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from the trust-us-we're-the-government dept.
The Washington Post has a story which says:
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Tuesday renewed a call for tech companies to help law enforcement officials gain access to encrypted smartphones, describing it as a "major public safety issue."
Wray said the bureau was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017 — more than half of all the smartphones it tried to crack in that time period — despite having a warrant from a judge.
"Being unable to access nearly 7,800 devices in a single year is a major public safety issue," he said, taking up a theme that was a signature issue of his predecessor, James B. Comey.
Wray was then quoted as saying:
"We're not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens," he said in New York at Fordham University's International Conference on Cyber Security. "We're interested in those devices that have been used to plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities."
He then went on to promote the long-disparaged idea of key escrow:
As an example of a possible compromise, Wray cited a case from New York several years ago. Four major banks, he said, were using a chat messaging platform called Symphony, which was marketed as offering "guaranteed data deletion." State financial regulators became concerned that the chat platform would hamper investigations of Wall Street.
"In response," Wray said, "the four banks reached an agreement with the regulators to ensure responsible use" of Symphony. They agreed to keep a copy of their communications sent through the app for seven years and to store duplicate copies of their encryption keys with independent custodians not controlled by the banks, he said.
To me this is more of the utter nonsense the government has spouted. When will they understand that key escrow only works when one trusts the government and the keeper of the keys?
Previously:
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:14AM (21 children)
scenario:
encryption of messages is illegal.
I send an encrypted message to a friend.
law enforcement intercepts the message, makes a copy of the encrypted message.
I get arrested, placed in front of a judge.
I testify that I like sending random bits to my friend.
my friend testifies that he likes receiving random bits from me.
according to "innocent until proven guilty", I should go home with no problem after this.
bad consequence of law that cannot be enforced:
I learn that as long as I can get away with it, I can break the law as much as I want.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:33AM (11 children)
News flash: You're guilty.
If even one partial sentence can be decrypted out of that message, you'd go to jail for encrypting a message. Remember there are large numbers of possible decryption of a message, depending on what algorithm you used. I'm sure they will choose a good algorithm to decrypt the random bits.
There will come a time when it is safer to say something intelligible, with meaning obscured by actual words and phrases.
Maybe we need an encryption method that reads as clear text, not totally disjoint collections of words, or song lyrics, and religious rantings. With the real message buried somewhere in the drivel.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dr Spin on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:45AM (4 children)
Are you implying that there is a sane message underpinning one or two of Trump's tweets?
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @09:49AM (3 children)
The Trump Rosetta Stone is carved onto Bannon's inner thigh.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:25AM (1 child)
No, it's Rosie O'Donnell's thighs you should check.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @04:58PM
Unfortunately those have been worn smooth.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 10 2018, @07:35PM
The Trump Rosetta Stone is carved onto Bannon's inner thigh.
That must have been where he stored the word to the national anthem, too!
What an unfortunate parting of ways.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:23AM (2 children)
If using a one-time pad, *every* sentence and its opposite can be "decrypted" from the random data (more exactly, everything of the same length is a possible decryption).
"So you say he sent an encrypted message. How do you know?"
"We've decrypted a sentence, it says 'kill them'"
"How did you decrypt it?"
"We just flipped some bits so that the message appeared."
"You flipped bits?"
"Yes, about half of them."
"Any pattern in the bits?"
"No. But you wouldn't expect that from a one-time pad encrypted message."
"Ah, but then, couldn't you always change some bits to get that message?"
"Errr … yes, sure."
"And if starting with random data, how many bits would you have to switch?"
"About half of them."
"In any specific pattern?"
"No."
"The defence has no more questions."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:45AM (1 child)
This relies on an intelligent and informed jury. Most would only hear that as technobabble.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:30PM
If your lawyer is smart enough, and you have enough money to pay him, he will hire an erudite expert witness to make it sound appropriately absurd.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday January 10 2018, @05:57PM (1 child)
Steganography is difficult even in jpegs, embedding it in text would require you to transmit entire volumes, at least if you wanted it to be hard to detect once suspected. Just imagine, e.g., trying to compose a message where the real message was carried by every "skip to the next prime number smaller than 1024 recycling"-th letter. Traditional methods like the initial letters of lines or only read the capitalized letters are hard enough to write, but relatively easy to decode (because they're expected).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @08:42PM
You're thinking too hard. If you have to communicate clandestinely, you use codes, and not stenography. The presence of a single word at the correct time or in the correct place, and the message is passed without reasonable possibility of suspicion. If you have to encrypt a detailed message that would break your codes, you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 10 2018, @10:02PM
How many printable ASCII characters in a row making up a fragment of an English word would count?
Some English words only have one letter.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:19AM (6 children)
Destroyed by "reasonable doubt".
In that two people who aren't, say, mathematicians working on random number analysis, would be sending a bunch of random numbers back and forth (excluding the fact that if it starts with --- RSA PUBLIC KEY -- then likely it's not for that purpose).
They'd convict you for being a smartarse, if nothing else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:27AM
If encryption were illegal, only morons would send messages that start with "--- RSA PUBLIC KEY ---".
Indeed, I'd expect steganography to rule in that situation. Is this just noise in that photo, or an encrypted message?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday January 10 2018, @02:08PM (3 children)
You've apparently never seen my facebook posts. I will from time to time post some base64 encoded random numbers just to mess with whoever may be watching.
Yes I am serious when I say that.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @02:45PM (1 child)
i thought people that were concerned about privacy didn't use facebook?
but then security isn't privacy so ok poison that well. The FBI still says your phone needs to be decrypted because you're posting weird things.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday January 10 2018, @05:36PM
Well given that even if you don't have a real facebook account you still have an unofficial facebook account I decided long ago that the best option would be to poison that well by getting an account. At this point I am pretty sure facebook think I look just like a macro photo of a mariposa lily [wikipedia.org] as years ago I noticed that their facial recognition software frequently finds a face there and started tagging a bunch of pictures of them as being me.
Add in that I actively poison the well for a lot of other things so by having one it makes my actual privacy better. Unless some how posting fairly good nature photos with no people in them that lack location tags or EXIF info is decreasing my privacy somehow. According to them I only watch slasher film, read only elephant and piggie [wikipedia.org] books, am a big fan of Scandinavian style Taiwanese death metal, and drive a 400 ton haul truck up in Alberta. For a while their system thought I was looking for a gay Jewish Jamaican man as all I saw for ads for about 6 months was that.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @04:16PM
"post some base64 encoded random numbers"
Your my hero!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday January 10 2018, @04:40PM
So what you're saying is that we should all set up scripts to automatically at semirandom intervals send random noise to each other and responses to noise we're getting from others?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 10 2018, @02:22PM
Suppose you and your friend are actually exchanging random bits rather than encrypted messages.
Should that be illegal?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 10 2018, @05:21PM
You'll be kept on jail without a warrant for months or years.