The war between Silicon Valley and the goverment
It’s a race against time for the companies:
Start-ups are particularly wary, Andreessen said, of legislation proposed recently by Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would compel tech companies to build technical methods to share customers’ encrypted data, at a court’s request.
“They believe there’s this window of opportunity that if we build strong encryption now, we can make it a fait accompli. But if we let five years pass, it may never happen,” Andreessen said.
In the past two years, more companies have embraced encryption, which scrambles information so that it looks like a stream of unintelligible characters to an outsider who accessed it without permission. What’s changed more recently, industry officials say, is that companies are encrypting data and throwing away the key to prevent their gaining access, a move that started with Apple but is spreading across the Valley.
This latter tactic is the most worrisome to law enforcement. Government officials have said repeatedly they do not want to outlaw encryption; FBI Director James B. Comey has called strong encryption a vital means of protecting the public’s personal information from hackers.
But officials insist that there must be a technical means to access that information when companies are served with warrants. Otherwise, there will be “profound consequences for public safety,” Comey told Congress in March. Terrorists and criminals are already using messaging services to which tech companies have thrown away the key, he said. Investigators say two such services, WhatsApp and Telegram, were used by terrorists in the Paris attacks last November.
I have very mixed feelings about all of this. I see the point of both sides of the argument. Distrust of government is, unfortunately, both rampant and in some cases justified. But there are very real dangers associated with encryption and lack of government ability to break it under certain circumstances. Basically, companies are now trying to put the keys in the hands of the user and keep themselves out of it to a large extent, in order to avoid a situation where they’ll be in a row with the government such as the one Apple faced earlier this year.
The solution is idiot obvious: stop Muslim immigration, eradicate ALL mosques — as they are ALL STATE SPONSORED institutions.
As in foreign government state sponsorship.
Duh.
Without jihad, the number ‘security cases’ that the Feds have to deal with collapse to trivial numbers.
As for cracking codes to get at mobsters — Pauli had them beat — sixty-years ago.
The MAFIA merely used alternate slang — without encryption — and THAT was enough — more than enough — to totally stump prosecutors.
For, at trial, the DA has to convince the jurors that MAFIA speak was a double-wise language — and do so beyond a shadow of doubt.
The only way that such a transference could be made was with flaming, naked, wire taps.
That will STILL be true with jihadis, crews that need only look at the MAFIA record for style points.
Duh.
What the FBI is asking for MUST mean that totalitarian states — world wide — will be FOREVER in command of their proles — that revolution can NEVER happen. CF Tehran.
The San Bernadino jihadis provided absolutely NOTHING in the magic missing minutes — something that ought to have been obvious from the start.
Once the fireworks began, there was no time to call mom — or any other co-ordinator… of which they had none.
Neo, you do not distrust “government”. You distrust the Progressive governments of the last 100 years, both the electeds and the bureaucrats. The current crop of Democrats has zero interest in protecting its citizens. It seeks to put every one of us into his own wee little box of “privacy”, isolating every one of us, so that if the right piece of data executed by you cannot be found, info about your health or lack thereof cannot be released to your immediate family members.
I was raised to distrust government. We raised our children to see government as a dangerous servant that must be watched closely and held in check. Government has been a dangerous, power hungry servant since at least Wilson. From time to time it backs off, but it always keeps pushing back eventually.
That is why I first supported Walker, then Fiorina, and then all in for Cruz. I viewed those 3 as serious about putting DC back in the box proscribed by the Constitution.
Frog,
Always distrust government, no matter who holds the reins. Power corrupts all too easily.
The serious bad guys will just put their own encryption on top of the built-in encryption. The government knows this. They want access to all communications for routine criminal matters.
parker:
“Government has been a dangerous, power hungry servant since at least Wilson.”
Exactly what I meant. Especially since Wilson; the early 1900s saw the birth of the Progressive movement. Before that, Federal government was fairly trustworthy because its powers were quite limited. But in rapid movement, the Income Tax and the Federal Reserve were born, and Senators became directly-elected. Oh, and the great Woodrow campaigned for re-election opposing US involvement in the Great War, then Blam! got us into it.
In the case that brought this about (San Bernardino terrorist attack) it was a government-owned phone ( from Wikipedia):
“On February 9, 2016, the FBI announced that it was unable to unlock one of the mobile phones they recovered, a county-owned iPhone 5C issued to its employee, shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, due to its advanced security features.”
I never understood why the government couldn’t access its own phone. And now the legislation hammer.
Technology has provided us a stark choice: a world in which only powerful officials can keep secrets or a world in which everyone can keep secrets. I know which I choose.
The big issue is the fact that nothing stops — and soon it will be much easier — individuals from doing their own encryption, completely independently from all the Googles of the world. The only way to attempt to stop this is by making such encryption illegal, even in the absence of any other crime. Do we really want to do this?
I would go one step further and say that all political power is corrupt power.
It need not be a government. Merely participating in giving political power, begins the corruption cycle.