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Another day, another U.S. law enforcement official calling for regulation and weakening of encryption. This time, Michael Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, has told Congress that Internet communication services are helping ISIS/ISIL and other terrorist groups as they are now "Going Dark," and the FBI needs a "front door":
As far as the FBI is concerned, private companies must "build technological solutions to prevent encryption above all else," the Washington Post reports Steinbach as saying. That's a pretty sharp reverse ferret from the FBI, which four years ago was recommending encryption as a basic security measure. But Steinbach said evildoers are hiding behind US-made technology to mask their actions.
Steinbach told the committee that encrypted communications were the bane of the agency's efforts to keep the American public safe from terror. But the FBI wasn't insisting on back door access to encryption; rather, it wants companies to work directly with law enforcement where necessary. "Privacy above all other things, including safety and freedom from terrorism, is not where we want to go," Steinbach said. "We're not looking at going through a back door or being nefarious."
Instead the FBI wants a front door; a system to allow it to break encryption created by US companies. Understandably, US tech firms aren't that keen on the idea, since "we have borked encryption" isn't much of a selling point.
Steinbach claims that while "traditional voice telephone companies are required by CALEA to develop and maintain capabilities to intercept communications when law enforcement has lawful authority, that requirement does not extend to most Internet communications services." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, fought unsuccessfully against the expansion of CALEA in 2004 to cover Internet and some VoIP providers. Efforts to expand CALEA continued in 2010, when the FBI first began to complain about "Going Dark":
In 2010, the FBI began its "Going Dark" campaign. Despite the fact that we are in a Golden Age of Surveillance, the campaign is a charm offensive to convince politicians that FBI is unable to listen in on Internet users' digital communications after obtaining a court order because of recent advances in technology. The proposed legislation would have forced all communications services to build secret backdoors for the government to spy on users and to decrypt any encrypted messages exchanged via the service. The proposal's problems were many, and it quietly died after a tremendous amount of uproar.
In the beginning of 2013, it was reported the FBI was again pushing for a wholesale expansion of CALEA to all Internet communications services. Similar to 2010, the FBI wants to force all companies with messaging services to engineer their products with a secret government backdoor and to decrypt all encrypted messages. The proposal also adds another component: fining companies for not cooperating. In May 2013, the New York Times revealed that the White House was "on the verge" of backing the proposal. While the bill was not introduced in 2013, updating CALEA was a stated priority for FBI Director James Comey in 2014 and we expect it to be so for 2015 as well.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:00PM
it is strange way of arguing.
if there had been no snowden we would all still assume that everything we do is "invisible".
now we find out that the De-facto industry standard isn't "invisibility" at all!
people toke notice, company feel the pressure and the FBI .. complains.
i assume this article would not even exist without a certain person blowing a whistle ...
in a assumed post-snowden perceived world (everyone's invisible) how does the FBI even know where to start?
if we get the real "invisible internet" now (as some companies claim), what is the selector then that triggers a fbi person walking to a company and ask to speak to the IT boss to see some data about a possible user/terrorist?
this would be impossible and thus there would be no need for a front-side looking backdoor?
thus we can assume that all big companies already have this backdoor inside ...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:56PM
"if there had been no snowden we would all still assume that everything we do is "invisible"."
Who is this "we" you refer to? SOME OF US have been painfully aware of NSA programs such as Carnivore for many years. Snowden didn't break the news about NSA surveillance - he simply confirmed the news, with plenty of proof for skeptics. I can't pinpoint the date on which I started growing suspicious of the NSA, but it's well over a decade now. Wait - what is this? 2015, right? And, 9/11/01 was like 14 years ago? So, I've been taking note of surveillance reporting for fifteen years anyway.
2008 article http://arstechnica.com/security/2008/03/an-overview-of-the-nsas-domestic-spying-program/ [arstechnica.com]
article citing 1999 as the date when Omnivore was retired, to be replaced with DragonWare http://computer.howstuffworks.com/carnivore1.htm [howstuffworks.com]
2013 article, I include only because it specifically mentions Prism http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/is-nsa-prism-the-new-fbi-carnivore.html [internetnews.com]
Although primitive in comparison to stuff the intel communites are using today, Echelon dates back to my own childhood in the '60's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON [wikipedia.org]
So, when you refer to "we", please be careful to specify who the hell "we" might be.
(Score: 1) by PocketSizeSUn on Sunday June 07 2015, @06:57PM
This article dates back to at least late 1998 http://mediafilter.org/caq/cryptogate/ [mediafilter.org]
Although much of the information was know and/or surmised by other sources before then.
Information about ECHELON was publicly disclosed in 1996, according to Wikipedia. This does correspond to some fuzzy estimates of when I first heard if referred by the code-name ECHELON. The cutest part was the legal wrangling: No the NSA doesn't spy 'in the US' it co-operates with other nations to spy on the 'US' when the US spys on their citizens. In practice the flow of information is primarily, but not entirely, one sided.
The contribution of Snowden is that he brought enough verifiable evidence to the table of nations that knew and had some clout that the open secret was promoted to open knowledge in the mainstream media. Additionally the "yeah, but ... " argument used to side line the illegal activities became harder to swallow:
'Yeah, but ... that is only international calls ...'
'Yeah, but ... I don't have anything to hide ... '
'Yeah, but ... they're not interested in me ... '
The truth has always been leaking for those who really wished to know...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:28PM
Great article. It seems that I remember reading about Buehler, but he didn't really mean anything to me back then. But, you definitely make my point, better than I did. This crap dates back at least sixty years - the article you link to implies that it dates right back to the end of WW2.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:04PM
Duh..
For anyone paying attention at all, it has been obvious for a long time that the communication links between all these internet computers was too tempting for any 3LA organization to let be:
1996 - ECHELON
2000 - Carnivore
2006 - AT&T employee Mark Klein, reveals the existence of Room 641A with "extra fiber links"..
2013 - Edward Snowden put right in everybody's face
In the beginning all these internet data went unencrypted via black box ISPs and anyone think any 3LA would be mentally capable to keep their fingers out of the jar?
No.....
It's like asking a 5-year kid to watch the candy store during the night.
Once it became this obvious everybody with a clue got onto the SSL bandwagon. It's a crap technology and adminstration, but it sure messes up the systematic approach.