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posted by martyb on Sunday September 01 2019, @07:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the Seckret-Codez dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:07AM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:07AM (#889120) Journal

    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.

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