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Bruce Schneier has written a short piece over at Lawfare in response to ongoing calls to weaken encryption. Unlike during the cold war there is no longer a distinction between consumer grade encryption and military encryption. This is because customized encryption is both more expensive and less secure, because it is unique, non-standard, and untested.
In his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity, Attorney General William Barr argued that companies should weaken encryption systems to gain access to consumer devices for criminal investigations. Barr repeated a common fallacy about a difference between military-grade encryption and consumer encryption: "After all, we are not talking about protecting the nation's nuclear launch codes. Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications."
The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials—heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else—worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.
Earlier on SN:
U.S. Attorney General William Barr Demands Backdoored Encryption (2019)
FBI: End-to-End Encryption Problem "Infects" Law Enforcement and Intelligence Community (2019)
The Crypto Warrior--Why Politicians Want a ‘Back Door’ into Your Devices—and Why it Will Never Work (2016)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 01 2019, @12:30PM (4 children)
Pretty much like the history books have painted WWII. Sure, the allies broke enigma, sometimes, and some of those times it made huge differences in the outcome of battles. How often were allied secrets intercepted and broken to the advantage of the axis?
Considering that history has been written in terms of "The Allies" vs. "The Axis (of EVIL)", I'd say that the editorial bias is pretty strong.
Code talking natives - sure... that was a thing. Any obscure dialects or languages floating around Europe? Seems unlikely, to me, that all deployment orders were issued in Haupt Deutsch. This is, after all, the country that removed or rearranged their road-signs to point incorrectly when they were invaded; the language that makes regular use of upgefukt time syntax like: five 'till half before three. The language with six different words that mean the number two. WWII was hardly their first rodeo.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 01 2019, @11:30PM
two, twain, twins, pair, duo, couple, ... hmm
ok, twins maybe carries connotations beyond "2"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 02 2019, @05:15AM (2 children)
Far less often. The intelligence advantage was huge. For example, the Axis powers couldn't maintain a serious intelligence network in any of the big Allied powers (with the possible exception of the Kuomintang), while the Axis side was thoroughly permeated with spies and guerillas. Also the two best intelligence networks (the USSR and the US/UK one) were both on the Allied side. The Allied side also kept a number of big secrets, some for years, such as the Manhattan Project, several large Russian offensives, and the Normandy landings, while the Axis powers were often led by the nose (Battle of Midway, Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of England, and the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto). While the Axis had some notable intelligence successes (such as hiding the attack on Pearl Harbor or the initial invasion of the USSR), that ended by 1941.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 02 2019, @12:20PM (1 child)
A lot of that comes down to the simple calculus that decided the war before it began: geography, size of the opposing territories. The Allies won, obviously. Battles went well, and poorly, for both sides. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japanese intelligence was pretty good inside the U.S. A little racial profiling went a long way to curtail that, at tremendous cost to the mostly innocents who were profiled. When I traveled in Europe, racially, I could pass as French or German.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 02 2019, @11:09PM
So there was an intelligence advantage.
So Japanese intelligence wasn't that good. Else they would have figured out before the war started how to work around it.