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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 jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 02 2019, @12:48PM
Dude, there is such a thing as cultural hegemony. It's not all monolithic. You cannot separate Barr and Trump from the people who give them power, and if these are the people making decisions about encryption, how trustworthy they are is a central element of the discussion.
Anyone with *any* ties to *any* spy agency, at all, will not be trusted with my cryptography as a civilian. Barr doesn't just have ties, he's one of the most currupt figures in american history. His dad didn't just know Epstein, he gave him his start. This guy has been corrupt since his birth, and the ties with untrustworthy israeli entities have only grown from there, and are only further reinforced by trump's inner circle picks like kushner.
In an ideal world, the discussion of whether private encryption is a discussion that the encryption people still win, but we are not in this world, we are in a world of deep deep spy games, where some people clearly want to know everything in the world. And all the evidence on hand points to a big problem with Israel, that the alliance with this country is threatening the entire *existence* of the united states as such. If a country can't have secrets it can't exist.
And yes the right wing christian stooges waiting for The End Times and their industrialist propagandists are a big part of how they are getting away with it.
Every discussion of encryption starts with who you trust and who you don't, trying to trim this from the discussion because it's uncomfortable is reductionist and ultimately anti-intellectual.