Insanity Rules: Disgusting Politicians Push For More Surveillance And Less Encryption... Based On Nothing
from the make-it-stop dept
Yesterday we noted that the surveillance state supporters were quick to rush in and blame Ed Snowden and call for undermining encryption in response to the attacks in Paris last week -- and they did so based on no factual information whatsoever. There was, briefly, a NY Times article quoting anonymous "officials" claiming that the attackers had communicated via encrypted channels. That article eventually disappeared entirely (with no explanation from the NY Times). If that's true, it would not be surprising, because terrorist groups have long used encryption -- as have tons and tons and tons of law abiding folks. Blaming encryption seems particularly dumb.And, indeed, on Monday it was made clear that no one actually has any idea how the planning was done and there isn't yet known evidence of encryption:
A U.S. security official said there is no evidence yet demonstrating that the Paris attackers used a particular method for communicating, or whether any technology they used was encrypted in a particular way.Of course, that statement is as meaningless as the one from the anonymous official claiming they did use encryption, because it's just a random namely "official." And, of course, it wouldn't be surprising at all if they did use encryption, because that's how people communicate safely. And it's not because of Snowden. As we noted yesterday, terrorists have known to use encrypted communications for well over a decade.
Still, none of this has stopped the insane grandstanding on the issue. CIA Director John Brennan kicked it off by taking a potshot at Snowden along with privacy advocates and tech companies -- again, based on nothing:
"In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of handwringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging," he said. "I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities."Brennan also ridiculously claimed that the terrorists had "gone to school" based on the Snowden disclosures, which again, defies all logic and historical reporting of how widely encrypted communications were used prior to this.
And then all the usual fear mongerers started to pile on. Let's start with the surveillance state's number one defender, Senator Dianne Feinstein:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, said she’s asked Silicon Valley companies to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies access communications that have been encrypted -- or scrambled to evade surveillance -- if terrorists are using the tools to plan attacks.But that's idiotic. Does she feel the same way about the telephone? Or paper? Or cars? These are all tools that terrorists use as well, but she's not calling for them to be broken. Blaming the tools is a ridiculous move -- especially for a politician who should know better.
“I have asked for help. And I haven’t gotten any help,” Feinstein said Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “If you create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way, to behead children, to strike innocents, whether it’s at a game in a stadium, in a small restaurant in Paris, take down an airliner, that’s a big problem.”
But, of course, she wasn't the only one. Senator John McCain -- who once was a strong defender of encryption in the late 90's, has apparently gone to the other side as he's been taken by unrealistic fears:
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on MSNBC Monday that "it’s time we had another key that would be kept safe and only revealed by means of a court order."Except, of course, that doesn't work. And McCain has been told that won't work and will make everyone less safe... and yet he's still pushing for it.
Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee got in on the stupid game as well:
“The dark space of the Internet is becoming a breeding ground for terrorist communications, recruitment and plotting,” said McCaul, a Texas Republican. “Our inability to monitor encrypted messages on social media apps, and the terrorists’ awareness of that, compounds the danger America and the West face.”You know what would put us in even greater danger? Undermining encryption and giving up our keys.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton also repeated the nonsensical claim that tech companies, in better protecting users from hackers, were somehow helping the terrorists:
Technology has been "purposefully designed by our manufactures so that even they claim they cannot get into their own devices after they’ve built them," Bratton said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.All of this is based on a weird kind of idiocy. It's wrong on so many levels: (1) strong encryption helps protect citizens, not harm them; (2) terrorists already know how to use strong encryption and they have for years; (3) backdooring encryption won't stop people from using non-backdoored encryption; (4) there's still little to no evidence that snooping on everyone's communications actually stops any terrorist plots. But a big tragedy happened and thus, politicians feel like they need to "do something" and that "doing something" seems to be to attack the technology that actually makes us safer. It's insanity on a massive level.
"They need to work with us right now," Bratton said. "In many respects, they’re working against us."
And the press is playing right into it. The NY Times may have dropped that original story, but came back with one claiming that the attacks had "reopened the debate on encryption." No, they did not. The debate is over. Undermining encryption is dangerous and bad news for everyone. As we noted, the intelligence community's top lawyer, Robert Litt, flat out said just a few weeks ago that he and his friends were waiting for the next terrorist attack in order to push for backdoors in encryption. This is the playbook that was planned all along and most of the press is falling for it.
Thankfully, there are a few exceptions. Kim Zetter at Wired pointed out how the whole narrative is wrong and that backdooring encryption won't help at all. And Alex Howard at the Huffington Post put up a similar story. But for much of the mainstream press, they're playing right into the surveillance state's game plan, repeating the stupid talking points on encryption, based on zero actual facts, and then insisting that the debate is somehow open again.
There is no debate. Yes, the surveillance state supporters want to undermine our security and undermine encryption, but there's no actual debate here. Actual experts know that this is a bad move and a dangerous one that will put many more people at risk. Exploiting an attack in Paris (right after France expanded its own surveillance efforts) is hardly a good excuse for undermining the safety of basically everyone.
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Filed Under: bill bratton, dianne feinstein, encryption, going dark, john brennan, john mccain, michael mccaul
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"What do you mean we can't force criminals to hand over their encryption keys?!"
Even if every single company was forced to cripple the encryption on their products/services, criminals would just move on to using encryption that was still intact, of which there would be plenty, so the spy agencies would be back to square one(well, at least with regards to spying on actual criminals).
Smart criminals are always going to use the most secure method of communication that they can find, and they have no problem switching if one method is compromised, so the idea that forcing broken encryption is somehow going to do anything more than slightly annoy and/or inconvenience them is a joke. The only people who are going to be screwed by broken encryption is the public.
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The whispered menace...
Now, let's switch a few words, and see how well that logic holds up, shall we?
“The dark space of private property, or public property without pervasive surveillance systems is becoming a breeding ground for terrorist communications, recruitment and plotting,” said McCaul, a Texas Republican. “Our inability to monitor whispered and in-person messages in public and private areas, and the terrorists’ awareness of that, compounds the danger America and the West face.”
No, no that argument really doesn't hold up does it, unless he's going to argue that people should be forbidden from communicating in any way, shape or form that the police and/or government isn't allowed to listen in to.
People have a right to privacy, and just because some use that right for illegal actions does not make it acceptable to strip it away.
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The Men Who Stare at Goats
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Protection failure
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Beat them at their own game.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/refuse_to_be_te_2.html
Spouting inanities because it causes your personal funding to increase is not the way to beat them. Beat them by refusing to accept what they are selling.
Which brings up an interesting question. Which companies benefit by terrorists winning? Who is paying to have this dreck spouted? What do they win? Encryption companies don't win by weakening their products, who does? It is not just law enforcement pushing these ideas, they don't have the money to buy congress. Do they?
Or do they? That would be quite the circle, we get our funding from congress so that we can support those congresscritters that support us? We just hire a few defense contractors to do their usual nothing so that they can support the correct PACs.
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Madness!
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Encryption has been around for thousands of years
Today we can crack yesterday's ciphers easily. But ciphers have always been used. Without computers, yesterday's ciphers were useful.
With computers, the ciphers have become stronger along with the ability to attack them. Key sizes make brute force attacks impossible. So attacks focus on weaknesses in the algorithm, or key, or random number generators.
Didn't the founding fathers of the US use encryption?
Why is encryption suddenly bad?
use a frictionless PRNG to avoid wear on parts
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Here is what will happen by weakening encryption
Finally, the terrorists will stick to open source or even home built secure email, apps, etc and still avoid being caught. So we the people will be less safe on all fronts.
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The NSA has gone to a lot of trouble & $$$$ to tap cables,
That Bluffdale, UT, facility cost as much (order-of-magnitude) as an aircraft carrier.
But what if the NSA held a party and no one came?
Of course, you'd blame Snowden/encryption/sequester/..., too.
The whole point of grabbing access to a 'choke point' is to choke!
So you then need to make sure that everyone is *forced* to use that choke point.
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They'll talk about freedom all day long, but they're only interested in the freedoms they grant us, because those can be taken away.
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Seriously, fuck TOYOTA.
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as said in an above comment, my bet is that everybody here quits doing anything sensitive in any way on the 'net once our lovely govt has its way on this, and american companies that have anything to do with the 'net will become curious fossils for future generations to poke and study.
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whoever thinks that anyone who wants to do something that is against the law is going to do so in as open and obvious method as those millions who dont want to do anything bad, is a total fucking idiot! talk about putting targets on backs! it matters not whether they want to rob a bank or carry out a murderous plot, there is no way that the plans are going to be done and exchanged in any way other than encrypted! all that is going on here, as anyone with a bit of sense knows, is that 'the people' are going to pay for the ridiculousness of the few, trying to get something that is hidden from the view of all except those who should be seeing it!!
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Vote for me, and I'll protect you from terrorists,
And if I fail, I'll simply request more money.
To show you that I'm doing something, I'll save you from a few *manufactured* crimes, too-large ammunition clips, giant cokes, etc.
To survive as a politician, I don't actually have to do my job; I simply have to suck less at it than all the other losers who are running against me.
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idiots in general
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The point is even with open communication people pulling off these kinds of attacks know how to communicate in ways that are secret. Yeah off the shelf secure communication software makes it a bit simpler for them, but destroying encryption and the safety of billions of people, just to make a small difficulty for a small amount of people is not worth is.
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Re: Beat them at their own game.
Law enforcement unions have lobbyists hard at work constantly pushing the desires of the police state... so yes, kind of.
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These same politicians...
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Haystacks, haystacks, haystacks, haystacks.
What's the reaction? "Thanks for handing us a needle. We'll put a red dot in it and then throw it back into the haystack. Because we have specialized on haystacks in the past decades, that's the only way we'll be able to see this in context."
They don't know yet how the terrorists communicated because, well, the needle with the red dot did not actually knock and shout. And it would have been cheating to observe the suspects in question rather than wait and see whether the red dot reappears during haystack processing.
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Haystacks and astronomers
The NSA plans to require that terrorists *register* (like lobbyists) and then *tag* all of their communications for easy selection. The penalty for non-registration and non-tagging will be quite severe.
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Re: Beat them at their own game.
A better question is does law enforcement have the information to be able to force congress to bend to its will; as law enforcement are the only ones who can protect themselves from mass surveillance.
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Quite logical
Well, that's kind of a given if they are trying to serve their customers in the form of normal citizens and Bratton and his ilk are trying to abolish all rights of normal citizens and unwrite the Constitution.
If NSA and CIA would stop fighting everything the U.S.A. is supposed to stand for, it would make it easier for companies trying to serve their customers to not impede the NSA and CIA. At least as long as anybody still cares about their constitutional rights, of course.
But that can be changed with enough propaganda, and that's what we are seeing here.
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Re:
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Re: Quite logical
Shouldn't this be
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Boondoggle Nation
CIA Director John Brennan, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator John McCain, Rep. Michael McCaul and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton (etal) are not leaders. They are mentally-defective defenders of the status quo at all costs regardless of how many times their previous boondoggles fail to deliver.
All these cretins know is more. More money squandered on war. More money squandered on surveillance. More money squandered on their lavish tax payer funded lifestyles. More money squandered on kidnapping, indefinite detention and torture. More money squandered on prisons. More money squandered bailing out their criminal banking benefactors.
And for what?
The only thing these so-called "leaders" have delivered over the past four decades, in the US, is a lower standard of living for tens of millions of hard working American citizens who now find themselves living in a dystopian nightmare of a nation which criminalizes all aspects of human activity.
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Given the dangers
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Re: Haystacks, haystacks, haystacks, haystacks.
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Re: Re: Quite logical
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Re: Madness!
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I'm for backdoors.....
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New Math
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lETS SEE...
And the only reasoning I can see, is to PROTECT THEMSELVES..
This is as bad as AFTER President Kennedy..
More laws, More surveillance, MORE protections for people, who are AFRAID to ride in an OPEN CAR..
I wonder WHy a politician would be AFRAID of the people they represent...
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Re: The Men Who Stare at Goats
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Re: Protection failure
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Re: Re: Quite logical
Of course, this isn't true. The powers that be, and the companies which are a slave to them continue to project the illusion that a compromised algorithm (software) leads to compromised communications, while simultaneously trying to obscure the fact that compromised hardware (your physical device) always has, and continues to this day to refer your unencrypted keystrokes to federal agencies long before you hit the "encrypt" button.
Consequently, you should encrypt your communications, regardless of the software algorithm, on a DDD (simply put, a Dedicated Disconnected Device), and then subsequently port the encrypted END RESULT to a connected device for transmission.
Once again folks, that's PieDDD (Pre-Internet Encryption with a Dedicated Disconnected Device).
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Re: Re: Protection failure
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Re: Here is what will happen by weakening encryption
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it does not matter who you vote for, it keeps running as expected, to tyranny
if you think left or right you are missing 1 dimension
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Re: Re: Re: Quite logical
Compromised hardware can indeed do this, but you seem to be saying everyone's hardware is compromised and doing this. That's demonstrably untrue, unless the hardware is using some communications channel nobody knows about.
Lots of people, myself included, keep a very close eye on the traffic stream using standalone sniffers. The only remotely questionable traffic I've ever seen has come from operating systems and applications. I hear the same from many others who keep a paranoid eye on their traffic.
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Re:
You don't need to decrypt it, just show that encryption was used as a starting point to using Paris
as part of the discussion.
Otherwise references to Paris or "beheading children" are shown to be demagoguery.
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Re: Re: Quite logical
Government access won't Chinese companies be willing to provide encryption
that only the owner and the Chinese can read ?"
What prevents anyone from buying a Chinese encryptor and using that before using
the American encryption ?
So a "court order" gets you a look at encrypted text.
How is that different from citizens having unbreakable encrytion ?
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Re:
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Re: Re: Re: Protection failure
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Re: Re: Beat them at their own game.
nothing compared against the military industrial complex
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Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
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Re: Boondoggle Nation
But they and their own are generally doing quite well.
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(PS: It's okay to behead adults.)
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