
FBI director: Unbreakable encryption is a “huge, huge problem” - hvo
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/fbi-director-unbreakable-encryption-is-a-huge-huge-problem/
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cvwright
Well, to be fair, it _is_ a huge problem for the director of the FBI. His job
is to investigate potential crimes by gathering lots of evidence and doing
lots of analysis. The popularity of encryption is making it increasingly
difficult for him to gather the evidence that he needs.

The problem (for him) is that encryption is a tremendous help to everyone
else, and we don't (yet?) have a way to protect our data from criminals and
from overzealous or corrupt cops, without also deterring legitimate
investigations.

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gozur88
The FBI still has a pretty extensive toolset when they need it. No amount of
encryption is going to save you from a listening device planted in the area of
your super secret phone calls.

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freedomben
True, but (at least for now) planting a listening device requires significant
effort and a warrant. Chances are they will have to be pretty interested in
you before going through that kind of effort/expense.

Storing and sifting mountains of data and metadata from everybody, and mining
it and mapping it, just waiting for somebody to do something wrong is just too
tempting to resist.

That said tho, I tend to believe that most encryption is crackable due to
mistakes made during implementation, or mistakes made by the user. In a
cryptanalysis class I took my mind was blown by how easy it an be to decode
cipher text using simple statistical analysis, _especially_ if some of the
plaintext is known.

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burntrelish1273
If chainsaws were used in a mass killing, should we ban chainsaws? Or how
about scissors?

Saying police and government agencies "need" to have master keys to every
building, network and endpoint is insane. This is the fascist Clipper chip
redux. The potential for abuse is beyond the pale for an open society. As such
an open society must accept some edge-case vulnerabilities (ie criminals using
crypto) in order to avoid becoming a censored, totalitarian fiefdom where
dissent is crushed by the wide powers of intelligence services that have a
panopticon into everyone's lives, 1984-style.

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spiraldancing
Devil's Advocate — in the entire history of US law, if police can convince a
judge that they have a good enough reason, judge can give the cops permission
to break into your house, your bedroom, your diary, your safety deposit box,
the safe you buried in your shed ... a judge always had the choice to decide
whether or not cops get to invade your privacy.

For the first time, ever, strong encryption changes that paradigm. Personally,
I'm still in favor of it, but it really is a very fundamental game-changer.

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sasaf5
"a judge always had the choice to decide whether or not cops get to invade
your privacy."

Judges could not, and cannot, force anyone to reveal information, which is
different from providing access to physical places and objects.

Strong encryption just gives leverage for what you can store in the domain of
your own mind, by allowing you to unlock lots of physical data with some small
piece of memorized information.

Essentially, little has changed, except perhaps the ever increasing hunger of
the state to control people's lives.

~~~
sjg007
They can hold you in contempt for not providing decryption keys. That would
suck if you legitimately forgot your password..

~~~
dllthomas
Has it been tested whether they can hold you in contempt if you consistently
claim to have forgotten the password? In the (ongoing?) case I am aware of the
person in question first explicitly refused.

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wybiral
This just in: FBI is annoyed by how easy it is for criminals to use paper
shredders, wear hats around cameras, and whisper in rooms with microphones.

But that doesn't mean these things should be stopped.

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jstarfish
For better or worse, so much of our lives are conducted through and recorded
by our phones and computers that they are now highly valuable black boxes for
post-incident criminal investigations.

It's a shame that encryption makes it harder for them to jack into the
accused's consciousness and simply download some assortment of digital
artifacts out of context that can be used to build a narrative against them.
Used to be you had to go out and hunt for evidence, but modern investigators
prefer to sit back and fish for evidence once it comes to them.

Plus there's the value of things like your contacts list...for OC cases, it's
a helpful collection of nodes and edges for their graph.

They also lose the ability to see what extracurricular proclivities you've
been up to. Anything licentious you've ever (or _have_ ever) done will be used
to gain leverage over other potential witnesses or simply demonize you in
court. God help you if you're embezzling money while carrying on an affair, or
you're a furry simply accused of a sex crime.

Our digital lives betray the fifth amendment. Even if you won't testify
against yourself, the contents of your phone/computer will tell
_everything_...unless it's encrypted. It's the last defense against self-
incrimination that we have in this era.

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gersh
You need to weight the law enforcement need for encryption against the
security threat of hackers stealing your data. Hackers including foreign
state-sponsored hackers appear to be a major threat. People need the tools to
protect their data.

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tj-teej
The inability to read minds, is a "huge, huge problem"

