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posted by janrinok on Thursday July 30 2015, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-gets-it dept.

Three former intelligence and defense officials have published an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting encryption and rejecting the Department of Justice and FBI Director Comey's campaign to weaken encryption using backdoors or key escrow:

Mike McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and director of national intelligence. Michael Chertoff is a former homeland security secretary and is executive chairman of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk management advisory firm with clients in the technology sector. William Lynn is a former deputy defense secretary and is chief executive of Finmeccanica North America and DRS Technologies.

More than three years ago, as former national security officials, we penned an op-ed [paywall] to raise awareness among the public, the business community and Congress of the serious threat to the nation's well being posed by the massive theft of intellectual property, technology and business information by the Chinese government through cyberexploitation. Today, we write again to raise the level of thinking and debate about ubiquitous encryption to protect information from exploitation.

[...] Today, with almost everyone carrying a networked device on his or her person, ubiquitous encryption provides essential security. If law enforcement and intelligence organizations face a future without assured access to encrypted communications, they will develop technologies and techniques to meet their legitimate mission goals.

TechDirt speculated that the Washington Post "unpublished" the editorial, but the Post reuploaded the story, saying that a "production error" had caused it to be posted prematurely.

At the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently went off the "Going Dark" script:

FBI Director James Comey, who opened the annual Aspen conference on Wednesday night, warned that his agency is "going dark" because of the use of unbreakable end-to-end encryption. It's an argument Comey has been making for months now. Johnson's comments were a reminder that authorities can see plenty.

"We have developed good capabilities to detect plotting, to detect efforts to do something bad in our homeland," he said. He then added that he wasn't disputing Comey's conclusion. "Um, we do have the problem of going dark that Jim talked about last night, very definitely."


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  • (Score: 2) by kadal on Thursday July 30 2015, @04:15PM

    by kadal (4731) on Thursday July 30 2015, @04:15PM (#215919)

    I'm being lazy but does anyone know if these guys took meaningful steps in this direction when they were in office?

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 30 2015, @04:19PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 30 2015, @04:19PM (#215921) Journal

    I seem to remember McConnel vacillating to one side and the other of reasonable. That is - he wasn't the draconian prick that General Alexander is today. The other two, I really can't recall.