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A coalition of dozens of the largest tech companies in the world is adamantly opposing any form of an official "backdoor" into encrypted devices.
The Information Technology Industry Council is a group of more than 60 major tech companies and organizations, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Facebook.
"We deeply appreciate law enforcement's and the national security community's work to protect us," the council said in a statement issued Thursday, "but weakening encryption or creating backdoors to encrypted devices and data for use by the good guys would actually create vulnerabilities to be exploited by the bad guys, which would almost certainly cause serious physical and financial harm across our society and our economy."
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Friday November 27 2015, @08:10AM
You might be right, but it's not going to work. USG would be essentially telling the companies to make math stop working, or make certain equations stop being known. Too late. The theory, the math, the software already exists. It's never going away and it will always be available. Forever.
It won't stop any terrorists. All they will be able to accomplish is to keep US citizens from being able to legally protect their own communications from the government. Oh...that might be the point.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 27 2015, @10:58AM
I think that you are a little bit to optimistic.
First, witness the "dumbing down of America". We simply do not have the number of people in STEM fields of research that we should have. Everyone is getting "educated" but the education is in soft sciences, like psychology and psychiatry, economics, etc ad nauseum. That is, if they aren't opting for "liberal arts" = whatever the fuck that is. Basket weaving?
Second, witness the hiring of STEM educated people by the government and it's agencies. If you're a math whiz, NSA has a place for you.
It is pretty easy to extrapolate that the government, with it's vast resources, will (if it hasn't already) dwarf the capabilities of the civilian sector to create and to crack encryption.
I find fault with those who believe that there can ever be an "unbreakable" encryption scheme. State of the art may be state of the art today, but given virtually unlimited computing power, what will the state of the art be in ten years?
I've read a number of anecdotes about warehouses filled with hard drives, awaiting the day that the FBI might be able to restore and/or decrypt them. Those anecdotes may or may not be true - maybe 90% of them are pure bullshit. Maybe 90% of the remainder are partly true, and the rest bullshit. But, we all know that "law enforcement" is very very patient, and they hate to give up on a case. I'm certain that the FBI and other agencies are holding onto hard drives that they can't read, hoping that new technology will "solve" their cold cases.
That drive I encrypted in 1999? Can you decrypt it today? In some cases, yes you can. It all depends on which encryption scheme I used, now doesn't it? And, it depends on the resources you have to throw at it. That computer I was using in 1999 was a Super Socket 7, running at 350 mhz, running a 32 bit operating system, and using 1999 encryption.
The computer I'm running today has 12 cores (dual hex-core Opterons), running at 2 Ghz. My video card alone has far more computing power than that old Socket Seven had. I dare say that anything encrypted on that old AMD chip in 1999 could probably be decrypted today within weeks, if I were to make the attempt. It likely wouldn't take weeks, but I'm being generous.
With all of that in mind, where will the NSA be in another twenty years? Where will Joe Average Consumer be in twenty years? The future looks bleak, to me.
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