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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 bzipitidoo on Monday September 02 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)
Over the years, I have come to realize several things about the military. Probably you know all this too, but I'm going to try to put it in words anyway, for practice and to help me clarify my own thinking further, if no other reason.
1st, many of the soldiers are young and idealistic, and dedicated to defending their country. 2nd, some are even grateful that the military gives them purpose and direction, and discipline. Makes life simple, if sometimes a little harsh. The military wants young people not just because that's when people are at their peak physically, but also because they are more easily brainwashed and suckered. That is the material that the Military Industrial Complex callously expends in pursuit of dubious goals. The young with their idealism inadvertently provide great cover, most of the time.
There are objectives above even the MIC's relatively narrow greed of profiting from the sale of more weapons to all sides. War is also the preferred means for a malevolent patriarchy to bleed off overpopulation. It's not that they really think that through, it's that they just want to make more babies without having to worry about externalities. Some get all sore that mean old reality won't give them endless room and resources, but they are quick to blame such situations on the greed of others. They see that there would be more room for them and theirs if they could take from others, and more than that, fear that those others are thinking along the same lines and looking at them as potential victims. Each fears the other wants to do a Great Replacement of them. However, this simplistic thinking overlooks just how impossibly hard it can be to really sweep away every last vestige of an existing population. In that background, it hardly matters if a war is won or lost, the real objective, more at a subconscious instinctive level (because thinking is hard work, and they hate that kind of work), was to solve the overpopulation problem until the next generation.
As to the propaganda, it tends to be laughably weak, full of untested assumptions. It's truly sick to go to war over some bull that the warmongers know, or could easily know, is flat wrong. For example, the Domino theory. After Vietnam, the public was a little wiser and warier, no longer so willing to swallow such crap. Even so, look what it took to end the Vietnam War. The Democrats under LBJ were in favor of the war. Nixon got elected (mainly because Bobby Kennedy was assassinated), and he wouldn't end the war either, far from it. After Nixon's resignation, Ford was willing to fight on. It was the Democrats in Congress who finally forced an end to the conflict. The Neocons had to work much harder to sell the public on the 2003 War in Iraq. Flat out lied about the Weapons of Mass Destruction. They also tried to sell the world on a vision of Iraq magically becoming a happy and prosperous allied democracy once freed of the yoke of the evil Saddam Hussein, working to eventually bring peace to the entire Middle East. But that alone wasn't enough, not least because no one really believed it. To bring this war about, they had to take a path that ended in them being outed as liars, brutal profiteers, and murderous scum. I devoutly hope that for now, it is impossible for the current degenerate Neocons to start another war, as they no longer have any credibility. One sign of that lack is that they keep aiming lower and lower in their courting of voters. They are almost to the point where they talk only to the simplest of the simpletons among us, as those are the only people they can still scare and befuddle.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:07AM
I think they have what they want actually, unlimited budget and global operations that don't even have to really even be reported on the news.
Hypernormalization, they just kept running these low intensity conflicts until now we have a grenada every month and it's seen as routine. There is no journalist or newspaper that could even try to report on what the u.s. military is doing in for instance africa, or especially syria.
This was the worst case scenario of the founders of the united states, an unrestrained military intervening internationally according to the whims of individual commanders in the military.
How soon history is forgotten, the colonies were once administered by british generals that had power over any local or remote civilian government.
The british didn't have drones to kill everyone in your country with an IQ over 130 though, which just might be what they are doing now to make sure they don't have any problems with the humans who live on top of the resources they want to extract at bargain basement prices.
It's grim, I am not excited about having citizenship with a country that breaks the geneva conventions and is an international aggressor. What does it mean to follow the law when your country doesn't follow one?
And of course I believe the U.S. military is near hopelessly infiltrated and comprimised by israel who is using them as a meatshield. Iran is not a threat to the united states, neither is syria or afganistan. Those are wars of aggression, and you either believe those generals need to be in prison or you believe the international criminal court should be disbanded, there is no middle ground there morally.