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UK Wants to Ban Unbreakable Encryption, Log which Websites You Visit

posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the snoopers-charter-v3 dept.
An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following:

The UK government will tomorrow publish draft legislation to regulate the use of encryption and require ISPs to log which websites their customers visit for a year. The government has previously expressed irritation at the idea of some communications being out of government reach. There is an (inevitably toothless) petition.

The silver lining is perhaps that the government still cannot comprehend that not all secure communications involve a communications provider. The government appears to be using the door in the face technique, making the bill as over the top as possible so they can appear to compromise later.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:33PM

    by Rich (945) on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:33PM (#258366) Journal

    There's an interesting history bit from the development of DES: It was known to _some_ that a new technique, differential cryptanalysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis [wikipedia.org]) could be used to attack such ciphers. IBM conferred with the NSA and the DES released to the public was made secure in that respect.

    The conclusion is that someone must have decided that it's overall advantageous if the public can encrypt securely. Otherwise they would have released an attackable variant and used a secure variation for military and official use (maybe with the excuse of having a few more bits of key, without revealing the true reason behind it, of course).

    It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind the decision and whether that still would be valid. The current issue goes even further, because if it is fully known in the first place that a state has unlimited access, no one would be doing (serious) business under the rules of that state anymore, if they could be secure elsewhere.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:00PM (#258542)
    They made DES weaker in some ways (smaller key) but stronger in other ways - resistant to differential cryptanalysis.

    So back then they probably wanted it weak enough for them to break but not weak enough for others to break.