This is big! Reuters is reporting that the Burr/Feinstein anti-encryption bill in U.S. Congress is likely dead in this session! That means that, at least for this year, Congress has dropped legislation that would weaken our security. We’ve all been working hard on this one, and it’s a huge victory for every one of us!
Source: accessnow.org
To hear FBI Director James Comey tell it, strong encryption stops law enforcement dead in its tracks by letting terrorists, kidnappers and rapists communicate in complete secrecy.
But that’s just not true.
In the rare cases in which an investigation may initially appear to be blocked by encryption — and so far, the FBI has yet to identify a single one — the government has a Plan B: it’s called hacking.
Hacking — just like kicking down a door and looking through someone’s stuff — is a perfectly legal tactic for law enforcement officers, provided they have a warrant.
And law enforcement officials have, over the years, learned many ways to install viruses, Trojan horses, and other forms of malicious code onto suspects’ devices. Doing so gives them the same access the suspects have to communications — before they’ve been encrypted, or after they’ve been unencrypted.
Source: theintercept.com
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and his counterparts in Paris, London and Madrid took to the New York Times op-ed page Tuesday morning to pose a flawed argument against default encryption of mobile phones, a service being commercialized and implemented gradually by Apple and Google.
The op-ed misstated the extent of the obstacles to law enforcement, understating the many other ways officials bearing warrants can still collect the information they need or want — even when confronted with an encrypted, password-protected device.
The authors failed to acknowledge the value to normal people of protecting their private data from thieves, hackers and government dragnets.
And they demanded — in the name of the “safety of our communities” — a magical, mathematically impossible scenario in which communications are safeguarded from everyone except law enforcement.
Source: firstlook.org