Give Congress Time to Debate New Government Hacking Rule

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/give-congress-time-debate-new-government-hacking-rule

71 29 10 years ago

lightbyte• 10 years ago

"Neither the Senate nor the House held a hearing or a markup on the relevant committees to evaluate these changes," Coons said.
Wyden countered the defense of the rule change we often hear from law enforcement officials that letting investigators hack into computers around the world is only small, procedural tweak.

Both these statements give me very little faith in what our government will do over the next 4-8 years.

hga8• 10 years ago

While I doubt it will give us any joy on this issue, Trump's presidency will be a failure unless he successfully takes on the Uniparty establishment that operates, or rather not, like this.

I don't think his vanity will allow him to fail without making a really serious and ongoing effort, and those who deny his effectiveness and ability are by and large those who claimed he'd never get win nomination or the election.

So, my advise is don't despair quite yet. Heck, perhaps wait until 2018 to see if he doesn't run a campaign against a "Do Nothing Congress" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress). Aside from Reince Priebus and that part of the RNC which followed Priebus, he owes the political establishment nothing.

vkou4• 10 years ago

He owes the political establishment nothing, yet his cabinet picks are all dyed-in-the-wool Republican insiders.

The claim sounds incompatible with reality.

tw04• 10 years ago

Which cabinet nomination have you heard that gives you a belief that's going to happen? Outside of his "drain the swamp" rhetoric, what specific announcement/pre-announcement has he made to back your claims?

So far I've seen all of his cabinet picks going to "establishment" folks, and his supreme court nomination is supposedly going to be based solely on abortion, with no thought whatsoever given to citizen united (you know, the one thing he could actually do to start getting money back out of politics).

marricks2• 10 years ago

Wyden is usually so good on security, depressing to see him defend this rule, is there more to what he said?

knd775• 10 years ago

He's not defending the rule. I think you've misunderstood that quote.

kej• 10 years ago

People supporting the rule change are calling it a minor tweak, and Wyden is saying it's "an enormous policy shift." Wyden is still on your side on this one.

BadApple1981• 10 years ago

More of the status quo. Just codified.

ramblenode• 10 years ago

The rule actually makes sense in a vacuum; tying warrants to geographical jurisdictions is a relic of a pre-internet age. The real problem is more fundamental: judge shopping. If the rule change goes ahead as planned, authorities will have an inexhaustible menu of magistrates spanning the whole country to whom they can appeal for a warrant. There needs to be 1) some randomization process for assigning warrant requests to judges, and 2) a way of factoring in any past denials for a warrant in future re-requests.

superkuh• 10 years ago

I think you're forgetting the other, more important, aspect of this change. It gives enforcers of the government the legal ability to get 1 generic warrant and then hack tens of thousands of people with that one warrant just because they are using network protocols that make them anonymous.

3pt14159• 10 years ago

Mostly true.

The other issue with this is that with a traditional warrant you know that they are gaining access. You might not be happy with it, they may have even busted down the door on the way in, but whatever damage was done was done once.

With this they break in (potentially damaging your systems), they take your data (potentially in ways that could leak it to other parties), store it (potentially insecurely), and even though your operations are compromised you have no idea.

Who is on the hook when the FBI leaks your SSH keys after they used a 0day to break into your machine and vacuum up everything on the HD? What if those keys are used to issue a software update that crashes every one of your businesses self driving cars all at once?

hga8• 10 years ago

Note also how poorly the government protects so many of its crown jewels of data. Like those OPM security clearance records. And need I mention Mr. Snowden, or Sidney Blumenthal, who didn't hold any sort of clearance, cutting and pasting NSA GAMMA material? If you can't trust the NSA, who can you trust ^_^?

tzs3• 10 years ago

Aren't those issues already present under the current rule, when a magistrate judge in the district in which the target computer resides issues a warrant to remotely break in to that computer?

This rule is just dealing with who can issue a warrant, not with what can be done once a warrant is issued.

tzs3• 10 years ago

The rule actually makes sense in a vacuum; tying warrants to geographical jurisdictions is a relic of a pre-internet age. The real problem is more fundamental: judge shopping.

Note that this only removes the tie to geography in two circumstances:

1. The location of the targeted data has been "concealed through technological means", or

2. the crime being investigated is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the damaged computers are in five or more districts.

tzs3• 10 years ago

A much more useful take on this rule change than the EFF's comes from the Center for Democracy and Technology: https://cdt.org/insight/issue-brief-proposed-changes-to-rule...

Unlike most groups that have written against this rule change, CDT actually proposes modifications to address their concerns that would still let the rule address the problem that it is trying to solve, which is a very real problem.

Give Congress Time to Debate New Government Hacking Rule

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