "neither the government's legal arguments nor the judge's legal basis for rejecting the government motion has ever been made public."
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Friday November 30 2018, @02:04AM
Yep. Traditional PSTN, including all mobile cellular carriers, will be CALEA compliant for the foreseeable future. Also for the foreseeable future, they will be not be encrypted, and in plain text. Very difficult to overcome and implement end-to-end encryption because of the devices involved. You might succeed in sending tones and using modem tech, which is very similar to FoIP, but still require an out-of-band channel for key exchange.
However, anything that uses the Internet is fundamentally different. Endpoints *can* reach other, and therefore end-to-end encryption is only going to increase as it gets easier to implement. I'm working on such things, and so is everybody else apparently. Signal, Telegram, Whisper, ZRTP, etc. Attempting to force key escrow systems will not work, and responsible encryption shares space with unicorns as far as reality is concerned.
Even if the FCC reclassifies TCP/IP, ICMP, and the Internet in general as telephone communications, it won't make any difference as far as encrypted communications are concerned. They would need to outlaw encryption in general, and attempt to enforce responsible encryption with key escrow systems again. We saw how that failed in the 90's, and I don't see how it could succeed today.
Like you said, nothing is going to stop the criminals from using FOSS and simply rolling their own covert comm channels. Which, as an aside, makes the CIA look like real dumb assholes when they couldn't do it.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.