Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

http://jonathanmh.com/re-obama-on-fetishizing-our-phones-yes-we-can/

by jonathanmh • 10 years ago

361 313 10 years ago

jonathanmh.com

joelhaus• 10 years ago

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/

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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

mozumder7• 10 years ago

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.

tehwebguy2• 10 years ago

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.

arkem3• 10 years ago

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.

mythz• 10 years ago

Nothing is being missed other than the premise that you can only create a back door that just compromises your privacy and security to the FBI/NSA. A backdoor available to the US Govt, is a backdoor available for everyone.

cheald• 10 years ago

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.

That argument had weight pre-Snowden. It carries no water now.

mozumder7• 10 years ago

You mean the Snowden revelations that show filters that filtered out communications of US citizens without a court order?

ericHosick• 10 years ago

If you don't trust judicial review, there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society

I would like to hear your definition of normal society. I personally feel that there are thousands of unique societies in the world.

Considering that technology knows no borders, I hope you and the "society filled with other people" have normal society figured out for us all.

rdlecler1• 10 years ago

The U.S. government has already shown that it is willing to abuse the law and create loopholes. Maybe the FBI will need a court order, but once the back door exists, what's to stop the NSA, or North Korea, from using it and finding ways to exploit that vulnerability. Freedom has a cost and we need to accept that. There are no free lunches here.

afarrell• 10 years ago

But without a valid court order, the evidence collected by the NSA cannot be used against a defendant in a trial. If a defendant feels a court order was improperly issued, he can appeal his conviction on those procedural grounds.

If the data is not used in a criminal case, then there is no mechanism for 4th amendment protection and the spied-upon has no recourse.

shmageggy• 10 years ago

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.

This is an extreme statement and a false dichotomy. I think there's plenty of room between "completely trust government" and "unfit for society". If I'm uncomfortable with the potential for abuse of monitoring (which has already happened plenty of times), that means what exactly? I should remove myself from public discourse?

mozumder7• 10 years ago

Right, which is why we have Judicial review of communications monitoring, since we don't trust the executive branch (a political entity) with that power alone.

hendler• 10 years ago

Your best option is to make sure judicial review cannot be corrupted.

This is the problem Snowden exposed. There is not enough transparency to verify judicial processes.

Secondly, it's seems that if information collection, safety, and exchange were working well, the FBI wouldn't be asking for more.

Obama's ability to unite and create dialog is welcomed. However, I don't think phones are fetishized. There's simply a lack of education everywhere. As Jobs said, “Privacy means people know what they are signing up for”.

JoshTriplett8• 10 years ago

First, it doesn't matter what process governments (plural) have in place to protect backdoor access mechanisms or escrowed keys. That those mechanisms exist at all means they can and will be abused by people who do not go through those mechanisms.

Beyond that:

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

Not even close to true. We have documented evidence at this point that the government is monitoring all communications. They have no discretion.

For the moment, I trust that the government has not yet descended so far that it will arbitrarily arrest or detain everyone who attempts to maintain the security of their information. That doesn't mean I trust the government to unilaterally decide whose information it can access.

Government brokenness is not binary. There's a spectrum from "theoretical perfection" to "absolute tyranny". The US and UK governments are currently attempting to take a step in the wrong direction; that doesn't immediately imply that anyone opposing that step "ceases to be able to function in a society". Or are you seriously attempting to suggest that the government is entirely infallible and incorruptible?

The safeguard for privacy isn't just the court system. That provides a modest amount of protection against abuse of information that was left insecure to begin with, such as information left unencrypted with a third party. However, for information that truly needs security, the privacy of that information is maintained by the system holding it; that system neither has nor needs any concept of "a user other than the owner who somehow has access".

Let's ignore the Apple case for a moment, since Apple fundamentally does have access to the device. Even additions like the more recent security chip have potential ways to bypass security, albeit by dissecting a tamper-resistant chip; that's a tradeoff for supporting insufficiently long user PINs, and wouldn't be needed with a secure passphrase. Whether Apple wins or loses, the much more interesting question is whether challenges arise to the construction of devices that genuinely cannot be accessed by anyone other than the device owner.

As a simple example, consider an encrypted device, using a key and passphrase, where the passphrase uses an appropriate strengthening technique to make it computationally intensive to test a single possibility. Easy to get in if you know the passphrase, but if done right, computationally infeasible to brute force even with NSA-level computing resources and centuries of time.

Laptops regularly use that level of security today (modulo the user's chosen passphrase). Phones should as well.

If I had a perfect eidetic memory, I could memorize huge volumes of information and keep no records of them; in that case, that information is completely secure (against anything except rubber-hose). Encryption provides an amplification mechanism there: instead of memorizing gigabytes of data, I can instead memorize a passphrase, and gain access to arbitrarily large amounts of information that nobody else can access (modulo security bugs, or physical device compromise followed by my continued access).

mozumder7• 10 years ago

They're monitoring meta-data, not private communications.

And for private comms, they have filters that filter them out for US citizens, as the Snowden leaks show.

LOL when people find out that the Snowden leaks actually show the NSA protecting privacy rights of US citizens, in a top-secret program.

an_account• 10 years ago

That those mechanisms exist at all means they can and will be abused by people who do not go through those mechanisms.

Isn't this true about traditional wiretaps as well? Yeah, a corrupt agent could illegally wiretap anyone's phone, but that certainly won't hold up in court.

musha68k2• 10 years ago

Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space.

We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains. If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well.

Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertarian" to foresee a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our civil liberties (as with democracy, the US still sets global trends btw).

JoshTriplett8• 10 years ago

Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space.

That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though.

Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.

dllthomas• 10 years ago

It is exactly like some communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no legitimate reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

Note that "most incidents are self reported" kinda sounds good, but really means "we don't have any good systems for finding it", and probably means many incidents are never discovered.

kailuowang• 10 years ago

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.

jonathanmh6• 10 years ago

alright, will write a follow up

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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

d0mine• 10 years ago

It seems obvious that It is impossible to spy on so many people in the physical world with the same efficiency as in digital.

studentrob17• 10 years ago

Sam Harris posted a video trying to draw such parallels between digital and physical worlds [1]. After reading responses to his first video, he then changed his mind [2]. In particular, one email from a Google engineer he found particularly compelling. I can summarize.

Our phones contain both a) things we consider privacy-sensitive and b) security-sensitive. Family photos and bank accounts. The Googler dispels one of Sam's analogies. Digital security and insecurity is highly scalable. We lock our doors, and police can force them open if needed. Generally, there are not many burglars around. Here I will quote Sam's reading of the Googler's email,

"The digital world is like having a house at zero distance from every burglar in existence, including the planet's top lock pickers. They have zero cost and near-zero risk attempting to break into my door. The "police" are virtually non-existent, and even if identified the bad guys are probably out of reach of prosecution. Even the amateurs have tools that allow them to probe millions of doors per second, and the pros have access to the same heavy tools that the police would use to force my door. And perhaps I live in a huge condo with a single door, so hacking that one lock will expose millions to ransacking. That's the nature of every digital device connected to the internet. Attacking them is a highly scalable task. You're not protected by your location, there's no affluent neighborhood with low crime and good police, where the wealthy can live and feel safe. Nope, the internet is a dystopian world when it comes to security. It's a Mad Max scenario where you're only safe if your front door and your entire house and your personal car is blinded like Fort Knox's safes, and armed with flame throwers."

Before I realized Sam had recanted his position, I wrote a point-by-point response to his first video [3]. I think the Googler did a better job relating to non-technologists.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQAmlVFjJ9k

[2] https://youtu.be/9HK4IBscfMQ

[3] https://pastelink.net/151k

ecma3• 10 years ago

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.

andrewfromx5• 10 years ago

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

wildmusings2• 10 years ago

So Apple either designs their phones such that they themselves can't hack them, or they have to comply with government court orders.

ecma3• 10 years ago

If the San Bernardino case proves anything, it's that encryption is not the whole picture.

harryh9• 10 years ago

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.

Aleman3602• 10 years ago

What about disabling the bricking mechanism that would have allowed the FBI to brute-force the PIN?

BinaryIdiot4• 10 years ago

We need people advocating for the right balance, not just getting each other frustrated.

I don't understand this line of thinking regarding the big encryption debate. Yeah it sounds good if you don't know anything about encryption. "Look, he's being reasonable. Why is everyone saying he's wrong instead of striking a balance".

The problem is it's a binary problem. There is zero way to strike any type of balance here. You either encrypt communication to prevent others from accessing it or you provide a backdoor or escrow key to access the data in which case all encrypted communications are now insecure.

There isn't a middle ground there. If there is I have yet to see anyone suggest it and I can't think of a technical way to do it. Too many attack vectors when you purposefully impose multiple party keys or backdoors.

wpietri3• 10 years ago

In that case, perhaps the balance we need to strike is rhetorical, not technical.

I think some people in the tech world are 4th-amendment absolutists. That's not a new thing; in Cryptonomnicon there was the electromagnetic doorframe so strong that it would wipe drives passing through it. I don't know that it's a position I hold myself, but it's one I definitely respect.

But we have a multi-century history of the government being able to read people's documents once they have a warrant. A lot of crime-fighting makes use of this. Whatever the intricacies of the technology, there's a status quo that I think we should at least acknowledge.

So I think the rhetorical balance we need to strike as an industry is along the lines of, "Yes, we totally get why you would want to get into that terrorist's phone. We wish we could find a way to give you access to just that without compromising everything. But it's not like a wall we can put a special door in. It's like a balloon. The moment it loses integrity, it's worthless. We want to help you, but we can't."

When the message instead comes across as absolutist, I think we're in danger of losing public support. Without that, we'll have a very hard time resisting government demands for access.

ecma3• 10 years ago

I didn't think I'd come back but I liked your comment and wanted to rebut.

There is a middle ground and where it lies is directly related to the assessed risk. To support a mechanism is a binary choice but its design is not.

In the San Bernardino example, an unexpected potential adversary (Apple) has emerged. An unexpected vector is being discussed which has nothing to do with the encryption mechanism itself. Perfect cryptography doesn't imply a perfect cryptosystem and it sure doesn't imply perfect privacy.

The balance that needs to be found is around the assistance which is rendered to warranted agencies to enable their access to data. IMO vendor supported key material attacks are not an unreasonable solution but obviously that mechanism can go horribly wrong if the software is leaked and it is not adequately designed. The same can be said for signed updates in general though. This is a hard technical problem but it's not a binary choice where the agency has some magic key they can use wherever they want or they have nothing. If they can be enabled on a case by case basis such that it is cost effective for them to do the rest, that might be enough.

Obviously this is all based on the assumption of a robust local judicial process. However, whatever decision making process occurs needs to take into account global implications. Other commenters here and elsewhere have mentioned what this could mean for agencies in other countries where judicial process may be less robust. Many have commented about a lack of transparency in our own. This is a separate but very closely related concern. There are also considerations for the open source community and how precedent like this might be applied to them. It's a hard problem but it's not binary.

BWStearns2• 10 years ago

I don't believe that Obama himself has an blunt understanding of this issue, but I can't know what is truly in his heart or head and the view promoted in his statements here is utterly oversimplified and purposely lacking in nuance. Glossing over the impossibility of providing security only against "bad guys" while leaving you open to "good guys" is an intentionally low resolution view of the issue intended to make refutations based on that impossibility sound like nerds nitpicking the implementation details.

beeboop8• 10 years ago

I don't think whether he understands it to really matter. I think even if he was the world's foremost security expert, his message would be the same as it is now.

SwimAway2• 10 years ago

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

bigiain• 10 years ago

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?)

tomlongson3• 10 years ago

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.

CamperBob2• 10 years ago

First he accused me of clinging to my guns, but since I didn't own any guns, I was OK with that.

Next he accused me of clinging to my religion, but since I was an atheist, I was like, meh, whatever.

Then he accused me of clinging to my smartphone, and oh, boy. It's on now, motherfucker.

vmorgulis2• 10 years ago

It's also (and not only) in Marx's vocabulary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

tosseraccount• 10 years ago

Was Obama using this term in a Marxist economics context?

tudorw• 10 years ago

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.

gambiting2• 10 years ago

Case in point - pre-ww2 governments collecting data about their citizens(religion, sexuality, race, political affiliation) which was then used to actually murder people by the Nazis. Just because the current government doesn't use the data in a malicious way doesn't mean the next one won't.

simonh• 10 years ago

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.

revscat• 10 years ago

This is well known and, for the most part, internalized by the people. Governments, however, seem to believe the opposite: that the fundamental goodness of their pursuit of protecting the governed justifies almost all tactics.

This is short-sighted and blatantly wrong.

studentrob17• 10 years ago

Right. We need to inform each other and our representatives how we feel about this issue, and support our argument with facts. There is a lot each of us can do. I suggest focusing on the security and economic implications of passing legislation requiring backdoors in phones. The DOJ and Obama will not listen to the privacy angle. It must be shown that on balance, we will not be more secure because criminals will just change to use technology that is encrypted, and in the mean time we will have placed our user data within reach of hackers everywhere via a government-imposed weakness that phone makers like Apple will never be allowed to fix. They'll be required by law to maintain such a weakness.

pasbesoin• 10 years ago

Fetish. Rubber hose "security". Coincidence?

tomlongson3• 10 years ago

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

tomlongson3• 10 years ago

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.

rubbingalcohol• 10 years ago

Speaking of transparency, Obama also secretly lobbied to kill FOIA transparency reform: https://freedom.press/blog/2016/03/new-documents-show-obama-...

SwimAway2• 10 years ago

Wow.

grandalf• 10 years ago

I think the following truth has a lot of relevance to your comment: the only way somebody gets elected president of the US is if it's a given that he or she will maintain the status quo on behalf of powerful interests.

Obama's campaign promises are as empty as those of any other politician. He's used his presidency to bring a windfall to the Halliburtons of healthcare and escalated the war on whistleblowers and the attack on privacy.

His successor will do the same.

We can hope that his supporters become appropriately disillusioned, but so much of politics is about loyalty in exchange for spoils, not ideas or accountability, so I'm not optimistic.

542458• 10 years ago

maintain the status quo on behalf of powerful interests.

I think "maintain" is the best-case scenario under the current system. "Shift dramatically in favour of" is the worst case, and that's primarily what I'm voting based on these days.

api2• 10 years ago

Policy wise Obama is close to a Rockefeller Republican. What people say during elections is entirely disposable.

enraged_camel2• 10 years ago

I'm giving Bernie Sanders one last chance. But if he is elected and also reneges on his promises, I will probably stop caring about politics permanently.

edit: Whoops! Shouldn't have revealed I'm a Bernie supporter. Forgot that HN is a libertarian paradise!

mtgx• 10 years ago

And once again we see what a bad idea it is for the US to only have two major political parties. If there was at least another major left-wing party, they could freely criticize Obama for acting more like a right-winger than a left-winger during his terms.

But the "supposed left-wing" Democrats can't do that right now even if they wanted to, because that would hurt their chances with the Democrats, and Independents are irrelevant in this context, as if they want to vote left-wing, they'll have no choice but to go Democrat anyway - even though Independents make up almost 50% of the country and could easily support at least another 2 major parties if they all were a little more organized and didn't get brainwashed into voting the same Democratic or Republican parties that they hate (and the reason they registered Independents).

theseatoms2• 10 years ago

What people say during elections is entirely disposable.

This is my hope re Trump.

jordanb• 10 years ago

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.

StavrosK• 10 years ago

If the president can't speak for online privacy because it's not a part of his world, poor people in the US are just fucked.

teddyh• 10 years ago

It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.

I always liked Václav Havel’s short speech from 1991 where he coined the phrase “power unto death”:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html

studentrob17• 10 years ago

I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs.

No doubt he will. But let's stay focused on the debate for now. He's still in office. There's still time to share facts with him.

He says he has a digital services team. Who holds those positions currently?

And who are his technology advisors? What are they saying on this issue? What have they shared with Obama?

From Obama's remarks, it sounds like he treats the digital services team more as a toolset, rather than a team of trusted advisors.

EDIT: The next PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) meeting will be on March 25 and webcast here [1]. No need to sign up, just visit that page on the date to view. I suggest we all watch this and submit questions to their group in advance.

They meet every other month. The last meeting was on January 15, which predates Comey's open letter to the public (Feb 21) about the San Bernardino case, so they have not yet publicly discussed encryption in light of what's happened since Comey's letter.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast

willholloway4• 10 years ago

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.

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.

That's going on the assumption that he had integrity in the first place and I'm no longer immune to considering the possibility that he did not and just played the voters for all it was worth.

For instance: someone with integrity would have returned an un-deserved Nobel peace prize.

Grishnakh7• 10 years ago

I'm not so sure about all this. Bernie's been in Washington for decades as a Congressman, so he's been exposed to the same stuff, and his worldview is completely different from Obama's. Before he was elected, Obama had very little experience in Washington; he didn't even serve a full Senate term, and mostly voted "present". He just told us what we wanted to hear, and didn't have much of a record backing up his rhetoric. Hillary, by contrast, has a lengthy record, but it backs up all the worst actions that Obama has shown, but worse. Bernie has an even lengthier record but unlike Hillary there's no indication of corruption and his record is pretty much all good from a liberal perspective.

spoiledtechie3• 10 years ago

Bull, he was always this way. He lies just like every other politician. Get over your lust for him and see through it.

gcb02• 10 years ago

in other words, we are OK with the man elected to represent us for a few years to live like an alien.

there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration.

eggy3• 10 years ago

I think Obama had that in his character years before he even ran for President, so I think it is an easy out to say he was corrupted by the system in Washington. Basic character doesn't just do a 180. Granted, your ideals may be softened by coming up against those who oppose them, but they do not reverse and hide under the covers. All politicians promise many beautiful things, but they have their agendas. Under Obama drone strikes have multiplied in several nations we are not even at war with, and stayed out of the news for the most part, and he has not been made accountable in the slightest. Through his representatives it has been made clear that he wants Snowden to return and face espionage charges. Even if that is the way to face the government, he did not offer any of his take on it to say otherwise. I am very untrusting of most, if not all, politicians, since I see it is a game for people to gain and feel powerful. I do not idealize candidates in the slightest. Trump polarizes people, and I do not like him in the slightest; I know where he stands though. With Obama his rhetoric and his actions are not in sync.

kobayashi• 10 years ago

I find your train of thought to be rather belittling and infantilizing of a man who, by all accounts, is quite brilliant (regardless of views on his politics, it's a commonly held position). Now, sure, people are affected by the circumstances in which they live, but you've framed it as though Obama has been hoodwinked by nefarious and persistent forces. Personally, I disagree with President Obama's crypto policies, but I don't assume that he came to his positions out of anything but a thoughtful reading of intelligence briefings and alike.

jonathanmh6• 10 years ago

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.

I completely agree, I bet it's not a great job most of the time and a really different and isolated world.

graycat4• 10 years ago

Ah, come ON: It was plenty clear just what the heck Obama was well before and during the election. E.g., Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and his other buddies. Then, during the campaign where he was campaigning and on a stage with Hillary and Bill Richardson and the US National Anthem was playing, Hillery and Bill had their hands over their hearts and Obama had his hands together and below his belt. Then there was his "my Muslim faith". Then on his apology tour where he bowed down to the heads of China, France, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

What did you expect?

coldtea4• 10 years ago

Actually all of these sound like excellent gestures.

Not playing to BS patriotism and phony sentiment by having his hands "together and below his belt"? Daring to say "my muslim faith" (haven't heard of that, so I kinda doubt it, but still). Bowing in respect to heads of other nations, instead of playing the "greatest nation on earth"?

All of these all excellent.

It's all the OTHER stuff that's bad about what he did.

spoiledtechie3• 10 years ago

I'm soo very surprised after all this, you still hold him such high esteem. When he was and is exactly like every other politician.

rdl2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if anyone could really stand up to the rest of Washington for 8 years, without going in as such a zealot in some way that you might not really want them as President.

Ted Cruz/Paul Ryan/Ron Paul might be the closest thing to that. Bernie Sanders, maybe, although I'd have a hard time seeing him maintain an 8 year long fight. Everyone else is basically establishment to some degree (Trump doesn't strike me as ideological as much as opportunist++, although certainly different in style than the others.)

(And maybe you want someone reasonable/rational/etc. but not ideological as President.)

rapind4• 10 years ago

I think Sanders could maintain. I could be wrong, but he has a pretty long record of doing the right thing (from my perspective) and I'm not sure what else you're supposed to vote for if not his / her record? Charisma? Promises? Anger?

ap222133• 10 years ago

Disclosure: I liked Obama as candidate, and I've liked him as president.

I haven't always been happy with some of his decisions and policies. But, my guess is that he's constantly being whispered the worst case scenarios.

A president probably feels responsibility for the well being of hundreds of millions of people. And, all that it takes are a few highly polished ex-lobbiest communicators whispering, 'if you won't strengthen this program, Mr. President, then a terrorist will unleash a dirty bomb on the east coast and injure tens of millions.' Who would want to be responsible for that? 'Oh, just wiretap citizens? I guess that doesn't seem too bad if it's an either-or-decision.'

Unfortunately, I don't see a way out of this mess. Bin Laden won when he turned the US into a 24-7 terror watch. Now, we live by fear and over-protection against an enemy that we can't see.

ocdtrekkie• 10 years ago

This is actually why I'm so hesitant on Bernie Sanders. I'm seeing the same campaign promises, the same basic ideas, the same wild support base. And I can't help but think we're about to face the exact same result.

I voted for Obama twice. I regret both.

rapind4• 10 years ago

Voting for promises is IMO meaningless. Same shit, different day. Instead, look at a candidate's history and base your vote on that. Unfortunately that takes more effort than most are willing to spend, but I can't think of a better way to estimate what they will do in the future.

Could you imagine what that would do to politics if everyone voted based solely on a candidate's record instead of promises and charisma?

chadzawistowski• 10 years ago

Liberty literally means "freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control"

According to who? The definition of liberty is still a matter of philosophical debate, as far as I understand it.

jonathanmh6• 10 years ago

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

shitgoose• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

aldeluis• 10 years ago

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

http://www.lasexta.com/programas/el-objetivo/noticias/entrev...

dawkins• 10 years ago

Thank you

awqrre2• 10 years ago

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

thom3• 10 years ago

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]

beeboop8• 10 years ago

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.

thom3• 10 years ago

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.

Grishnakh7• 10 years ago

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

Um, this is pretty easy to refute: we've been complaining about copyright and DRM for ages now, and not only are they not waning, they're at least as strong now as they've ever been. There's no indication whatsoever that copyright law is going anywhere or being relaxed in any way, in fact it's the opposite. Sure, it's generally easy to copy digital stuff (absent DRM), but that doesn't make it legal, nor has the internet become a free-for-all (quite the opposite in fact; it's more dangerous to commit copyright violations now than ever I think). Same goes for DRM: despite all the complaints, DRM is still present in many places, and you still need to use it for things like watching Netflix. It is possible to defeat it (I'm not going to say technically easy though, because a lot of it is unbroken), but what the DRM-users have proven to us is that it's non-trivial now, and more importantly it only has to be "good enough": as long as it prevents most users from doing something the copyright holder doesn't want, that's all they really care about.

thom3• 10 years ago

I don't really recognise any of what you're describing here - it's trivial to download almost any copyrighted work in seconds, for free, and basically nobody suffers any consequences for doing so.

Even so, it was just an analogy. There's very little stopping people just following you round recording you on their smartphone as it is. When it's semi-autonomous flying robots the size of a grain of rice, I don't believe you are going to have much legal recourse.

x5n1• 10 years ago

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.

downandout• 10 years ago

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...

[2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/senator-mccain-joins-...

beeboop8• 10 years ago

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.

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

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).

Zigurd• 10 years ago

One of the best ways to make such actions fail is to proliferate strong encryption in OTT messaging and for system software makers to create interfaces that enable third parties to make encryption products for all purposes including voice calls.

Making broad swathes of widely used software into contraband will be a law enforcement nightmare.

studentrob17• 10 years ago

I'm not convinced this will get past our Congress. Lindsey Graham is also not convinced [1]

The reason the Apple case is in the courts is nobody wanted to put their name on this encryption bill without understanding it. Feinstein is one of the only ones willing to so far [2]. Basically, any politician who feels they are at about the end of their career might put forth such legislation, but all the others know it'd be suicide.

[1] https://youtu.be/uk4hYAwCdhU?t=1m44s

[2] http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016...

thoughtsimple• 10 years ago

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."

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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...

eigenvector4• 10 years ago

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.

over2• 10 years ago

That's a really good point, it's like provoking someone until they scream at you and then accusing them of being unreasonable.

ossreality• 10 years ago

... 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.

eigenvector4• 10 years ago

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...

studentrob17• 10 years ago

dragnet surveillance of nearly all communications. That's not the bargain the public has had with law enforcement

I'm not sure this is the argument to make to Obama and the DOJ. They are already framing this as a privacy issue

The factors they understand are the public safety and economic impacts. Let us speak to those points and allow privacy to be a secondary concern. Obama himself told President Xi last year that the exact same policies would dramatically hurt Xi's economy [1]

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china-idUSKBN0LY...

brudgers• 10 years ago

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.

plcancel• 10 years ago

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...

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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

Mandatum• 10 years ago

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).

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

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.

mattmanser• 10 years ago

They can still plant bugs in offices, cars, homes, etc. That's specific and targeted and proportional, but expensive and hard.

There's no good reason they have to have access to electronic devices, they can install cameras and mics. It's just easier going straight to the phones and emails.

But they had that power and they abused it massively, and are now suffering the backlash, and why should privacy stop given they've demonstrated they can't be proportional in their surveillance?

They were not specific with what they got from the phones and emails, so they've demonstrated they're not responsible or measured and now strong encryption is necessary as government has clearly shown that secret courts === warrantless mass surveillance.

The other thing that's clear is that the US couldn't care less about privacy for anyone not in the US, so all us non-US citizen need this encryption to protect us from your peeping tom government.

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

So you're in favor of the government bugging and installing cameras secretly? Because you can't really bug say, Enron's corporate office without a warrant served, and so they'd know they're being watched.

The alternative is breaking and entering. So since retroactive paper trails will be devalued, the government will have to switch to preemptive collection and entrapment scenarios.

I'm not sure this is better for privacy or democracy.

jes5199• 10 years ago

100% impregnable, and people maintain good OpSec

fortunately, that never happens. Even the strongest defenses consistently fall to human error

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

Yup. Just as Dredd Pirate Roberts. :) Satoshi Nakamoto is probably the only one I've seen to successfully do near perfect OpSec.

eigenvector4• 10 years ago

You're completely right that there are undesirable consequences to mathematically absolute privacy that can't be compromised by any means. But I'd argue that the government has brought this scenario upon itself by blowing up the old system of procedural (rather than mathematical) safeguards.

In the past, Apple had your iMessage data, or at least the ability to decrypt it on-demand. It was understood that this data would be private by default, but would be disclosed to the government through an established, case-by-case process supervised by the courts. Everyone was pretty much OK with this. You and I got our data kept private, unless there was some material, specific reason for the government to suspect it was related to a crime. The government got to dump the data of people under investigation, if a court thought there was good reason to do so.

Then the government went nuclear. They said, here's a National Security Letter that compels you to give us everything you have. Bulk data. Any cooperation that is physically possible. You can't talk about it and you can't appeal to the courts. If you have to capability to MiTM all of your users and pipe everything to us, you have to do it. No oversight, no transparency and no safeguards. Whatever we do with the data is up to us.

In this context, what alternative do tech companies have besides to similarly escalate and build systems that make it physically impossible for them to cooperate?

The government destroyed the social compact between telecom providers and law enforcement with forced, secret bulk surveillance. If the government is willing to step back and make binding, unequivocal commitments that companies that do maintain the ability to decrypt their users' communications won't be forced to secretly use them en masse, maybe we can go back to the old status quo. But the government doesn't seem willing to do that. They want cooperation, but they also want the ability to bust in the back door with an NSL and say "give us everything, on everyone."

The legal system has become so tilted in the government's favour (see: the inability to challenge the constitutionality of bulk surveillance, because you can't prove it happened to you), that companies will no longer trust in the old procedural safeguards. The only thing we can trust is the mathematically proven safety of encryption. And that's the government's fault. So now we are forced to chose between absolute privacy and zero privacy.

So far, I think Apple is making the right choice.

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

I'm in favor of Apple's choices, but I can see the government's side of this too, I don't think it's as cut and dried morally as people are making it. I like to mentally "game out" repercussions of various scenarios to see where they lead, and I don't think it is bad with such wide sweeping and powerful technologies, to play devils advocate and argue on both sides.

A lot of people don't seem to want get into the fine details and debate at all. They just want to declare absolute privacy, like absolute freedom of speech, a done deal, and move on. I think there are interesting sociological, economic, and political issues to discuss not to curtail debate like that.

I also don't like the way the sides are demonized. Perhaps the end result is to enact a shift in the way police work is done and the way regulations are prosecuted. Perhaps the government can rule that privacy is a right only for personal communications, and does not apply to computers used for business sectors that are regulated. They can mandate anti-privacy, mandate transparency and paper trails, for say, health insurers, or makers of chemicals.

But the nuance and fine details need to be worked out.

BWStearns2• 10 years ago

This is largely overblown though. Even with unfettered access to great and easy to use crypto your society doesn't collapse. It turns out that maintaining anonymity is a giant pain in the ass, no more people are going to go full on tinfoil ghost on society to dodge taxes any more than they already disappear and live off the grid. Most businesses are easier to conduct in public and even derive benefit from it.

Regulatory enforcement is fairly easy: in order to have a license to operate your coal plant, you agree to hand over documents x, y, z. If in your crypto-dystopia I handed over encrypted docs instead of the plaintext for my coal plant I would just have my business fined out of existence just like would happen now.

If I have incriminating documents and no crypto I'm not going to encrypt them, I'm going to slag the hard drives they're on and burn the paper copies.

If you're a public official: make it illegal to use encryption beyond the provided email encryption (which the agency IT dept can also read). I think you can make the case that it is already illegal since an internally encrypted message that you refuse to decrypt (at the request of a superior, a court, or investigation) would have to have been misuse of gov't property (your first amendment rights do not allow you to use government systems for private use and you explicitly have no privacy with respect to the scenario mentioned above when you use them).

People have always had plenty of ways to be shitheads and get away with it, and there have always been mechanisms to make those decisions costly. These things continue to be true despite the presence of strong crypto.

The reason an "absolutist" position here makes sense is because this is a binary choice between everyone legally having security, or no one legally having security. Until now we haven't had to make this choice because neither was an option, we just all existed in a vague middle ground dictated by our circumstances, number of shits given, and technical acumen. True, you might not have had access to cryptography, but you didn't have data to encrypt so you lost nothing by having no encryption. Now everyone has a lot to lose but not everyone realizes that.

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

The issue isn't that they won't hand over documents x,y,z, they'll just hand over fake documents x, y, and z, while the real documents remain encrypted. When the government asks why they can't read files Real_X, Real_y, and Real_Z, they'll claim they're private email communications between employees, and that you can't force them to turn over the keys.

But in reality, they were secret bribery emails between corporate executives and local politicians.

Prior to cryptography, you could pull this off as well, you could have fake books. Hide the real books offsite so warrants can't find them, etc. Cryptography doesn't change whether it's possible to do or not, it just makes it easier to do and scales better.

I mean, even the Nazi's could have used one time pads by carrier pigeon if they wanted to, Enigma wasn't even needed. But the logistics of doing it are less convenient.

As cryptography becomes more universal, more automatic, more user friendly, OpSec will become less of a burden for less diligent people.

Infact, we hope it does, because sloppy OpSec is a huge problem for society right now. Just look at passwords.

revelation• 10 years ago

Way to burn a strawman the height of Mount Everest. Nobody is asking for cryptoanarchy, just freedom of backdoored communication.

In any case, I surely hope my bank is already practicing that kind of opsec. That doesn't mean they suddenly stop giving reports to the government. Why would it? That's just.. what?

coldtea4• 10 years ago

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.

And there's nothing preventing law enforcement to find about these by tons of other means, including checking suspected bank transactions with a warrant.

People determined to communicate without anyone hearing, e.g. to setup their tax-haven accouts-- can do it in 2000 ways. Mass surveillance is about all the others who casually exchange data and discussions.

The end result of going full tilt on crypto is cryptoanarchy.

That sounds like, but is not, a thing.

cromwellian9• 10 years ago

"People determined to communicate without anyone hearing, e.g. to setup their tax-haven accouts-- can do it in 2000 ways."

That's pretty much the argument made against any gun regulation, because pretty much anyone who wants to commit a gun crime can find a workaround.

"including checking suspected bank transactions with a warrant"

Assuming one is not using cryptocurrency like bitcoin to store money and make transactions.

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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

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

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

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

skybrian2• 10 years ago

"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.

pas• 10 years ago

cryptoanarchy and Democracy are on a collision course

Yes, though I'd like to see your argument for that.

However, the failure mode of crypto-anarchy is perfectly secret digital companies arising, who then proceed to affect the real world for digital currency. (Such as a hitman, or an army of anonymous mercenaries conducting irregular warfare for hire.) So, basically large scale terrorism.

Probably much better than the failure mode of a bit overzealous police state.

some of the same people who constantly criticize Swiss bank accounts, Cayman island financial shenanigans.

That's their shortsightedness. There are ways to tax that don't rely on looking into people's bank accounts. And a lot of the current expenditures could be replaced by projects that require proof of payment. So, you need to show a proof of payment otherwise no school for your kids, no healthcare, no pension, you can't use public roads, etc. And people can vote to enforce collection of money, just like now, foreclosure and repossession works on physical things.

companies

People can vote to make records keeping mandatory (just like now), and employees have it in their interest to get things in writing. Otherwise they (also) go to jail if they did something really stupid. (It was an order is not an acceptable defense for some time.)

Will Democracy be able to audit nothing of the interactions of citizens or our institutions in the future?

As it was unable to do so before digital records. And as it is unable to do so for criminal organizations.

And since cryptography exists and computing is becoming more and more accessible, it's getting easier and easier to maintain a secret organization with a secret ledger.

So, all in all, it's a bad thing to rely on those backdoors. It's not even a stopgap measure.

erkkie• 10 years ago

This as an argument is completely crazy and similarly absolutist.

Having access to proper crypto at all, as an option, does not mean everything will inevitably be encrypted and not controlled for. Companies will still have the power to set their own device rules and so on. There's plenty of existing laws in place to allow for any kind of reporting still happen; you do not need to break all crypto forever.

mikeash8• 10 years ago

Unbreakable encryption isn't new. One-time pads have been around for a long time. Book ciphers can be impenetrable when done properly. And there's always the tried-and-true technique of simply never writing anything down, and doing everything face to face. Even if you argue that this is too difficult and you need something modern and easy to use, uncrackable encryption programs have been available for maybe two decades now.

Yet regulators seem to still be able to get the information they need. They're often nearly toothless, but that's because of politics, not technology.

stillsut• 10 years ago

Absolutely right. Imagine a white man goes on a spree shooting with hate-crime elements. We are trying to find out if more of these attacks will occur

Now the suspect's money is in a Goldman Sachs account and the bank tells the gov't they couldn't just break into their client's financial records and find out who transferred them money. This is a "secret trust" account where nobody - not even Goldman employees - can recover transnational records. What kind of precedent would that set? What about if China wanted to find out bank transactions?

Some say this is hate-crime is one of the worst in decades and it's worth finding out if we are at risk for more. Opponents say banking privacy is an absolute right.

Can anyone tell me if they story ran in national news, the CEO of Goldman would not be facing charges of treason right now?

Patronus_Charm• 10 years ago

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

threeseed• 10 years ago

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.

awqrre2• 10 years ago

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.

basicplus2• 10 years ago

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

studentrob17• 10 years ago

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...

a3n• 10 years ago

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.

wl• 10 years ago

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.

exabrial• 10 years ago

"You don't need encryption"

"You don't need a gun"

Oddly enough both are classified as munitions.

1024core• 10 years ago

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.

Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones

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