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from the nothing-to-hide-vs-none-of-your-business dept.
The New York Times published an interesting story about the fears of the current FBI director:
The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said Thursday that federal laws should be changed to require telecommunications companies to give law enforcement agencies access to the encrypted communications of individuals suspected of crimes.
... Mr. Comey warned that crimes could go unsolved if law enforcement officers cannot gain access to information that technology companies like Apple and Google are protecting using increasingly sophisticated encryption technology.
“Unfortunately, the law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant public safety problem,” he said.
Mr. Comey said that he was hoping to spur Congress to update the 20-year-old Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which does not require companies to give law enforcement direct access to individuals’ communications.
The F.B.I. has long had concerns about devices “going dark” — when technology becomes so sophisticated that the authorities cannot gain access to them. But now, Mr. Comey is warning that the new encryption technology has evolved to the point that it could adversely affect crime solving.
The kicker is this line:
“Those charged with protecting our people aren’t always able to access the evidence we need to prosecute crime and prevent terrorism, even with lawful authority."
Of course, it should be no surprise to the FBI why so many people are going "dark" and using things like Tails. For decades, the government has proven time and again that it can't be trusted to act lawfully and constitutionally. The FBI is responsible for more than its share of that. So naturally those who can are going to take steps to protect their privacy and Apple and Google, among others, are simply responding to that demand.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrGuy on Friday October 17 2014, @12:46PM
is that law enforcement doesn't like the fact that effective encryption exists.
And I can see why. Without encryption, everything's open to them with the appropriate warrant and technique. If there's a piece of paper, they can bust down the appropriate door and find it. If there's a conversation, they can put a bug in the right room or intercept a call. If there's a file on a computer, they can read it. Regardless of how much you approve on the way they apply those powers within the law, before effective encryption, if it was recorded it could be found and used.
Encryption changes the game fundementally. Things can be recorded that cannot be recovered no matter WHAT warrant you have or how effective your technical team is. Of course this makes law enforcement's job harder - there are things that they could use in theory use in court that are unattainable. Sometimes that unattainable thing is the piece that could have cracked the case. It's no wonder why law enforcement is deeply uncomfortable about uncrackable encryption.
The thing law enforcement needs to get is that this genie doesn't go back in the bottle. The ability to communicate privately and securely over an untrusted network is pretty much fundemental to having trust in the digital economy, which is mindbogglingly useful. Encryption has to exist or a large part of the global economy comes down with it. Publicly backdoored encryption (e.g. government key escrow) is fundamentally flawed - if they key is known to exist, someone will eventually get the key. Privately backdoored encryption (secret government backdoors or deliberate weakness) is a secret that you can't keep forever, and is a major breech of trust and almost certainly a blow to your economy (just you wait - you ain't seen nothin' yet as the fallout from the Snowden revelations hit US hardware and software manufacturers, and causes companies to actively bypass sending data through or storing it in the US...)
This is trying to hold back the tide. Good luck.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Friday October 17 2014, @01:33PM
There's another thing as well.
Encryption also helps to *prevent crime.* It's not *just* useful to criminals - it's useful to everyone, to LEOs perhaps more than most, and to criminals only in the sense that they, too, are a subset of everyone.
Holding back the General Welfare in order to accrue a special advantage to one sector of society is arguably in violation of the Constitution itself, and certainly NOT good governance.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Friday October 17 2014, @02:42PM
Right. But if you don't understand how this works, you might THINK it's a "cake and eat it too" situation. Holder's public statements seem consistent with that.
What they want is magic cryptography that's easily breakable by law enforcement, but NOT breakable by anyone else. Apparently, they do not realize the theoretical impossibility of this desire.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @05:27PM
They are not in the business of preventing crime. They are in the business of letting crime happen, then catching the criminal quickly. If they started preventing crime, then suddenly crime would decrease, their budgets would be cut, and some of them would be laid-off. The last thing that law enforcement wants is a reduction in crime.
Sure, it would make a better world for nearly everyone, just not for them.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Friday October 17 2014, @06:46PM
preventing crime would also mean their job is to arrest people for crimes they did not commit. i don't want to live in a world where innocent people are regularly arrested and locked away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @08:27PM
In that world innocence simply isnt binary, merely setting the threshold below much further below 1.00 than currently.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Friday October 17 2014, @11:18PM
prisons are already full of people who say that didn't do it. arresting people before they commit crimes would make every one of them honest. if we were to make attempting or planning to commit a crime illegal, we're entering the dangerous realm of policing thoughts; either the state would have to prove motivations and intentions beyond a reasonable doubt or it'd just be plain ol' totalitarianism. it'd be almost guaranteed to be the latter, but neither of them are acceptable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17 2014, @02:54PM
Here's what I see as the fundamental change. In the old days, if you suspected someone of a crime, you got a warrant and searched for evidence. If he'd burned all his letters, you were out of luck. If your warrant was to search for evidence of drug dealing, and you found child pornography, the child pornography was supposed to be discounted. If you suspected someone was planning a crime, you got a warrant, tapped their phone, and listened to hear if they talked about it. If your man dozed off during the critical conversation, the evidence was gone.
In the modern era, communication is in written form, stored electronically, and often recoverable, even if the user thinks they've been destroyed. The power to defeat encryption therefore gives law enforcement not only the power to investigate events following the grant of warrant, but to retroactively search a nearly indefinite history. This is the same power the NSA wants by archiving all that data. From a citizen's perspective, the police power to dig back through one's whole life is horribly threatening. It makes the date on a warrant completely pointless and allows police to use any warrant as an open fishing expedition into one's whole life.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Friday October 17 2014, @03:52PM
Most of your post is scarily correct, especially the analysis of the current state of affairs. I need to correct you on a couple of points, though:
If your warrant was to search for evidence of drug dealing, and you found child pornography, the child pornography was supposed to be discounted.
This is not, and has never been correct. Evidence of crimes not covered in the warrant is admissible if it is obvious during the lawful execution of the warrant.
Here's your car analogy: if the cops get a warrant to search your car for drugs and they find both a key of cocaine and a dead body in the trunk then you're going down for murder in addition to the drug charge - the body was within the scope of the warrant search.
In contrast, if the police have a warrant to search your garage for a stolen car, and they find a key of cocaine under your bed in the master bedroom then the drug charge won't stick - the warrant didn't cover a search of the bedroom.
Then there's this:
If you suspected someone was planning a crime, you got a warrant, tapped their phone, and listened to hear if they talked about it. If your man dozed off during the critical conversation, the evidence was gone.
For nearly as long as there have been wiretaps there have also been tape recorders. If they have a warrant to listen to your phone for drug evidence and they hear you confess to a murder, the recorded murder evidence is now also admissible.
This makes the rest of your analysis scarier. With the expanded scope of wiretapping and electronic searches, a warrant for drug evidence "on your computer + cloud accounts" means there is no electronic part of your life off limits to the search. Your child pornography is only off limits if the Judge explicitly wrote the warrant to limit the scope to a single topic, and not all judges will do that.
I had mod points, but a reply with "+1 it's worse than you think" seemed like a better idea.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin