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The FBI Wants You to Know it Has Not Changed its Position on Encryption. And That’s a Problem.
(www.techpolicy.press)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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So they want to keep the backdoors but have the Chinese government stop naughtily using them when they're only for American use. Good plan! A quick call to Xi Jinping should sort the whole thing out.
I'm no encryption expert, but wouldn't a backdoor of any kind be inevitably exploited by a malicious actor?
Yes, but politicians and police keep fantasizing about a magical crypto-backdoor that only they can use, no matter how many times people explain this to them or how many times they get burned.
Frankly a person with such persistence trying to get a tool they never justly need should get punched in the face until they get smarter.
I mean, there already are laws about what should be surrendered to them in legal proceedings and how. That's not impeded by any encryption. That everybody has right to remain silent is already a rule, encryption just reaffirms it with math.
What they are trying to create is a tool for illegally violating people without being detected, thus not causing outrage and not having to justify it.
It's literally an unprecedented penetration of government structures and agencies and political groups by criminals who want to use those organizations to spy after others. By thieves. They should all be found and put in jail.
On the first day it was released to the public.
The encryption specialists at universities knew about the eliptic curve backdoor before it was implemented, and kept recommending that it not be.
Remember that if the police can read your stuff, so can foreign interests, industrial spies, organized crime and militants of large scale political movements.
Besides which here in the States, law enforcement is notorious for abusing their access to technology to bypass protections of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, often relying on getting a warrant post hoc or lying to establish probable cause.
And usually the judges don't mind.
Can you cite me some specific examples? I would love to do aome further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Here's a whole ass Wikipedia article on the very subject, because it's been so widespread for so long it has a fucking name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemisphere_Project
Here's a Wikipedia article on the mass surveillance by the DEA, which is where the data used for parallel construction was sourced.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805/
Here's a good example from the first Wikipedia article about how the Feds pass signals intelligence to local law enforcement so they can start cases and claim they found the initial evidence some other way than illegal mass surveillance.
For more history about attempts to install backdoors, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
That's a wicked response. Thanks big!!
Go onto Techdirt ( here ) and check Tim Cushing's blog. His beat is the abuse and corruption of our justice system. The latest issue I recall was using drones to peek into fenced backyards, into windows and deep across property lines, all without a warrant or probable cause.
During the 2010s IMSI spoofers were being used but the Stingray corporation required precincts sign an NDE so parallel reconstruction (creating an alternative plausible path of investigation to lead to the same discovery of evidence) was the norm. Eventually defense lawyers learned to press the issue, as even FBI would drop cases before admitting they used IMSI catchers to spy on where a suspect's phone was.
One of my bigger beefs is the misuse of detection dogs, which have up to a ~90% false positive rate, called Probable Cause on Four Legs it's known that most departments prefer trick-pony dogs who just signal a lot, in contrast to dogs who can actually detect stuff.
Interestingly, there is a subset of the K9 sector who train and handle detection dogs (which are still legitimately used, say to detect explosives in long lines of luggage at airports), and thanks to the common use of dogs to force a search, the public has been losing confidence in them, and courts who believe dog searches are for real.
Animal slavery? You know, just the other day I heard about humans using dogs to hunt coyotes, it seems a lot of humans use these dogs as a slave species...no bueno
The cooperative relationship between humans and dogs has always been a working one (that is, centered around the collaboration of productive tasks), so I have less concern with dogs on duty. In this case, dogs are being used not for their keen sense of smell, but as dousing rods on the pretense of their keen sense of smell.
I did not mention dogs used as attack dogs, which absolutely abuses the dog. Not only that, but the dog is regarded as an officer if a victim fights back, what has only become a controversy when an attack dog was used on a fellow officer.
As for dogs used to hunt, that's the first thing we collaborated in doing, and we seem to have developed our relationship with dogs at the same time we developed agriculture, so they'd definitely be used to hunt vermin including foxes and coyotes.
There’s just so many examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Also, Greece had a national scandal where their phone system had legal backdoors added for wiretap orders, and someone broke in and published the confidential phone calls of politicians using the same system. The US is now dealing with a similar attack.
That's so fuckered up, what's wrong with people these days?
u/floofloof is speaking sarcastically above, I believe.