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Great, Now There's "Responsible Encryption"

posted by mrpg on Monday October 30 2017, @09:00AM   
from the unsweetened-sugar dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1

Trump's Department of Justice is trying to get a do-over with its campaign to get backdoors onto iPhones and into secure messaging services. The policy rebrand even has its own made-up buzzword. They're calling it "responsible encryption."

After Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein introduced the term in his speech to the U.S. Naval Academy, most everyone who read the transcript was doing spit-takes at their computer monitors. From hackers and infosec professionals to attorneys and tech journalists, "responsible encryption" sounded like a marketing plan to sell unsweetened sugar to diabetics.

Government officials -- not just in the U.S. but around the world -- have always been cranky that they can't access communications that use end-to-end encryption, whether that's Signal or the kind of encryption that protects an iPhone. The authorities are vexed, they say, because encryption without a backdoor impedes law-enforcement investigations, such as when terrorist acts occur.

[...] "Look, it's real simple. Encryption is good for our national security; it's good for our economy. We should be strengthening encryption, not weakening it. And it's technically impossible to have strong encryption with any kind of backdoor," said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), when asked about Rosenstein's proposal for responsible encryption at The Atlantic's Cyber Frontier event in Washington, D.C.

Source: Great, now there's 'responsible encryption'

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Original Submission

• NopeNope (Score: 2, Disagree) by fyngyrz on Monday October 30 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)

  by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday October 30 2017, @10:00PM (#589721) Journal

  Because 'letting the cat out of the bag' [wikipedia.org] means to 'reveal something nasty which was previously hidden', not 'solve the problem too late'

  No, it doesn't. It means to reveal facts that were previously hidden. Read the whole wikipedia article, which indicates the etymology you cite has no known basis.

  Besides... the primary reason a cat would be nasty in that case is because you were idiot enough to put it in the bag. Which makes the nasty entity... you.

  Encryption's not like that. Putting things deeply and blackly in the encryption bag is a good idea. Putting cats in a bag, definitely not.

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• Re:Nope(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 30 2017, @10:59PM

  by c0lo (156) on Monday October 30 2017, @10:59PM (#589744) Journal

  No, it doesn't. It means to reveal facts that were previously hidden

  In the context of non-tangible things, it's the same

  Besides... the primary reason a cat would be nasty in that case is because you were idiot enough to put it in the bag. Which makes the nasty entity... you.

  Speaking of the use of encryption, of course it is a nasty thing... for spooks
  (the fact they want it now backdoored being the 'cat that bolted out of the bag').
  Which doesn't make anyone using encryption an idiot.

  --
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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