Attorney General William Barr Declares War On The General Public

from the dangerous-man-in-a-dangerous-position dept

President Donald Trump set the tone for his administration as soon as he took office. Less than a week after his inauguration, he issued this statement:

One of the fundamental rights of every American is to live in a safe community. A Trump Administration will empower our law enforcement officers to do their jobs and keep our streets free of crime and violence. The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration. President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.

So far, the administration has failed to end the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere" or turn "living in a safe community" into a fundamental right. Trump may back the blue, but the blue keep making things worse for themselves by refusing to alter their tactics, their "us v. them" attitude, or their routine abuse of the rights of those they're supposed to be serving.

The former Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, wanted to roll back the clock for law enforcement, replacing the minor alterations of years of DOJ/law enforcement agency consent decrees with old school drug warring that shoots first and never asks questions.

Sessions is out and the new boss is in. Attorney General William Barr has already made it clear he believes tech companies should create encryption backdoors for law enforcement. Now, he's declaring war on the general public. His speech to a national police union gathering makes it clear the only people who matter are those wearing badges.

According to Barr, police officers are soldiers in a war zone.

[W]hen police officers leave their precincts every morning, there are no crowds on the highway cheering you. And when you come home at the end of the day after a job well done, there are no ticker tape parades.

One reason for this is that law enforcement is fighting a different type of war. We are fighting an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society. While there are battles won and lost each day, there is never a final resolution – a final victory is never in sight.

It takes a very special kind of courage to wage this kind of fight – a special kind of commitment; a special kind of self-sacrifice.

This mindset already permeates much of law enforcement. Availing themselves of the military's surplus gear and vehicles, along with repurposed military tech, police officers have treated the neighborhoods they patrol as war zones. Anyone who isn't a cop is an enemy.

These supposed war zones have been getting safer and safer. There are a few outliers, but crime rates have been falling steadily across the nation for nearly 25 years. But you wouldn't know that from talking to cops, especially those that already look like soldiers and treat normal warrant service like a military operation.

William Barr wants a police state. He wants it because he's decided to trust the relentlessly negative propaganda spun by law enforcement, rather than the annual crime reports assembled by his own department. Barr says society is crumbling and it's up to armed men to restore order.

If people lose the values and moral discipline to control themselves, then government would increasingly have to use external force to keep order, and the community would gradually lose its freedom. This is what James Madison was talking about when he said, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves.”

We live in an age now when the institutions we have relied on to inculcate values and self-restraint have been under constant assault for over 50 years. As a result, we see about us increased social pathology: boys growing up without fathers; alienated and angry young men; gangs engaged in the most brutal violence; mass shootings; increasing mental illness and suicide among young people; a drug epidemic inflicting casualties beyond what we would sustain in a major war; growing domestic violence; an increase in sexual assaults and child exploitation.

Gang violence is down because crime rates as a whole have declined for two decades straight. Mass shootings are still a relative anomaly. If there is actually a drug epidemic, it seems ridiculous to assume doubling down on things that haven't worked for four straight decades will fix it. The police are ill-equipped -- perhaps deliberately -- to handle interactions with the mentally ill and suicidal. If domestic violence is growing, certainly law enforcement's participation in the problem isn't helping. Law enforcement agencies' inability/unwillingness to take sexual assault cases seriously has certainly contributed to this problem, but even these numbers have fallen, rather than increased.

Everything said here is either a lie or intellectually dishonest. And all of it is being used by Barr to push a narrative where cops are facing overwhelming odds with almost zero support.

Part of the problem is the mouthy citizens who demand officers be held to a higher standard.

Despite the fact that the majority of the American people do support the police, unfortunately, over the past few years, there has been an increasingly vocal minority that regularly attacks the police and advances a narrative that it is the police that are the bad guys rather than the criminals. Whenever there is a confrontation involving the use of force by police, they automatically start screaming for the officers’ scalps, regardless of the facts.

Barr says there's no problem here, other than the increase in police criticism. He even uses a popular idiom to describe what he views as a minimal issue, truncating it the way cops and their supporters always do to make it self-serving, rather than cautionary.

I am not suggesting there are never abuses. As with all human institutions there are sometimes bad apples; and we will deal with that. But these are very much the exceptions, not the rule. If anything, I continue to be amazed at the professionalism of our police officers in the most extreme circumstances.

Bad apples spoil everything in the barrel. They convert exceptions into rules. And, no, the DOJ will not "deal with that." Neither will most law enforcement agencies. Under Sessions, the DOJ stopped investigating civil rights abuses by police departments. With the feds out of the picture, local agencies are even less inclined to police their own.

There will be nothing but compliance, if Bill Barr gets his way. There will be no concerns for long-existing rights or the well-being of anyone police interact with. Why? Because cops are apparently owed respect under this DOJ. They no longer need to earn it.

The anti-police narrative is fanning disrespect for the law. In recent years, we have witnessed increasing toleration of the notion that it is somehow okay to resist the police.  

[...]

We need to get back to basics. We need public voices, in the media and elsewhere, to underscore the need to “Comply first, and, if warranted, complain later.” This will make everyone safe – the police, suspects, and the community at large. And those who resist must be prosecuted for that crime. We must have zero tolerance for resisting police. This will save lives.

This is nauseating. This is bootlicker telling a nation it needs to get busy licking boots. This is Barr telling people their rights are a distant second to efficient policing and speedy arrests.

As for your rights, only one of them may improve. According to Barr, your right to a speedy trial will attach immediately if you kill a cop.

We will be proposing legislation providing that in cases of mass murder, or in cases of murder of a law enforcement officer, there will be a timetable for judicial proceedings that will allow imposition of any death sentence without undue delay. Punishment must be swift and certain.

You get one right and you're presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Finally, Barr wants the American public to view law enforcement officers as gods among men.

One of my messages today is that the American people need to pay close attention to issues of public safety in their communities. As a society we should not take our police officers for granted.

I would like to see the American people gain a renewed appreciation of the noble work done by our police officers in protecting our communities. I would like to see increased recognition that being a police officer is the toughest job in the country, and it is getting tougher. I would like to see a greater commitment to supporting the police.

Barr can't make this happen. But if he can budge the needle a bit, more Americans will view cops as cops view themselves: powerful arbiters of justice that should never be questioned by those who pay their salaries.

This should not be taken lightly. These remarks to members of a powerful police union may seem a bit like playing it up for the home crowd, but Barr's record since he took office shows he has little interest in ensuring the Department of Justice actually lives up to its name. He taking an already-skewed perspective held by many in law enforcement and making it worse. And by his very presence, he's announcing to the nation the DOJ will side with cops in almost every situation, no matter how much abuse they engage in. He has elevated them above the people they serve and that is going to continue to harm the relationship they have with their communities, exacerbating the problems he claims he's going to eliminate.

Filed Under: civil liberties, doj, police, rule of law, william barr

Texas AG Joins Lawsuit Against T-Mobile, Showing Bipartisan Opposition To Mindless M&As

from the bipartisanship-ahoy dept

Despite obvious red flags regarding reduced competition and massive layoffs, both the FCC and DOJ have rushed to support T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint. We've noted that the math (and history) are very clear on this front: the reduction of major telecom competitors uniformly results in much higher consumer prices as the incentive to compete in direct price competition is hugely reduced. It's a major reason why you haven't seen AT&T and Verizon (both lobbying juggernauts) criticizing the merger. History's also clear: such mergers inevitably result in huge layoffs as redundancies are eliminated.

And while the FCC and DOJ (both now run by former telecom executives, it bears repeating) are tripping over themselves to sign off on the merger, a growing coalition of states has other plans. 10 states have sued to block the deal, quite correctly noting that mindless M&As are one of the biggest reasons we all hate broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast so much. Such deals help just two class of folks: investors and executives. Everybody else pays a steep price.

While the DOJ had approached numerous states in the hopes it could convince them to drop the lawsuit, that's not going all that well. Republican Texas AG Ken Paxton has now done the complete opposite, and in a statement announced that Texas will be joining the suit instead:

"While we appreciate the time and effort that went into the agreement between the parties and the U.S. Dept. of Justice, the Texas Attorney General has an independent obligation to protect Texas consumers. After careful evaluation of the proposed merger and the settlement, we do not anticipate that the proposed new entrant will replace the competitive role of Sprint anytime soon,” Attorney General Paxton said. “It is the Attorney General’s responsibility to preserve free market competition, which has proven to result in lower prices and better quality for consumers. The bargain struck by the U.S. Dept. of Justice is not in the best interest of working Texans, who need affordable mobile wireless telecommunication services that are fit to match the speed and technological innovation demands of Texas’ growing economy.”

It's a rare moment of bipartisanship that might otherwise be missed in the current climate. Now, even with the FCC and DOJ approval, the deal will have to survive this lawsuit as well. Originally slated to begin in October, the court battle has now been bumped to December, meaning any approval (if it happens at all) likely won't occur until the new year. This certainly isn't the big win T-Mobile was envisioning after spending millions of dollars sucking up to the Trump administration (be it ramping up patronage of Trump hotels or hiring Trump ally Corey Lewandowski as an advisor).

The DOJ's "fix" for the competitive problems of the deal is to force Sprint to sell some spectrum and prepaid brand Boost Mobile to Dish Network, then hope that Dish is competent enough to build a replacement fourth mobile carrier out of twigs and scraps. But Dish has a long history of empty promises, Boost Mobile has just 8 million subscribers (compared to 150 million for AT&T and Verizon each), and nobody really thinks the Ajit Pai FCC will hold T-Mobile and Dish to deal agreements, or stop AT&T and Verizon from trying to undermine this new fourth competitor.

The DOJ's "solution" to the merger is made up of duct tape and dreams, and the Texas AG can see right through it. The simpler route remains blocking the deal outright, forcing Sprint (whose tenuous financial position has been exaggerated for effect) to pursue a new mobile partner that doesn't result in the elimination of a direct wireless competitor.

Filed Under: broadband, doj, texas
Companies: sprint, t-mobile

AT&T Employees Took Bribes To Plant Malware On Company's Network

from the ill-communication dept

The DOJ this week announced that AT&T employees have been paid more than $1 million in bribes to unlock millions of smartphones, and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on the company's network. According to the full DOJ complaint (pdf), Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan and a (presumed dead) co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, paid off AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington. In return, from April 2012 until September 2017, the two men unlocked iPhones so they could be used on another carrier's network.

Worse, the bribed employees happily installed malware and keyloggers providing broad access to the AT&T network. That includes keyloggers intended to gather data on AT&T's internal systems and processes:

The DOJ said Fahd and his co-conspirator then created a second malware strain that leveraged the information acquired through the first. This second malware used AT&T employee credentials to perform automated actions on AT&T's internal application to unlock phone's at Fahd's behest, without needing to interact with AT&T employees every time. In November 2014, as Fahd began having problems controlling this malware, the DOJ said he also bribed AT&T employees to install rogue wireless access points inside AT&T's Bothell call center. These devices helped Fahd with gaining access to AT&T internal apps and network, and continue the rogue phone unlocking scheme.

Carriers have had a bit of a problem with rogue employees being bribed. Similar tactics have been used by hackers engaged in "SIM hijacking," which involves posing as a wireless customer, then fooling a wireless carrier to port the victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Both AT&T and T-Mobile have subsequently been sued after instances where SIM hijacking then lead to identity and cryptocurrency theft, though both companies have been busy trying to dodge culpability for failing to keep consumer data secure.

The DOJ notes that one AT&T employee received more than $428,500 in bribes over a five year period. And the operators of the scam appear to have been focused on running an illegal phone unlocking ring via a number of bogus companies including Endless Trading FZE, Endless Connections Inc., and iDevelopment. Fahd was arrested in Hong Kong in February 2018, and extradited to the US last week. AT&T, meanwhile, states that it lost upwards of $5 million in revenue annually as the result of the unlocking scheme. The DOJ does not detail the width and scope of the private data accessed via the malware planted by the duo.

Granted while the DOJ and government regulators were quick to run to AT&T's assistance in this instance, they've been far more hesitant to police AT&T's own, direct role in failing to secure customers' private data. No action has been taken (nor criticism levied) against AT&T for failing to police both SIM hijacking scams being run on its own customers, nor has any agency taken action against revelations that AT&T and other mobile carriers spent years selling private customer location data to a universe of shady middlemen.

Filed Under: bribes, doj, ghulam jiwani, muhammad fahd, security
Companies: at&t

Judge Not Impressed With DOJ's Attempt To Claim Presidential Tweets And Orders Don't Mean Anything

from the nice-try dept

The DOJ wants its secrecy. The President keeps taking it away. Over the past couple of years, FOIA litigants have received unexpected support from President Trump, often in the form of tweets. While the DOJ is arguing nothing the records seekers are seeking should be handed over, Trump is tweeting out demands that everything should be released -- largely due to his unwavering belief that selective transparency will somehow expose a massive Deep State operation against him and his associates.

The stuff Trump wants exposed relates to FISA court orders and other documents related to investigations of Trump's campaign team and their ties to Russia. Trump is convinced there's nothing there and wants the public to see this for themselves. It's inadvertently commendable, even though there's a strong possibility the documents won't actually prove what Trump thinks they'll prove.

Nonetheless, the friction between the DOJ's FISA-related opacity and Trump's Twitter account continues, as Josh Gerstein reports for Politico.

The Justice Department had urged U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta to shut down the Freedom of Information Act suit, arguing that all the unreleased parts of the warrant for former Trump adviser Carter Page remain classified.

However, Mehta said a series of factors combined to create a factual dispute denying the government victory in the case, at least for now. These included a Sept. 17 White House press release that said much of that information was declassified, Trump’s tweets four days later seeming to back away from the decision, and the Justice Department’s failure to adequately account for the statements.

The DOJ argued the tweet stating the DOJ had "agreed" to "release" the unredacted documents, as well as the White House press release ordering immediate declassification of parts of these documents, did not say the things they did. The DOJ's legal team claimed -- in a bunch of unsworn statements -- the President surely meant the opposite of the things he said.

Unsurprisingly, the court does not agree.

“Defendant offers no reason to believe that the Press Release inaccurately conveys the President’s ‘directive.‘ Thus, contrary to what Defendant says, it would appear that the President did make ‘his intentions clear ... to declassify information.’”

Not only that, but the DOJ ignored the press release entirely -- the one containing an order these documents be publicly-released. That didn't escape the notice of the court, which noted the DOJ did not submit anything at all referencing this order.

The DOJ also argued it could still withhold the information under other exemptions. Wrong again, the court declares. The DOJ cannot effectively nullify a presidential order simply by switching black-bar horses midstream.

The court is giving the DOJ a second chance to explain itself and its refusal to accept presidential orders and tweets at face value. But it will have to do so with sworn statements, rather than dropping a bunch of questionable assertions into the judge's inbox. In the meantime, it will have to hope the President stops handing FOIA plaintiffs tweeted gifts.

Filed Under: doj, fisa, trump

AT&T Scores $1 Billion Contract To Rebuild DOJ Systems

from the blurred-lines dept

AT&T is increasingly becoming one of those companies that's so bone-grafted to the government, it's getting harder to determine where the telecom giant ends and the government begins. Reports have already explored how AT&T is effectively fused to the NSA; the company provides the government widespread access to every shred of data that traverses its network, and its employees can often be found acting as government intelligence analysts.

Granted after some early concerns about corruption, AT&T has also been tasked with building the nation's $47 billion emergency communications network, FirstNet. And this week the company also netted a new $1 billion, fifteen-year contract to rebuild the Department of Justice's computer systems:

"AT&T has won a $984 million, 15-year contract to help upgrade the US Department of Justice's technology systems. The deal will see AT&T move more than 120,000 DOJ employees in 2,100 offices to a new communications platform for mobile voice and data, cybersecurity and cloud services. While it doesn't cover 5G for now, the next-generation networking service could be added on later."

Aside from that whole DOJ lawsuit against the Time Warner merger (which was likely more about pleasing Rupert Murdoch than reining in corporate power), AT&T has been having a hell of a run under the Trump administration. It not only got to effectively hand pick the head of the FCC, it then was showered with incalculable billions in regulatory favors (like killing net neutrality and broadband privacy rules), before getting showered in billions more in favors thanks to the Trump tax cut.

The problem of fusing a historically anti-competitive monopoly to government should be fairly obvious. Especially given AT&T's repeated ethical challenges. This is a company that in just the last few years AT&T has been: fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired, fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families, fined $105 million for helping "crammers" (by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills), and fined $7.7 million for turning a blind eye while drug dealers ran a directory assistance scam on its customers.

That's before you even get to AT&T's routinely anti-competitive behavior, concern over which has been widely sidelined given the laser-like focus on "big tech." Recent tech policy conversations almost exclusively focus on Silicon Valley giants, yet oddly exclude the threat of telecom monopolies from the conversation, another Trump era favor to AT&T. Of course telecom lobbyists are more than happy to have the entirety of recent policy conversations fixated on "big tech" and not telecom, given the latter is trying desperately to disrupt the former's stranglehold over online advertising.

Which is all to say that maybe at some point in addition to trying to fix the problems with "big tech," we could shift at least a portion of the tech policy conversation back to unethical, anti-competitive telecom monopolies we're happily bone-grafting to the US government? Just a thought.

Filed Under: computer systems, doj
Companies: at&t

What Happens When The US Government Tries To Take On The Open Source Community?

from the maybe-we-are-about-to-find-out dept

Last year, Microsoft bought the popular code repository GitHub. As Techdirt wrote at the time, many people were concerned by this takeover of a key open source resource by a corporate giant that has frequently proved unfriendly to free software. In the event, nothing worrying has happened -- until this:

GitHub this week told Anatoliy Kashkin, a 21-year-old Russian citizen who lives in Crimea, that it had "restricted" his GitHub account "due to US trade controls".

As the ZDNet article explains, a user in Iran encountered the same problems. Naturally, many people saw this as precisely the kind of danger they were worried about when Microsoft bought GitHub. The division's CEO, Nat Friedman, used Twitter to explain what exactly was happening, and why:

To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.

Public repos remain available to developers everywhere -- open source repos are NOT affected.

He went on to note:

The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.

Users with restricted private repos can also choose to make them public. Our understanding of the law does not give us the option to give anyone advance notice of restrictions.

We're not doing this because we want to; we're doing it because we have to. GitHub will continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.

The most important aspect of this latest move by GitHub is that open source projects are unaffected, and that even those who are hit by the bans can get around them by moving from private to public repositories. Friedman rightly points out that as a company based in the US, GitHub doesn't have much scope for ignoring US laws.

However, this incident does raise some important questions. For example, what happens if the US government decides that it wants to prevent programmers in certain countries from accessing open source repositories on GitHub as well? That would go against a fundamental aspect of free software, which is that it can be used by anyone, for anything -- including for bad stuff.

This question has already come up before, when President Trump issued the executive order "Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain", a thinly-disguised attack on the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. As a result of the order, Google blocked Huawei's access to updates of Android. Some Chinese users were worried they were about to lose access to GitHub, which is just as crucial for software development in China as elsewhere. GitHub said that wasn't the case, but it's not hard to imagine the Trump administration putting pressure on GitHub's owner, Microsoft, to toe the line at some point in the future.

More generally, the worry has to be that the US government will attempt to dictate to all global free software projects who may and may not use their code. That's something that the well-known open source and open hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has written about at length, in a blog post entitled "Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War". It's well-worth reading and pondering, because the relatively minor recent problems with GitHub could turn out to be a prelude to a far more serious clash of cultures.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: crimea, doj, open source software, sanctions, trade wars, us sanctions
Companies: github, microsoft

William Barr Turns Up The Heat On The DOJ's Anti-Encryption Rhetoric

from the 4000-words,-zero-concessions dept

The DOJ has now spent more than a year dodging an obligation it created itself. For years, FBI directors and DOJ officials have told anyone who'd listen -- conference attendees, Congressional reps, law enforcement officials -- the world was going dark. Device encryption was making it far more difficult for the FBI to collect evidence from seized devices and the problem was escalating exponentially.

It wasn't. Every new "going dark" speech contained a larger number of impenetrable devices the FBI was sure contained all sorts of juicy evidence. When the FBI was asked about these devices by members of Congress, it finally decided to take a look at its numbers. The numbers were wrong. The FBI said there were around 8,000 locked devices in its possession. In reality, the number is probably less than 2,500.

The problem is we don't actually know what the correct number is. The DOJ has been promising an update since May 2018, but it has yet to release this number. Instead, it has released the mouth of its top man -- William Barr, a longtime fan of domestic surveillance.

Barr's keynote address to the International Conference on Cyber Security didn't deal much with cybersecurity. Instead, it was 4,000-word anti-encryption rant. William Barr wants encryption backdoors. There's no use in the DOJ denying after his verbal assault on device encryption and device manufacturers. There is no subtlety and no hedging. The only concession Barr makes is that encryption shouldn't vanish entirely. But any form of encryption that remains should leave a key under the doormat for the G-men.

While we should not hesitate to deploy encryption to protect ourselves from cybercriminals, this should not be done in a way that eviscerates society’s ability to defend itself against other types of criminal threats. In other words, making our virtual world more secure should not come at the expense of making us more vulnerable in the real world. But, unfortunately, this is what we are seeing today.

Service providers, device manufacturers and application developers are developing and deploying encryption that can only be decrypted by the end user or customer, and they are refusing to provide technology that allows for lawful access by law enforcement agencies in appropriate circumstances. As a result, law enforcement agencies are increasingly prevented from accessing communications in transit or data stored on cell phones or computers, even with a warrant based on probable cause to believe that criminal activity is underway. Because, in the digital age, the bulk of evidence is becoming digital, this form of “warrant proof” encryption poses a grave threat to public safety by extinguishing the ability of law enforcement to obtain evidence essential to detecting and investigating crimes. It allows criminals to operate with impunity, hiding their activities under an impenetrable cloak of secrecy.

According to Barr, the government has a right to the contents of encrypted devices. He attempts to draw this conclusion by referring repeatedly to the Fourth Amendment. This safeguards citizens against unreasonable searches. Unreasonable searches can be performed as long as the government has a warrant. That's as far as Barr takes this line of thought. As he sees it, encryption shouldn't be able to nullify a search warrant. He believes encryption does this.

The Fourth Amendment strikes a balance between the individual citizen's interest in conducting certain affairs in private and the general public's interest in subjecting possible criminal activity to investigation. It does so, on the one hand, by securing for each individual a private enclave around his “person, house, papers, and effects” — a "zone" bounded by the individual's own reasonable expectations of privacy. So long as the individual acts within this "zone of privacy,” his activities are shielded from unreasonable Government investigation. On the other hand, the Fourth Amendment establishes that, under certain circumstances, the public has a legitimate need to gain access to an individual’s zone of privacy in pursuit of public safety, and it defines the terms under which the Government may obtain that access. When the Government has probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime is within an individual’s zone of privacy, the Government is entitled to search for or seize the evidence, and the search usually must be preceded by a judicial determination that "probable cause" exists and be authorized by a warrant.

Nothing is preventing the government from seizing devices. The warrant can still accomplish that. What Barr is arguing is that the Fourth Amendment guarantees government access to evidence, which it doesn't. It only gives it the right to search for it. A search warrant may result in a searched house or vehicle, but there's no guarantee any useful evidence will be recovered. The evidence it's looking for may not be on the premises. Or it may reside in a safe law enforcement isn't able to crack. Or it simply may not exist at all.

The "locked safe" is the closest equivalent to an encrypted device. The government is free to continue trying to open the safe, but the warrant only allows it to seize evidence or items likely to contain evidence. It doesn't obligate the safe manufacturer to build master keys for all safes and distribute them to law enforcement. Encryption backdoors make that demand. And they make that demand of any device manufacturer or software developer that secures customers' communications and data with encryption.

So, how does Barr think this will be accomplished? It appears he thinks everyone else should spend time figuring that out and let the DOJ get back to the difficult work of not answering questions about the FBI's encrypted device stash.

He thinks the courts should fix it, pointing to the Supreme Court's 1925(!!) decision creating the automobile exception to search warrant requirements. He feels this concession to law enforcement (one that's abused frequently by cops searching for seizable cash) should be followed by more concessions. Courts may not be able to order across-the-board backdoors, but they can create useful precedents for compelled access -- either for device owners or device manufacturers.

He thinks society in general should fix this, even if it can't contribute directly. What society can do is stop arguing about the deliberate weakening of encryption and just accept the fact that governments (and whoever else can find the backdoor) should have access to their communications and data. It's a sacrifice we, the people, should be willing to make for our government, which pretty much has only its own interests in mind.

And Barr thinks the tech community should fix it. He lists a bunch of bad proposals, one of which was proposed by none other than the UK's version of the NSA. He talks up Ray Ozzie's take on key escrow and (former GCHQ security specialist) Matt Tait's "layered envelopes" pitch he made for a blog that's headed by noted surveillance state apologist, Ben Wittes. Those are the "experts:" the GCHQ, a former GCHQ employee, and a software pioneer.

Barr says the real risk posed by compromised encryption is worth it. He doesn't explain how it's worth to the millions of people he'll put at risk in exchange for law enforcement access, but he seems to assume we'll all feel much better about it when criminals start disappearing from the streets.

[T]he argument is that a business is thwarted in its purpose of offering the best protection against bad actors unless it can also override society’s interest in retaining lawful access. Some hold this view dogmatically, claiming that it is technologically impossible to provide lawful access without weakening security against unlawful access. But, in the world of cybersecurity, we do not deal in absolute guarantees but in relative risks. All systems fall short of optimality and have some residual risk of vulnerability — a point which the tech community acknowledges when they propose that law enforcement can satisfy its requirements by exploiting vulnerabilities in their products. The real question is whether the residual risk of vulnerability resulting from incorporating a lawful access mechanism is materially greater than those already in the unmodified product. The Department does not believe this can be demonstrated.

In the end, Barr hopes we'll be hit with a tragedy so awful, Congress will decide to end the debate by outlawing un-backdoored encryption.

Obviously, the Department would like to engage with the private sector in exploring solutions that will provide lawful access. While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.

This is much worse than the handful of spoken asides uttered by FBI directors and a handful of DOJ officials. This was the only focus of Barr's 4,000-word keynote address. He spent a few words at the opening to at least indicate to the crowd he knew where he was (a cybersecurity conference) before spending the rest of it arguing against effective encryption. This is Barr's DOJ and, by extension, his FBI. This is the issue the DOJ's going to run with as long as he's in charge.

Filed Under: backdoors, doj, encryption, security, william barr

Here We Go Again: Trump Administration Considers Outlawing Encryption

from the not-this-bullshit-again dept

Well, here we go again. According to Politico, on Wednesday, at Trump's National Security Council meeting, a proposal was floated that the administration should back legislation that would outlaw encryption. Of course, that's not how it'll be framed should they actually decide to go down this path. Instead, they'll be nonsense about "responsible encryption" and "lawful access." But, make no mistake, what's being proposed is outlawing encryption.

Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. Tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook have increasingly built end-to-end encryption into their products and software in recent years — billing it as a privacy and security feature but frustrating authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.

“The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people.

It's unclear what the final decision was, but if it was to back such a law, we'll know about it soon enough. There are some sensible folks on this issue -- including some from the intelligence communities who actually understand the security value of encryption. The State Department and Commerce Departments are both also said to support keeping encryption legal. It's mostly the law enforcement folks who are against encryption: including parts of the DOJ and FBI, ICE and the Secret Service. As if any of those need any more power. Homeland Security (of which ICE is a part) is apparently "internally divided."

It's been said before, but this is not a debate. There is no debate. There is no "on the one hand, on the other hand." There is no "privacy v. security." This is "no privacy and weakened security v. actual privacy and actual security." There's literally no debate to be had here. If you understand the issues, encryption is essential, and any effort to take away end-to-end encryption is outlawing technology that keeps everyone safe. While Senators Feinstein and Burr released a truly dangerous bill a few years back to outlaw encryption, who knows what sort of nonsense would come out of this and whether or not it could actually get enough support in Congress. Hopefully not.

But just the fact that security folks now need to waste a ton of time and energy on this shit all over again is immensely frustrating and wasteful. This debate was over decades ago. There is no reason to do it again.

Filed Under: backdoors, doj, donald trump, encryption, end to end encryption, fbi, going dark, national security council