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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: 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!