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Obama sides with UK PM, calls for law enforcement-crackable encryption
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MacNN Staff
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President Obama has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that encryption is a problem for law enforcement. With UK Prime Minister David Cameron alongside, the President said that there must be both ways to keep citizens' information private, but that there has to be a way to allow law enforcement to surveil both in real-time, as well as decrypt after-the-fact forensically, when a court deems it necessary. "Because this is a whole new world, as David [Cameron] says, the laws that might've been designed for the traditional wiretap have to be updated. How we do that needs to be debated both here in the United States and in the UK," said the President.
"If we find evidence of a terrorist plot ... and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can't penetrate that, that's a problem," said the President. He is referring to software by Apple and Google that both companies claim can't be decrypted, even with a court order in place.
Apple and other tech companies have "opted out" of playing a role in law enforcement by changing some messaging systems, such as email and chat, to use private encryption that the companies cannot break. Omitted by most governmental officials discussing the matter is the fact that law enforcement, if suitably inspired to do so and with physical access to the devices, can generally break most encryption systems, given time and tools already in their possession. End-to-end encryption makes it more difficult, and more laborious, for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to obtain evidence - but does not by any means make it impossible.
End-to-end encryption, once solely the province of people who wished to hide something from either law enforcement or just their family, has gone into the mainstream in large part due to the discovery that Americans and many other citizens - including in the UK - were being routinely spied upon by their own governments without any suspicion of a crime, and without a court warrant. In the US, a secret court system was set up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack that mostly rubberstamps requests from various agencies on minimal or no evidence of any reason for the monitoring. Leaks from Edward Snowden and other sources have exposed both the practices and their frequent abuses.
Earlier in the week, Cameron said that he would seek a ban on end-to-end encrypted messaging, calling it a tool that terrorists use to effectively and securely communicate. "I have a very simple principle to apply here," explained Cameron in his speech, "which should be at the heart of the legislature that will be necessary. The simple principle is this, 'In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people, which even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the Home Secretary personally, that we cannot read?'" He has since claimed that the remarks were misconstrued, but the intention of the Prime Minister's words seems clear enough.
Without going into specifics of when a court order would be issued for surveillance, Obama also said that "when we have the ability to track that in a way that is legal, conforms with due process, the rule of law and presents oversight, then that's a capability that we have to preserve." He will likely meet stiff opposition from civil libertarian groups, who will argue that secret monitoring without rigid and transparent accountability and controls in place will inevitably lead to both abuse and the dismantling of fundamental Constitutional protections, including free speech and the presumption of innocence without evidence.
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Last edited by NewsPoster; Jan 18, 2015 at 02:56 AM.
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Grizzled Veteran
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I'd rather be subject to the odd terrorist attack than give the government and/or law enforcement access to everyone's communications. They don't need a spare key to my house, they don't need my garage door opener code, they don't need to peer into my home to see what's going on, and they certainly don't need to be reading and/or listening to my communications.
Law enforcement is hard, and it should be. We don't lower the hoop when basketball players can't dunk, we simply tell them they have to work harder and jump higher, and maybe, just maybe, they'll just never be able to dunk at all. In other words, we don't need to make it easier for law enforcement to break our encryption, law enforcement needs to work harder if they want to do that.
I don't think we should be working to stop terrorist attacks at the last minute -- I think we should be focusing on solving the harder, larger problems that create people who eventually become terrorists in the first place.
I'm about as far from the tinfoil-hat-wearing armchair political conspiracy theorist as you can get, but this one's a particularly bad one. What's to stop a nation of computer science students from creating the next "unbreakable" encryption scheme that doesn't include government backdoors? I'll tell you what -- making the creation of "unbreakable" encryption schemes that don't include government backdoors illegal. And that would be a very sucky thing.
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Senior User
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Sorry but at least in the US, the citizen's rights outweigh the ability for the government to spy on them. Let's flip the positions and demand that government systems have backdoors available to private citizens and see how far that idea goes. A private citizen's absolute right to privacy outweighs the government's demand to break it. There's no such thing as encryption that by default has a backdoor. This isn't encryption. It's governmental spying. As for Obama demanding it, I feel he's getting pressure from many areas in the federal government, especially all those three-letter departments who could care less about the rights of the citizens. If this goes through, the US has finally turned into China, North Korea and all those countries who could care less about their citizens. The Republicans are behind a lot of this and would pass anything Obama suggests as long as their crony businesses have an opt-out clause so they can continue to have full encryption while all of us have nothing. This isn't the Democrats against the Republicans, it's the government against its citizens.
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Grizzled Veteran
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Maybe Obama's using the ol' reverse psychology tactic -- he knows that Republicans will vote against anything he proposes simply because he proposed it, so perhaps he's actually on our side on this one...
...HA.
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I am all for transparency. But then, please, let's make all financial transactions public too. We need to know who's financing the terrorists and how much money someone transfers to the Kayman islands or how many washes his dirty money in a Delaware account. Let's also make any and all weapon sale completely public. Who sold guns and bullets to whom?
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Mac Elite
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Diablo and noway: I like your reasoning on this. On the off chance the President is sincere, however, I'd remind him (if I could) that if law enforcement can crack a given sort of encryption, so can "bad guys." If law enforcement has access to a tool they intend to use for good, it can also be abused (as we've seen with the NSA and other entities). America was founded on the principle of civil liberties and a right to privacy: we cannot let largely-irrational fears of possible terrorism cause us to over-react and strip ourselves of the very qualities that make the US distinct from most other countries.
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Charles Martin
MacNN Editor
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This encryption that everyone is talking about is mostly communications encryption, and as such they're talking almost exclusively of public key encryption. Let's assume these <strike>dumb asses</strike> politicians get their way and they outlaw secure public key encryption. They'll be able to sift, whenever they want, through all our private communications. Criminals will have an easier time figuring out how to break less secure encryption so they will also will have better and easier access to our private communications and data.
Criminals by definition are breaking the law. So terrorist, and any other criminal enterprise will use illegal secure encryptions, including private key exchange communications which the government will never be able to break.
So basically, criminals will have business as usual. Law abiding citizens will be subjected to more crime involving theft of data. And Law abiding citizens will have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
This sounds like a solid plan
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Last edited by drbenru; Jan 17, 2015 at 11:23 PM.
Reason: legibility)
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hayesk
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Why does Obama think terrorists can't use their own encryption with no back doors, considering the fact that it already exists?
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Forum Regular
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WELL SAID drbenru.
All of these 'laws' that strip away our rights simply give criminals (including the government) an advantage over us. I really don't care whether and R or D proposes it, they are all complicit in the weakening of America. For all of those who want 'their team' to win the next election, really you have completely been snowed. As soon as becoming a politician stopped be a temporary act of service and became a career, we all lost.
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Michael
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As usual, this a stupid and not well thought out move. If a law like this ever passes, then only the bad guys will have good encryption.
Politicians are idiots.
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Andy Pastuszak
amp68(spammenot)-at-verizon.net
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Charles Martin: "America was founded on the principle of civil liberties and a right to privacy: we cannot let largely-irrational fears of possible terrorism cause us to over-react and strip ourselves of the very qualities that make the US distinct from most other countries."
Well said...
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Junior Member
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Most of the posters have got it covered spot-on. These politicians are all about acquiring the money in your wallet by sowing fear. It's ALL about funding the response to the bogeyman to make their *crony* military/security/corporate clients richer. And while people are distracted by this "number one" issue... it a good time for their best friends on Wall Street to rob retirement portfolios, pension funds etc and make *their* wealthiest, big fee clients richer. Meanwhile we've got this ultimate distraction of the Dem/Reb good-cop/bad-cop show in DC.
Time to vote some real leaders in.
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Pennsylvania Patriot
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