
Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones - jonathanmh
http://jonathanmh.com/re-obama-on-fetishizing-our-phones-yes-we-can/
======
tomlongson
A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the “most
transparent” government- however the only person to really deliver on that
promise was a whistleblower. Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now
calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either
was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since
becoming POTUS.

Maybe it's that he decided to use his political clout to pick healthcare as
his signature in American history, not wage war against the NSA, but either
way it saddens me to have campaigned for someone who has empowered a
surveillance state instead of fight against it.

Liberty literally means "freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or
control", and freedom in the information age means the liberty to communicate
and store information. Anything to compromise that makes us all more
vulnerable to control in all parts of our lives, not just those stored in
zeros and ones. I believe America can be "Land of the free, home of the
brave", but not without digital liberty.

~~~
jordanb
I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's
spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being
paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another.

A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a
computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems
completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard since he became
president. His daughters are the only teenagers in America who've never been
near Snapchat (the Secret Service will keep it that way). And he's literally
surrounded by security officers and spooks everywhere he goes. They manage
every interaction he has so you can imagine their worldview is going to affect
him.

I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He's so completely off the deep end
nowadays (between this and TPP) that it's heartbreaking as a long time
supporter. I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few
years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. It would be
an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's
integrity.

~~~
willholloway
Let's take a moment of deep appreciation for President Obama's decision to not
panic after the San Bernadino shooting, reinstate color terror alert codes,
spark a ground invasion of Syria, or in any other way overreact.

For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't
capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia
and fear.

We won't always be this lucky.

~~~
studentrob
I _am_ happy about that.

What does any of that have to do with the fact that he does not understand
encryption technology?

I can appreciate some things about Obama and not others.

People aren't all bad or good. I support ideas, not people, just as I hate the
game, not the player.

~~~
willholloway
We almost never say it. I want to say it. As someone who first became
politically aware during the post 9/11 Bush era, it's really nice to have an
administration in the White House that isn't trying to scare us.

We wouldn't live like that in a Trump administration. We would live in fear.

~~~
digler999
hillary would do the same god damn thing. "but...terrorism!" "Iran is
threatening _freedom_ ".

~~~
willholloway
"SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what
to do as Gaddafi’s forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab
League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be,
but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians
in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and
the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting
involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president;
Tom Donilon, the national security adviser.

And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France
and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and
then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially
convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to
join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces."

[http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...](http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside_hillary_clinton)

------
eigenvector
> So if your argument is strong encryption, no matter what, and we can and
> should, in fact, create black boxes, then that I think does not strike the
> kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years.

Mr. Obama, you are the one who upset the balance with secret, dragnet
surveillance of nearly all communications. That's not the bargain the public
has had with law enforcement for the last 300 years. Widespread, end-to-end
encryption is simply the natural reaction to the arms race you started. We
would have never come to this point if the government had kept surveillance
within court-supervised bounds.

~~~
ossreality
... the programs that all started long before he was in office?

He's at fault for keeping them in place, but that's about it.

~~~
eigenvector
Obama has been President for 7 years, during which time he has consistently
supported and expanded the programs started during the Bush presidency. In my
view this makes him as culpable as anyone for the position that we are at
today. George Bush may have started these programs but he isn't the one
launching attacks on the tech industry today.

See: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/power-wars-how-
ob...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/power-wars-how-obama-
justified-expanded-bush-era-surveillance/)

------
cromwellian
Obama has a meta-point however that proponents of the absolutist position
don't seem to want to face. Democracy relies on transparency. Many of the
progressives who are rallying in support of absolute right to privacy are some
of the same people who constantly criticize Swiss bank accounts, Cayman island
financial shenanigans.

But if companies were to implement the same sorts of impenetrable encryption,
on every device, all the way down to the corporate desktop, in a way that not
even the company executives themselves can read the email of their own
employees, then lots of regulations the government applies to companies would
be mooted.

Taken to the extreme, if all communication is digital, and 100% impregnable,
and people maintain good OpSec, then it will be hard to impossible to execute
lawsuits or regulatory investigations into malfeasance because they'll be no
paper trail.

The end result of going full tilt on crypto is cryptoanarchy. This was pretty
much well argued in the 90s among the cypherpunks community. Most of the
libertarians and Objectivists were salivating over how strong crypto protocols
would end fiat currency, end taxation, end regulation, and so on.

So how far as a society are we willing to take this? Does it just extend to
private data? Does it extend to transactions? To payments you make for things?
To transfers of money? To business transactions? Will Democracy be able to
audit nothing of the interactions of citizens or our institutions in the
future?

You don't have to agree with Obama's position to see that cryptoanarchy and
Democracy are on a collision course, and it makes sense to discuss the
possibilities openly without just plugging your ears and taking an absolutist
position that demonizes anyone who disagrees.

~~~
studentrob
This is not a debate about privacy vs. security.

It's about security vs. security. [1] [2] [3]

On balance, putting backdoors in phones will make us less secure, because
criminals will just use other methods to communicate, and the public will be
putting their data within reach of every hacker in the world through a
government-imposed weakness.

The administration is unlikely to understand our privacy concerns. They _do_
understand economic and public safety issues, and it is the facts around these
issues that we must share with them. President Obama himself told President Xi
last year that introducing backdoor legislation would hurt his economy [4].
Let's make Obama's argument back to him

[1]
[https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h35m52s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h35m52s)

[2]
[https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h11m46s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h11m46s)

[3]
[https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h19m39s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h19m39s)

[4] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china-
idUSKBN0LY...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china-
idUSKBN0LY2H520150302)

~~~
skybrian
"the public will be putting their data within reach of every hacker in the
world through a government-imposed weakness"

You're reusing arguments about key escrow in a way that doesn't apply.

This isn't key escrow. It's about software updates, which use digital signing
in the way it's supposed to be used.

Apple's software updates are guarded by a private key. Of course they need to
keep the private key safe, but sometimes use it to sign releases. It's
expensive but doable, and a good thing too, because the entire app ecosystem
(not to mention https and Bitcoin) depends on keeping private keys safe.

If keeping a private key safe is impossible even for a well-funded company
like Apple, public key encryption doesn't work. Game over.

~~~
studentrob
> If keeping a private key safe is impossible even for a well-funded company
> like Apple, public key encryption doesn't work. Game over.

Funny, FBI Director James Comey says the same thing [1]

And, the DOJ has suggested that if Apple does create the requested tool, then
they can just give the source code and key to the FBI [2]

I think we know where you stand on this issue.

[1]
[https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=2h43m12s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=2h43m12s)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/fbi-
could-...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/fbi-could-force-
apple-to-hand-over-private-key)

~~~
skybrian
Do you? Actually I'm strongly against anyone having to turn over a private key
to the government.

------
thom
We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a
world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the
internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled
by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing
people on Twitter.

Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like
copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat,
and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard
to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly
encrypted channels.

[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]

~~~
beeboop
I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or
twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very
popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is
massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted
content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a
good example).

The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much
do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But
within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which
both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer
and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be
maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS
providers.

The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently
in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability
(but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most
often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The
Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your
info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms
that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not
ready for widespread use.

~~~
thom
I'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your
online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on
you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - knows
to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and
published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection).

It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but
4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act.

I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected
drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of
that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more
publicly than we do now.

~~~
newjersey
This is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by
the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not
like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios
at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification
for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the
mastermind behind millions of death.

Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is
worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.

~~~
beeboop
I think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the
tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since
2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and
chalk them up as collateral damage.

~~~
newjersey
I am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at
you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing
behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem.

When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are
minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture
people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill
those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a
drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to
catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the
issue.

~~~
beeboop
> If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of
> whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem.

You very well might be a sociopath.

~~~
newjersey
I am not a very smart person so I looked up the definition of sociopath.

> Hare also provides his own definitions: he describes psychopathy as not
> having a sense of empathy or morality, but sociopathy as only differing in
> sense of right and wrong from the average person.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy)

Well, I might be a sociopath. Don't get me wrong. I think babies are very cute
and would go out of my way to save an infant's life. However, I cannot command
others to imperil their own lives to maybe not kill an infant.

Not to derail the topic too much but it bothers me that people think the
collateral deaths of "innocent women and children" in an extrajudicial drone
strike are worse than the death of the target. The collateral damage would not
have happened if we didn't shoot in the first place. I am not saying we should
be isolationist or even that we should not exercise restraint in use of force
(even in self defense), far from it. I am just asking that we approach the
topic as rationally as we can.

Now, we should be clear as to why we try to save infants and small children
first in an emergency. Here is the article that made me think about this
[http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-
ar...](http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-are-special-
but-not-particularly-important.html) but it makes sense what I read a while
back. It is not because they are more important (far from it, society has much
more invested in growing up a working adult) but because the infants and
children are more vulnerable. It made a world of sense when I thought about it
this way. When it comes to a fire, I can see how a healthy adult can survive
longer suffocating in a smokey room as opposed to an infant. I think a trained
fireman or a nurse can do triage pretty will without someone screaming in
their face "why won't you attend to my baby first?"

In most situations, we would probably care for infants and young children
before anyone else. However, like with everything in life, we should think
about why and not just what. A person who has killed millions of people has
the same right life as a newly born infant and we shouldn't try to sidestep
difficult questions and scream "why won't you think of the children" just
looking for an emotional response.

------
downandout
In the end, they are going to introduce laws that make it illegal to implement
end-to-end encryption. This sucks, but it's going to happen. France is already
moving to do it [1], and in the US, John McCain and others are also calling
for similar laws [2]. They will all start off saying that it will be
controlled carefully etc., as Obama keeps saying, and then it will be used
with reckless abandonment.

What this essentially means is a move to Android for criminals, terrorists,
and anyone that wants privacy (since Android allows installation of apps that
have not been approved by a gatekeeper bound by the laws of the countries it
operates in, whereas iOS does not by default). Open source Android apps with
strong encryption will be built in countries without such laws. All of this
will likely be the downfall of a few lazy drug dealers that don't want to give
up their iPhones, but since the cat is out of the bag and apps with end-to-end
encryption already exist and will continue to be built, the governments making
these moves will not actually catch any reasonably intelligent terrorists that
install and use these apps. They will, however, gain exactly what they want:
the ability to conduct surveillance on most people in the world whenever they
want.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/03/04/french-law-apple-iphone-
encryp...](http://fortune.com/2016/03/04/french-law-apple-iphone-encryption/)

[2] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/senator-mccain-
joins-...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/senator-mccain-joins-the-
call-for-new-laws-against-end-to-end-encryption/)

~~~
beeboop
I cannot fathom end to end encryption ever being made illegal. I tremendously
doubt this will ever happen in any effective manner. At worst, they will pass
from vaguely worded bill that makes it illegal in the sense that you are
required to decrypt data on demand for any government agency. But since we are
already seeing the trend of service providers being unable to decrypt user
data, I doubt that will be much of an issue either.

We _will_ probably start seeing a lot more people getting locked up for
decades for "contempt of court" by refusing or being unable to decrypt their
personal data for a judge. Current record for contempt is 14 years - with no
conviction and no jury.

~~~
jacquesm
If you're not willing to revolt over it then it is definitely a possibility
that end-to-end encryption will be made illegal. Non-techies simply don't
care, they have 'nothing to hide' (or so they think).

~~~
beeboop
I don't think it will happen due to the impossibility of actually enforcing
it, hence "effective manner" in my OP.

~~~
cmurf
I think it's naive to underestimate a government's ability to coerce people
into not using it. There are many surviving illiberal democracies and it
really wouldn't take that much to get the U.S. to trend more toward
illiberalism either.

Lavabit?

~~~
beeboop
The Lavabit case was only contentious because of a very poor implementation of
encrypted user data. It won't be long until there are established platforms
and libraries that are used by most apps that fix the technical problems of
Lavabit. Mega (the file uploading service) is pretty close to having a
reasonably fool proof design, in that the most security conscious users are
unlikely to have any external party be able to send malicious code that
prevents the security and effectiveness of client side encryption.

------
tudorw
One strong point that comes out is reference to the transitory nature of
governments, just because you trust yours now (!), does not mean you can trust
future incarnations, don't give this kind of power to an unknown.

~~~
simonh
Also asserting that your government has the right to certain powers over its
citizens establishes the precedent that any government should have that right.
If it's OK for the US or UK governments to have the keys to its citizens
encryption, then it's ok for China, Russia, Iran, etc.

Interestingly, the encryption system underlying WhatsApp was developed by the
US government for people in oppressive states to use to avoid surveillance and
restrictions on access to information.

------
joelhaus
Rather than rhetoric, it would be nice to see more HN arguments based on the
strongest possible counterarguments [ _].

_
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/)

~~~
studentrob
I agree that being open to an alternate point of view is a good idea..

We need to share facts in this debate..

We know about technology, they know about law enforcement

Let us each bring facts to the table and resist coming up with conclusions
from the outset. Obama is missing some facts, and in order to convince him
that's true I think we need to be open to the idea that there may be some
things we do not know

We're not going to find out about those things by conjecturing. We need the
administration to share any relevant details as much as they need to
understand encryption technology

------
thoughtsimple
This is akin to the politicians that don't want to believe the science around
global warming. They believe that if they just deny it, they will turn out to
be correct. Obama is doing the same with "golden key" encryption. It is not
that the experts are correct and know what they are talking about, it is just
that they are disengaged and being stubborn.

"I'm the President of the United States of America and if I say that there
must be math that gives me what I want. If you don't invent it, you are
disengaged."

~~~
studentrob
Yup. But he doesn't understand that criminals will just change to use
technology that _is_ encrypted. We just need to share the facts and let people
make up their own minds.

What baffles me is that nobody has been able to convince the President of that
simple fact. Surely, he must know about Signal and Snowden, and that Signal
can easily be downloaded to any device...

------
plcancel
A couple of other fun quotes:

"And what we realized was that we could potentially build a SWAT team, a
world-class technology office inside of the government that was helping across
agencies. We’ve dubbed that the U.S. Digital Services."

Yes, that's a great analogy! Go with that!

"And this was a little embarrassing for me because I was the cool, early
adaptor President."

Cooler and adepter!

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/03/11/transcrip...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/03/11/transcript-
obama-remarks-sxsw/6m8IFsnpJh2k3XWxifHQnJ/story.html)

~~~
studentrob
Actually...

From his rhetoric, it sounds like he wants to appeal to technologists by
arguing he keeps them very close to him in the White House. He's saying, "see?
I have tech friends and I give them cool jobs where they feel appreciated."

He's also implying that they should count towards him being informed about
technology. But we know that's not the case.

So he's trying to say he has trusted technology advisors, but he doesn't. It's
scary. Join me in tweeting at them [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/usds](https://twitter.com/usds)

------
SwimAway
Obama, our manipulating word artisan of a president yet again attempting to
use strong language (i.e "fetishizing") to polarize our view.

~~~
bigiain
Interesting choice too - there's clearly a demographic who go to the Folsom
Street Fair who definitely don't have negative connotations to "fetishizing",
and I suspect any porn site operator could give you some numbers that some
people would not believe about the number of people for whom fetishes are a
real thing.

I wonder if Obama and his speechwriters have research about how many people
(and from which demographics) that phrase is going to be read in which ways?
(I wonder if they've worked out that they've already lost the tech crowd on
this issue, and there's a statistically significant crossover between the tech
crowd and the people for whom fetishes are considered a positive thing?)

~~~
tomlongson
If they are not harnessing big data for writing speeches then the White House
is less savvy than Netflix and House of Cards writer, Beau Willimon.

------
a3n
This is not a fetish. This is a conflict between a government that has gotten
away from the "we serve the citizens" mentality, and gone to "we'll do
anything we want, routing around the constitution whenever we want, and use
"serving citizens" as the excuse, and the citizens who _should_ be able to
specify, to any level detail that we want, exactly how those "servents" _will_
serve us. It seems to be sliding away from us.

------
aldeluis
This interview with Snowden has been broadcasted tonight in Spain. Ended just
minutes ago.

[http://www.lasexta.com/programas/el-
objetivo/noticias/entrev...](http://www.lasexta.com/programas/el-
objetivo/noticias/entrevista-completa-edward-snowden-objetivo-version-
extendida_2016031300159.html)

~~~
awqrre
Would be nice to have English subtitles for the questions...

------
shitgoose
so they tell us that we have to arrange our private lives in such way that it
would be easier for them to investigate/persecute us, if sometime in the
future they decide that we are guilty of breaking their laws.

[with great sadness]: how low have we fallen if we seriously discussing this
instead of grabbing pitchforks.

~~~
epicureanideal
I think what it takes is a visible critical mass gathering with "pitchforks"
and all the relatively-awake people in society would join in. Nobody wants to
be part of the 10 or 100 or 1000 person "movement" that gets squashed and
futures ruined. But if it seemed like most of (active) society was going to
pile on too, people would.

However, most of society is simply not active. Most of society would never
pick up any pitchforks one way or the other, without things getting REALLY
bad. At some point a highly motivated minority of the population (but still a
lot of people) basically needs to make the change for everyone. I'm not saying
that's right or wrong, just saying what seems to be the case.

------
brudgers
This has been the default position of US government across administrations at
least since the 1976 Arms Export Control Act. Nothing has changed except that
"the terrorists" have replaced "the communists".

It doesn't matter who says it.

------
jonathanmh
I honestly didn't expect this to be seen. /me is humbled and reading comments

------
Mandatum
If law was adopted to require backdoors - those who are privacy conscious
would simply move their data to countries that allow for strong encryption as
well as deniability.

It'd still pose an issue for when people are accessing their data, however
depending on your setup this will be very hard to prove from a third-parties
perspective given ample security precautions taken (ie using an offshore VPN
all the time, data never full accessed locally).

For larger tech companies, I'd assume setup of a new company structure
offshore and sensitive data handling to be "outsourced" offshore too (ie parts
of the EU, other OECD countries).

------
1024core
I hate it when leaders get all upset when the balance is shifted away from
them, and yet are perfectly fine when the balance tilts in their favor.

FTA: "then that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived
with for 200, 300 years."

200 years ago, it was not possible to cast a dragnet and catch everyone who
was doing Something Bad(tm). The government had to get a warrant to open mail;
today, the NSA can sift through billions of messages (metadata, they say) in a
second.

Even considering US Mail: you could not keep track of who was sending whom
mail, at scale. But today, _every_ letter that is mailed has its front and
back scanned (for reading the address); but more importantly, these images are
saved for future use.

All of this is possible thanks to technology. And when the balance was tilting
in their favor, the Establishment was quite happy. But when the balance tilts
the other way, suddenly they're crying like a spoiled child whose toys have
been taken away.

You can't just throw tantrums when things don't go your way. If the technology
permits E2E encryption, they'll just have to live with it and find other ways
to catch criminals.

------
kailuowang
Would like to see more detailed logic in the original post. For e.g. why
specifically the parallel between physical world and digital is flawed.

~~~
jonathanmh
alright, will write a follow up

~~~
studentrob
There's a lot of this online. Check out Sam Harris' recant of his original
position against Apple in which he reads an email he received from a Google
engineer [1]. The email is very well written

[1]
[https://youtu.be/9HK4IBscfMQ?t=2m33s](https://youtu.be/9HK4IBscfMQ?t=2m33s)

------
exabrial
"You don't need encryption"

"You don't need a gun"

Oddly enough both are classified as munitions.

------
x5n1
Obama, the technology, sir, is absolutist. You can have it one way, with
privacy, or another, complete lack of it. That's how things are, and you are,
with all due respect, stupid for arguing otherwise.

------
wl
All this talk about "warrant-proof spaces" presumes that they're something
new, when in fact they aren't. In the past, conversations in private tended to
not be reduced to tangible form and were lost to law enforcement unless they
had the foresight and the warrant to bug the location. Now that so many of our
communications are mediated by technology, they are by necessity reduced to a
tangible form. Secure end-to-end crypto merely takes us back to the status quo
antebellum.

------
basicplus2
Obama, like all the recent US presidents is just a puppet.

------
awqrre
I used to think that Bush was bad and Obama was good... I'm really upset that
I was wrong and that now Bush appears to be the better of the two.

------
studentrob
Let's get the facts straight about encryption and security. The DOJ needs our
help, and we need theirs

We need a grassroots movement here. I know we have the EFF and Apple and a
slew of others. But we all need to be writing about this to have our voices
heard.

I am in between projects and writing about this extensively online. Would
anyone like to work together to organize facts and promote discussion in a
concerted manner? The goal would be a) to make a concise message that is
understandable by a non-techie, b) back it up with facts and primary source,
and c) seek out public figures who can share our message. I have a running
summary of events here which I will put in a github repo [1]

Dear technologists:

The task of educating the public and our government on encryption may be even
harder than you think. Everyone needs to understand the issues at stake in
order to make up their own mind, and it could take years to educate the
general public about encryption.

We can expect to continue seeing terrorists attacks in the news regardless of
what laws Congress passes. This much we know, and this is, of course, out of
our control. However, uninformed law enforcement will blame encryption and
they will blame technologists for not allowing them to catch these attacks.
Unless all law enforcement truly understands the technology, then they will
always blame citizens for fighting for their right to privacy.

Of course, we know this is about security vs. security, not security vs.
privacy. Privacy is a secondary focus for many. But law enforcement believes
our primary focus is privacy.

My primary concern is that law enforcement does not know how to keep us safe
in a world where criminals can sometimes communicate with smartphones across
the world in a way that cannot be monitored with a warrant. Regardless of
whether Cyrus Vance, James Comey, Loretta Lynch or Obama truly understand this
or if they are putting up a smoke screen, the fact is that law enforcement
across the country trust them the most. Non-technologists will be more moved
to understand the security and economic implications of forcing backdoors upon
Americans and US phone manufacturers. For the most part, they are not going to
see eye to eye with us on privacy concerns. Lindsey Graham has already changed
his view. We can share facts with others and let them make up their own minds.

Some damage is already done. The fact that Vance and Comey have been fighting
this for so long is going to make it difficult for them to go back and
convince officers of the law that technologists were right, and they were
wrong. Many officers will continue to feel snubbed by the tech community.

If we're to advance to the next level of our mutually trusting society, we
must all understand encryption technology and its implications. To the extent
that we do not all understand encryption, and the ease of which it can be used
regardless of government mandates, we will continue infighting and not
progress together.

The idea that technologists feel the issue is black and white or absolutist is
absolutely incorrect :-). Math is black and white, but our public safety and
security is not. It is a complex equation that must be balanced, and we have
that focus just as President Obama does. The difference between us and the DOJ
is we understand a few more pieces to the equation. I'm open to the idea there
are pieces that technologists do not know about, and I encourage the
administration to share these details with us. Until all the details are on
the table, we won't be able to come up with a solution together. Let's focus
on discussing and sharing the variables and their weights. Given information,
people can make up their own minds.

If backdoor laws are passed, it's not the end of the world, but our industry
will suffer while non-technologists struggle to understand why terrorist
attacks continue to occur. It'll be another 4-8 years until we can dig
ourselves out of that hole. Let's keep the great country we have and bring
facts to the table for open discussion.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu/the_mass_surveillance_debate_kicked_off_by/)

------
pasbesoin
Fetish. Rubber hose "security". Coincidence?

~~~
tomlongson
Coincidence. Commenter SwimAway had a more likely argument that it is
polarizing language.

------
Patronus_Charm
Obama always telling people what to do. Its just not a good look.

~~~
threeseed
He's the President who forms part of the apparatus that decides the laws that
govern the nation.

Everything he does involves telling people what to do.

------
ecma
This is incredibly naive bordering on puerile. To suggest that POTUS' view on
this is without nuance is to miss his point. POTUS went on to cite existing
warrant mechanisms and their underlying principle:

"And we agree on that, because we recognize that just like all of our other
rights ... that there are going to be some constraints we impose so we are
safe, secure and can live in a civilized society."

I'm not suggesting that this means POTUS and the government have the right
answers at the moment. Despite that, we can't ignore the important role law
enforcement plays in society, the requirements in support of their role, and
the complexities surrounding the right to privacy. We need people advocating
for the right balance, not just getting each other frustrated.

OP may have worries other than US law enforcement being from another country.
This is one of the /many/ complexities in this space.

~~~
andrewfromx
but there is no "balance" when somethig is binary. You either have encryption
or you don't.

~~~
harryh
That's wrong.

The government isn't saying that no one should be able to encrypt data. They
just thing that, in some cases, it should be done in such a way that certain
data can be read by use of a centralized master key.

This, of course, presents certain problems. What if that master key leaks?

But it's not binary. Data secured this way is absolutely safer than not
encrypting something at all. "Is it safe enough?" is certainly a question that
people can disagree on.

It's not binary.

~~~
andrewfromx
wow, when you put it that way it's like saying "either I have the right to own
a gun or I do not." So I guess if people except limits on gun ownership they
should accept limits on encryption cuz it's just as dangerous?

~~~
harryh
Actually no. What I'm saying is that you do have the right to own a gun, but
there are limits on gun ownership.

    
    
      * Minors cannot buy guns.
      * Convicted felons cannot buy guns in most circumstances.
      * There are numerous locations in which it is illegal to bring a gun.
      * There are numerous types of guns that you are not allowed to own.
    

It's not binary.

------
mozumder
I think a lot of libertarians miss the fact that many of the communications
monitoring aspects that the administration is proposing includes authorization
by court order.

It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government
employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for
personal privacy, and that's through a court order.

If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed
good reason, as determined by a judge.

Sure, you might call that final safeguard as not enough or susceptible to
corruption, but once you do that, you cease to be able to function in a
society.

Judicial review is the "trust zone" that citizens are expected to have on
society. If you don't trust judicial review, then there's no hope left for you
to function in a normal society filled with other people. If you don't have
such a "trust zone" in government, then you are basically forced to build your
own army to protect you, since you don't trust government.

Since having your personal army is stupid, your best option is to make sure
judicial review cannot be corrupted.

~~~
tehwebguy
Communications are already being monitored by random government employees with
no judicial review.

The FISA court is already a rubber stamp. Encryption is one of the only ways
to non-passively protest.

Edit: Can't reply to my replies, likely because of the down votes on my
parent's comment.

Re: FISA, yes to both. That anecdote may be truth but I am still hung up on
NSA employee looking up ex-girlfriends' emails the day he got access to do so.

Re: Army, you aren't wrong but that's not encouraging. It's true, at the end
of the day the most powerful military will win.

But it's an argument that only wins against those with something to lose, like
people who care about their family or nation states with a future. I guess
that's why the ultimate response over a long enough timeline to an unbeatable
military force is terrorism.

~~~
arkem
I hear this a lot, what is the basis of considering the FISA court merely a
rubber stamp?

Is it the approval rate? Is it the lack of transparency?

If it's the approval rate, in my experience the reason why court warrant
approvals are so high is because intelligence / law enforcement are very risk
adverse and will not submit requests that are likely to be rejected.
Anecdotally, the officers I talked to considered it career poison to submit a
request that got rejected by a court.

~~~
noir_lord
In 35,000 requests, they denied 12.

Either the NSA _is really accurate_ or something smells.

~~~
arkem
I think it shows that they have an excellent understanding of their
authorizing legislation.

It also reflects that unlike other types of warrants the court can request
revisions or additional information before making a decision and requests can
be withdrawn before a formal rejection can take place.

Some estimates put the reject/withdrawal rate closer to 25%

Some more information: [https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-
court-t...](https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court-
tougher-media-says)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscour...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/honorable-
patrick-leahy.pdf)

