As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national%2dsecurity/as-encryption-spreads-us-worries-about-access-to-data-for-investigations/2015/04/10/7c1c7518-d401-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html

by jakobdabo • 11 years ago

87 100 11 years ago

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MichaelCrawford• 11 years ago

Among my concerns are those working for legitimate political change. I expect that's because I have very vivid memories of Watergate, as well as some memories of the Vietnam War protests.

larzang• 11 years ago

There's no need to even go back that far. The treatment of David Miranda, Manning's imprisonment, Kiriakou's imprisonment, Snowden's ensured imprisonment should he ever leave the safety of his current umbrella, continued harassment and infiltration of anarchist and leftist orgs in California and Oregon and elsewhere by all levels of law enforcement.

The FBI continues to disproportionately expend resources on environmental groups despite no cases of loss of life from green direct action, while admitting themselves that right-wing militias present a greater domestic threat than even the dreaded foreign terrorism they're so happy to prove they're protecting us from by spending years deliberately radicalizing and then entrapping harmless fools.

Law enforcement motivations cannot be ever trusted when it comes to your privacy.

danielschonfeld2• 11 years ago

Law enforcement in its current form can't be trusted period. It's too biased with its own political and financial agendas and does very little in terms of law enforcing and too much of concocting.

If mental healthcare got a sliver of the attention and budgets defense+LE get i personally think we'd all be better off.

olefoo• 11 years ago

We need to start having key signing parties. And we need better software to manage and run them.

No key escrow proposal (which the multi-party proposal in this article is) will ever be safe. If the key can be assembled, it can be cached; and as we've seen in the past decade it's very hard for any agency to deny itself surveillance powers.

diyorgasms• 11 years ago

Let's suppose for a minute that there is some legislation put forth forcing encryption to have back doors inserted, or some other sort of key escrow. Why would anyone with the know-how and a privacy concern not just write an implementation of a known crypto algorithm?

Essentially, how would this legislation do anything but compromise the security of law-abiding people while not at all reducing the capabilities of those the US government wishes to stop?

eternalban3• 11 years ago

In my opinion this is all smoke. No algorithm that I am aware of exists that protects a mobile software agent running on a hostile platform.

   algo: add 2 2
   comp: 5!

cortesoft• 11 years ago

Seriously, it is way too late for this. You can't change the math, which is what crypto is. Now that people know it, you can somehow remove that information from the world.

4bpp5• 11 years ago

I always found examples such as the one with the trucker, which keep getting brought up in this context, extremely disingenuous. The same sort of argument could easily be used for any tactic that ever resulted in anyone being convicted for something they most likely did - in a hypothetical alternative scenario, they might just as well have been extolling the benefits of torture by saying how after having a few of his fingernails pulled out, the scumbag trucker was more than happy to confess to his crimes.

Nobody is doubting that giving the prosecutors more powers to produce incriminating material will produce more convictions. Emotionally charged anecdotes like this just serve to distract from the discussion about proportionality and possible abuses that we should be having, while providing no relevant information.

IBM• 11 years ago

I don't think it's an unfair argument. The assault by the trucker happened and evidence of it existed on the phone. In the post-iOS 8 world that evidence would be unavailable. It's the difference between him getting off or not (or likely getting off depending on the circumstantial evidence).

4bpp5• 11 years ago

Sure, but this is not being disputed. It's just such an obvious proposition that I'd argue making it adds nothing to the discussion, while taking attention away from the counterpoints that would (and slowly conditioning the reader to think that "who does it allow us to convict that we would like to see convicted?" is the most important benchmark to apply to legal principles).

mckiddy• 11 years ago

The evidence also wouldn't be available if he simply hadn't recorded the videos in the first place.

drdeca• 11 years ago

I don't understand why it would be reasonable to require that the phone have a backdoor which allows them to access the data if they have a warrant for that specifically, but not reasonable to require someone to give up the the password under contempt of court if they have a warrant for that specifically.

Not that I necessarily think either is reasonable, but I don't understand in what way the second would be worse? I suppose if a person turned out to have not committed a crime, and there was a warrant against them, if they were required to give up their password, they might fail to remember it?

Is that risk worse or lesser than the risk of authorities being able to e.g. get data without a warrant via the backdoor?

I'm not really sure?

danielschonfeld2• 11 years ago

another disingenuous thing about that example is that law enforcement, really didn't do anything special. they got lucky, by the criminal's own stupidity. in other words, law enforcement really didn't do much in terms of law enforcing, by utilizing power that were available to them and will now be stripped away in an all encrypted world.

in the new world, the criminal could just as likely do something stupid that will cause the data to be unencrypted and for them to find the damning evidence.

csandreasen16• 11 years ago

In a sense, all evidence is the result of the criminal's own stupidity and all crimes are solved based on law enforcement getting lucky. If the criminals were smart, they wouldn't leave any evidence behind.

The issue from law enforcement's perspective is that there is now a class of evidence that was previously accessible to them, but is no longer accessible not because the criminal got smarter, but because Apple said the police shouldn't have access to it.

A warrant is already required to search a cell phone. Is there any reason why a cop shouldn't be allowed to search a phone when they went to court, presented their probable cause to a judge and was subsequently issued a warrant?

bickfordb• 11 years ago

I think it's also important to point out that this sort of evidence didn't exist until very recently. Before smartphones with video capability existed, the FBI wasn't insisting that technology companies develop them and that consumers adopt them. Now that we have them they're insisting that we give them unencrypted access to incriminate ourselves.

ctdonath2• 11 years ago

Nonetheless, the American Founding Fathers recognized the core problem and addressed it in a clear comprehensive manner: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In no way could that be construed as permitting federal requirement that personal communications & records be arbitrarily accessible by law enforcement agents on a "fishing expedition".

YokoZar• 11 years ago

Let's be fair, the police are actually very concerned about privacy and ubiquitous recording when it's of on-duty police behavior.

vamur• 11 years ago

Wonder if the arguments will be the same once there is tech to read human brains.

mrbabbage• 11 years ago

Two main thoughts:

Hailed as a victory for consumer privacy and security, the development dismayed law enforcement officials, who said it threatens what they describe as a centuries-old social compact in which the government, with a warrant based on probable cause, may seize evidence relevant to criminal investigations.

This is an interesting perspective. I tend to view this the opposite way. Until spring 2013, we tended to believe that the state doesn't rummage around in the private lives of individual citizens, except for warranted investigations of a few tax cheats, drug dealers, racketeers, and the like. Snowden's disclosures were a massive trust-loss event, and both companies and individuals will be loath to offer any concession to law enforcement without a clear demonstration of good faith and limited access to private data.

I'm also glad to see this perspective from the top cybersecurity advisor at NIST:

“The basic question is, is it possible to design a completely secure system” to hold a master key available to the U.S. government but not adversaries, said Donna Dodson, chief cybersecurity adviser at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technologies. “There’s no way to do this where you don’t have unintentional vulnerabilities.”

Personally, I'm hoping the United States eventually realizes Dodson is right and that preserving both individual security and law-enforcement access is futile. Hopefully the United States will give up on these key escrow / split key schemes and let meatspace force break encryption on a warranted, rare basis as investigations require.

bcg1• 11 years ago

Until spring 2013, we tended to believe that the state doesn't rummage around in the private lives of individual citizens

Not sure if I'm taking your comment the wrong way, if so I apologize... but a lot of us have known for quite a bit longer than spring 2013

staunch• 11 years ago

“I don’t want a back door,” Rogers, the director of the nation’s top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. “I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.”

This kind of Orwellian doublespeak coming from officials in power should give all sane people pause.

But, even if our right to privacy was not enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, it would not be possible for any government to have their intrusion into our private lives enforced in the long term. Computers have the means to afford people true privacy and they will have it, without respect to those who would deny it.

eternalban3• 11 years ago

Consider the software on "your" machine as a mobile agent running on a potentially hostile platform. Now please tell me again how "Computers have the means to afford people true privacy and they will have it, without respect to those who would deny it."

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Long term? Smaller and cheaper devices means people are even more easily spied upon. Privacy must be handled as a sacred law, because technology will blow past it. We simply leak too much information as a matter of physics.

eternalban3• 11 years ago

Privacy must be handled as a sacred law

Fully agree with this. Technology is merely an amplifying factor here. If a society is healthy, then applications of technologies of the day are non-issues.

Just keep in mind that 1776 would not have been a meaningful year if the founders could not even "assemble" and discuss legitimate grievances without fear of being subject to misuse of state power. This is why we have a 4th amendment.

anonymousab2• 11 years ago

Computers have the means to afford people true privacy

Computers whose design and construction, from end to end, are fully subject to the tampering of the people trying to deny said privacy?

philfrasty• 11 years ago

Can anyone recommend a good read discussing the relationship between security and privacy?

junto• 11 years ago

I think they have already quite well demonstrated their total disregard for the public's privacy. Now that the horse has bolted they now suddenly realise that they have backed themselves into a dark nasty corner, where everything is going to be encrypted within a few days years.

Sorry, but you have to earn trust and they are unlikely to get it back. Just look at the way geeks look at Microsoft.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

Ugh, that just makes me think that when the NSA will start using "modern graphics" in its slides (since everyone seems to be mocking it over that now) and maybe open source some non-critical spying tools, many will start calling it the "new" (and better) NSA and even start cheering for it.

DickingAround• 11 years ago

Yes. There isn't some big debate going on. The feds did a bad thing by looking in people's bedroom windows. Now people are shutting their blinds. It's not a debate. It's a response. The feds can mandate that people open the windows again but then there will be no more undressing in front of them. The peep show is over.

arto• 11 years ago

As Jacob Appelbaum observes in the documentary Citizenfour, "What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead."

higherpurpose2• 11 years ago

That's powerful, and probably accurate.

ipsin• 11 years ago

The use of Stingrays (IMSI catchers) and the DEA's collection of international phone records for almost 20 years are more examples of how any power given to law enforcement or the Federal government will be abused, and that abuse will be actively hidden from view.

You can't "find a balance" when the scales are hidden.

cm21872• 11 years ago

And the problem with data is that they store it. You don't just have to trust the current government, you have to trust all the governments for the next 50 years. At least in Europe, History tells us that a democracy can rapidly turn into a violent dictatorship.

PythonicAlpha• 11 years ago

Do you really think, that this can only happen in Europe? (I know, that you meant history, but I am wondering, if humans are so much more democratic in the US? I for my part am sure, that in my country there can be a violent (or covered) dictorship again very soon).

spiritplumber• 11 years ago

Safety, security, laziness, pick two.

p01926• 11 years ago

If the FBI wanted car manufacturers to design seat belts and airbags with murderers and rapists in mind, it wouldn't have taken months of debate to reject the idea. Just because we've entered the domains math and CS, we get months of dithering, contemplating whether or not to force domestic companies to install complex new self-destruct functions into their products.

Al-Qaeda have been using Mujahedeen Secrets — a Windows-based encryption app — since 2007. Legislators should test whether potential new laws can have any impact on such uncontroversially abhorrent software. If, like split keys, they fail the Mujahedeen Secrets test, they can only damage our collective security.

woah• 11 years ago

What is abhorrent about this software?

stuartd• 11 years ago

Nothing, according to Bruce Schneier - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_se... - perhaps OP just doesn't like encryption when used by bad guys.

tmalsburg25• 11 years ago

As a European, I'm totally in favor of a mandatory backdoor for the US government. It would do wonders to the development of the European IT industry because many governments and cooperations could not continue using US-based IT products. The amount of hubris required to force a backdoor on a global industry and market is really breathtaking and I think the US would shoot themselves in the foot if they tried doing that. It's not like there is a law of nature that makes software development outside of the US impossible.

enupten2• 11 years ago

Well, it's not just the US; the Chinese are doing it too.

tmalsburg25• 11 years ago

The difference is that the vast majority of IT products used in Europe and elsewhere are from the US not China.

morgante• 11 years ago

The UK is already trying to force a back door, so I unfortunately think this destructive thinking is spreading globally.

tmalsburg25• 11 years ago

Not destructive all all, this will rather bring us much-needed diversity to replace a US-centric monoculture. It will also pave the way for the triumph of free software which will prove to be much more resilient against such efforts than proprietary software.

bdcravens• 11 years ago

Would companies based in the US not ship a different version of their products that are exported? What would it mean for companies outside of the US. A large number of the products and services my company uses are from European countries.

It's not like there is a law of nature that makes software development outside of the US impossible.

Of course, see what I said above. I think what makes the US attractive for software development is the VC industry and culture there; a quick browse of founders in SF will reveal a ton of immigrants attracted to that culture.

tmalsburg25• 11 years ago

Would companies based in the US not ship a different version of their products that are exported?

They can of course try that but their clients have little reasons to trust them. Apart from that it might be very costly to develop, test, and distribute two versions of each product and to maintain compatibility, all of which puts US companies at a disadvantage.

There is already plenty of evidence for the idea that the privacy crisis helps the European industry. Many new businesses in several European countries are successfully selling privacy-reserving software and services and their future crucially depends on the trust of their customers, so they have to take privacy serious in ways that US companies don't have to, at least for now.

enupten2• 11 years ago

Is there really any "security" lost ? I mean, last I checked, the NSA had little to show for all the snooping around (other than possible economic benefits).

nateabele• 11 years ago

“What we’re concerned about is the technology risks” bringing the country to a point where the smartphone owner alone, who may be a criminal or terrorist, has control of the data [...]

Wow, it's almost like criminals and terrorists would be secure in their persons and effects, as would the rest of us!

Then law enforcement and the TLAs might actually have to do real, actual investigative work. Oh, darn.

voidlogic• 11 years ago

I don't get it (aka hate it), any sophisticated government adversary (terror groups, organized crime, etc) will simply use the existing strong security measures that the government cannot crack (since they have no escrowed key).

To me that means this measure isn't about the boggy-man of terrorism, etc rather its about everyday criminal investigations. I think people are (overly) willing to give up their liberties when faced with the major boggy-man threats, but I think convincing the public to give up liberty to catch the pot dealer down the street or the dude embezzling from mega-corp is going to be a much harder sell politically.

cyphunk3• 11 years ago

giving tools that help law enforcement do their job is a good thing. but if those tools are so easily replaced by current market or future market alternatives then pushing for those tools just kills your industry.

anonymousab2• 11 years ago

It seems like encryption methods that rely on the government, like some sort of government-run key escrow, are the inevitable solution. Corporations are relatively secure from malicious threats and the government gets the access it wants.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

Bad actors won't respect the ban on effective encryption tools. So giving the government keys expends massive resources and doesn't actually solve the problem that it proposes to solve.

moe• 11 years ago

This whole debate is a red herring.

The NSA already has backdoors[1][2] in your Desktop OS (Windows, OSX), in your mobile OS (Android, iOS), in your smartphone hardware (Qualcomm Baseband), in your ISPs network hardware (Cisco, Juniper), in your server hardware (Dell), in your network hardware (most router firmwares), and there's rumors they have backdoors in Intel and AMD CPUs, too.

Why would they be concerned about encryption that runs on top of hard- and software that they can control at will?

[1] https://gigaom.com/2013/12/29/nsas-backdoor-catalog-exposed-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

tptacek• 11 years ago

It would certainly be the most expensive and hamfisted possible way for NSA to get access to a target computer system.

The more you know about how encryption software is actually built and deployed in large-scale applications, the sillier this "split key escrow" trial balloon sounds. It is facially ridiculous and will never happen. Good for pageviews, though!

bendoernberg• 11 years ago

What makes it expensive and hamfisted?

carrotleads• 11 years ago

I would assume they work off the logic, you can always have more weapons...

The softer weapons can be handed to low level personnel...

strooper• 11 years ago

For the sake of argument, if we assume that US government has right to protect its citizens from the monstrous conspiring world, why are they exporting these backdoor technologies to secret services all over the world? Even the countries championing in least human rights, poverty, oppression have these backdoor technologies to use against their citizens. US citizens at least enjoy the freedom of barking, citizen of those other countries don't...

SEJeff• 11 years ago

This reminds me of a bully complaining when suddenly everyone is learning martial arts... A bit ridiculous

tete• 11 years ago

Wait, what? You need security, such as encryption to get privacy? How is that a clash?

pdkl95• 11 years ago

It is easy to fall into a nihilistic, hopeless attitude when faced with problems of this size. While this problem can affect anybody, I suspect the these feeling about feasibility of change affect the people that create modern technologies in a specific way: it distracts and hides just how much power we retain, that cannot be collected by the people trying to place themselves at the top of rapidly centralizing power structures.

The power I'm referring to is the power retained by whomever is actually implementing the world we live in. A tyrant can issue all the orders and threats they want - unless someone caries out those orders, the tyrant is just making a lot of hot air. Implementation is what matters in the end, and I think the readers of HN have a pretty good idea who it is that will end up implementing our future.

So the next time someone asks you to implement some bit of the surveillance state, use your power and let some bit of that future go unimplemented. It may be a trivially small thing that may not affect much in the long run. Those little things add up, and the message it sends is important.

I realize that it is hard to take a stand. There is always the possibility of being fired - or worse. Just remember that the engineers working around technology have an advantage over the typical "protest" crowds of the past: the people that want to use the surveillance state need engineers to make their tools. So take advantage of any little bit of power that you have and hold the line in some small way against this creeping tyranny. Above all, remember that tools like this very forum are available.

I'm not saying there is no risk, and I'm not saying there won't have consequences. What I am suggesting is that unless we start making these principled stands right now, the situation is only going to get worse, and the sacrifices required to fix this situation only rise with time.

Please. This is our future, and as clichée as it sounds, there is a lot of truth to the idea that the real power comes form strength in numbers.

/* speaking of the power held by engineers... I suspect "work to rule" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule ) could be a particularly effective tool in the hands of the people the keep important parts of the world running */

m4x4• 11 years ago

You only need a few sympathetic hardware engineers to put in hardware back doors, however, and it's practically impossible to verify that the hardware you have is trustworthy by the time it's in your hands. A million engineers all making sure they don't implement surveillance functionality can't undo the work done by the handful of bad guys unless they're somehow able to inspect every piece of hardware down to the lowest level and verify manually that it's safe.

The user has to do the same thing when they receive their hardware for obvious reasons.

And software is no different. There are lots of FOSS devs who would refuse to help implement surveillance systems, yet there's no practical way to prevent one small team of bad actors from injecting code somewhere between software-conception and delivery-to-end-user.

The only possible way to be confident about your technology would be to build it yourself from the ground up. You would need to design and fabricate the hardware yourself, from passive components up, and re-implement the entire software stack by hand.

Even if you did all that, if you're a desirable target then you still face a very high risk that one of the people working somewhere in your project will be employed by your opponent and will compromise your system.

The conclusion I have come to is that if you have anything you don't want intercepted, you simply can't use any modern device.

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

What many here are asserting is basically a form of individual sovereignty, that a person should have the ability to create and share information that the government cannot read. This will never happen. The government is always going to assert that your rights are contingent on the government's ability to violate those rights if it thinks it has sufficient cause according to some standard. Many of you are arguing that the government should completely give up that ability for regular crime that probably happens thousands of times across the country every day.

You are now thinking, what about encryption, PGP, passphrases, I have a legal right to not have to give those up, don't I? Yes, we are very lucky that in the United States the Supreme Court has decided that you don't have to give up a password. But this was because it used to be that a password didn't actually protect very much and the legal system hasn't caught up yet. Lock combinations are meaningless when the government can just crack the safe, and passwords to email are meaningless when they can just compel the email service to cough up the mail. The court's aware of PGP, but the times it actually hasn't been able to get the data through other means is currently small so it's still not worth the political battle. When the device that most people can carry around in their pockets is sufficiently secure that nobody can get the contents without compelling the owner to give up the passphrase, legislation will be introduced for backdoor access or the Supreme Court will rule that you have to give up the passphrase. That is why device LE access is, believe it or not, a compromise. They are willing to overlook nerds using PGP because that's still niche, but encrypted unbreakable devices are an existential threat to the government's ability to control everyone's life for good or for ill.

I still think it needs to be fought as long as possible, but I am under no illusions that we will ultimately lose.

As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security

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