Tech firms “can and must” put backdoors in encryption, AG Barr says
'US Attorney General William Barr today launched a new front in the feds' ongoing fight against consumer encryption, railing against the common security practice and lamenting the "victims" in its wake. "The deployment of warrant-proof encryption is already imposing huge costs on society," Barr claimed in remarks at a cybersecurity conference held at Fordham University Tuesday morning. Barr added that encryption "seriously degrades" law enforcement's ability to "detect and prevent a crime before it occurs," as well as making eventual investigation and prosecution of crime more difficult. The existence of encryption means "converting the Internet and communications into a law-free zone" that criminals will happily take advantage of to do more crimes, Barr added, likening it to a neighborhood that local cops have abandoned. The cost of encryption, he said, is measured in "victims" who might have been saved from crime if law enforcement had been able to lawfully intercept communications earlier. He also accused tech firms of "dogmatic" posturing, saying lawful backdoor access "can be and must be" done, adding, "We are confident that there are technical solutions that will allow lawful access to encrypted data and communications by law enforcement, without materially weakening the security provided by encryption."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/tech-firms-can-and-must-put-back... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:41:21 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'US Attorney General William Barr today launched a new front in the feds' ongoing fight against consumer encryption, railing against the common security practice and lamenting the "victims" in its wake.'
Something not mentioned in that report <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/23/us_encryption_backdoor/>: “We are not talking about protecting the nation’s nuclear launch codes,” Barr told the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University. “Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, email, and voice and data applications.” In other words, big business can be trusted with strong encryption, ordinary people can’t.
On Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:41:21 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'US Attorney General William Barr today launched a new front in the feds' ongoing fight against consumer encryption, railing against the common security practice and lamenting the "victims" in its wake.'
Has he changed his mind <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/attorney_genera.html>? If one already has an effective level of security say, by way of illustration, one that protects against 99 percent of foreseeable threats -- is it reasonable to incur massive further costs to move slightly closer to optimality and attain a 99.5 percent level of protection? A company would not make that expenditure; nor should society. Here, some argue that, to achieve at best a slight incremental improvement in security, it is worth imposing a massive cost on society in the form of degraded safety. This is untenable. Schneier notes: The final thing I noticed about the speech is that it is not about iPhones and data at rest. It is about communications -- data in transit. The "going dark" debate has bounced back and forth between those two aspects for decades. It seems to be bouncing once again.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann