
Encryption Has Foiled Wiretaps for First Time Ever, Feds Say - rdl
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/encryption-foiled-wiretaps/
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mtgx
Interesting that this is appearing only now, even though it happened in 2012.

Reminds me of the recent "news" that terrorists changed their tactics after
the leaks, "according to _government officials_ ". Greenwald talked about this
recently:

[http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8?t=47m5s](http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8?t=47m5s)

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qwertzlcoatl
What's with the laughtracks? I'm confused.

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eightyone
It's not a laugh track, it's an actual audience. He's speaking at the
Socialism 2013 conference. He originally planned to be there but was unable to
make it due to all the stuff that's gone down these last few weeks.

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alan_cx
Like I've said in other posts, spy on people and they start to react. In this
case they start using encryption more and more. No, such people are not 100%
secure, but if there is a secure option, they take it. This increases
encrypted traffic and of course government paranoia. More of us are hiding
stuff, there for more of us must be guilty, so government needs to spy more.

Mean while, real criminals will simply avoid electronic communications.

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agilebyte
Or like POWs in WW2 devise language that will have hidden meaning.

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Kluny
You mean... a CODE?? Now there's a new idea.

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ihsw
I may be a bit too paranoid, but this seems like a decoy similar to the
iMessage decoy earlier this year.

This is a quote from the government so surely there will be multiple --
perhaps even conflicting -- interpretations and definitions of the terms
encryption, foiled, and wiretaps.

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ryguytilidie
Doesn't seem too paranoid to me at all. Even a couple years ago, if you had
said the NSA was spying on everyone, people would have branded you as a tin
foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Now we're supposed to believe the things
that our government tells us after years and years of lying about hundreds of
things at a time? No thanks.

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D9u
Sounds like more misinformation. Another excuse to exceed their mandate. I
don't trust anything they have to say anymore.

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tootie
How is this misinformation? It's 100% true that end-to-end encryption is
unbreakable.

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zurn
Huh? End-to-end just means it's not decrypted in transit by design. All the
other usual technical things can still go wrong (trust model failures,
exploitable programming bugs, crypto protocol breaks, crypto algorithm breaks,
ui trickery etc). Not to mention social engineering, phishing, backdoors and
such.

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derefr
Interesting that they specifically mention Apple. If I recall, a few months
ago, before this whole NSA thing broke, there was a story on how iMessage's
encrypted-by-default communications were being a PITA for investigators used
to just being able to pull SMS logs. I wonder if that's what this is talking
about?

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radicalbyte
Note the important caveat about _court-approved wiretaps_ :

    
    
      For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps, U.S. officials said today.
    

So it doesn't stop the NSA.

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deepblueq
Of course, that's what they'd say if they _had_ broken it. If they hadn't,
then saying this would be counterproductive.

Alternate 1: Since they're keeping encrypted stuff forever, they're somehow OK
with not getting access to stuff until moore's law has had a while longer to
run / more exploits have been found?

Alternate 2: They want the metadata, and if people didn't trust encryption
they wouldn't even get that?

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ambassador451
This is _exactly_ what they would say if they actually had found a way to
break encryption.

Sad to see wired.com becoming another mouthpiece for the government like other
mainstream media.

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rdl
I don't believe they can break most forms of crypto head on, but they can
certainly exploit a lot of flaws (either errors in the implementation or flaws
in either the infrastructure it runs on or physical/human factors).

It's an open question whether strong crypto used inappropriately makes people
do things they wouldn't otherwise. If you know all comms are monitored, and
don't ever say anything incriminating on the phone, you're better off than
someone who has an unbreakable encrypted phone but is talking to an informant
with a recorder on the other end.

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DefectiveDesign
It was broken before it hits the shelf.

"They do not use(release) code, they can't crack"

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nknighthb
Are you alleging the NSA is violating its mandate by deliberately leaving top
secret information vulnerable?

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mpyne
Not only that, but he's also alleging that NSA developed AES.

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nknighthb
Read in a literal sense, that is true, but the NSA has sufficient influence to
exercise an effective veto over mass-market crypto just by saying they don't
believe it's secure (whether that is true or not). If the NSA said "don't use
AES", most people wouldn't use AES. They also could have easily spooked
everyone off Rijndael during the AES selection process.

For that reason, I don't generally find it useful to argue the point of
exactly where Rijndael actually came from.

