Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Other Major Tech Companies Decry Republican Bill Seeking To Break Encryption (medianama.com) 66
In response to the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act proposed by three Republican senators, Big Tech companies have registered their opposition through their Reform Government Surveillance coalition. From a report: They said that building encryption backdoors would jeopardize the sensitive data of billions of users and "leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries." They also pointed out that as the pandemic has forced everyone to rely on the internet "in critical ways," digital security is paramount and strong encryption is the way forward. The coalition's members are Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, Verizon Media, Dropbox, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The coalition was established in December 2013, a few months after documents about the United States' PRISM data collection program were leaked.
Repblicans love big government (Score:5, Insightful)
People seem to forget, it was under a Republican administration that the Department of Homeland Security (such a comforting title) and the TSA were created. The TSA treats every person as a criminal without providing evidence for any wrongdoing.
Why would it be surprising Republicans would want to endanger the data of billions of people? That would make it that much easier for them to treat everyone as a criminal.
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Lets not forget the 'War on Drugs' that is the turning point for all of this bullshit.
Re:Repblicans love big government (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your comment is its narrow focus. Let me offer you an amended version:
There has never been a point in time where the holders of power have not been looking to gain power. The moment centers of power are established they immediately start looking for more power. They rip out all the brakes and install as many gas pedals as they can convince the citizens to let them have.
It's not just governments. The same is true of priesthoods, labor unions, corporations, wandering bands of mercenaries, etc. etc. etc. Some of these groups are more socially useful than others, but they are all dangerous in exactly the way you attribute to governments. Whether governments are worse than corporations is a matter of dispute.
When ANY of these groups gets too powerful, it's destructive to civilization, because the desire for power is insatiable, and uses it's power to increase its power.
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The TSA treats every person as a criminal
Seeing as how they came into being under a Republican administration, we will have to forgive them their tendency to project such faults onto others.
Re:Repblicans love big government (Score:5, Insightful)
Dems only had power for 2 years and used the political capital on health care reform, which they barely got passed before their time ran out.
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Priorities are just as telling as everything else. The fact that they "barely" even got that done is just another sign of what that beast is. A lot can happen in two years, and if it were not for the parties... even less would happen. Keeping all those greedy fucks satisfied takes an immense amount of effort and even then... the result was worse than the problem we were looking to resolve.
Go figure right? Humans only seem to be able to make the problem worse in their political efforts to solve problems.
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No, it isn't "go figure," the system is designed to make it difficult to get things done. Reducing the rate of change has advantages; it is a giant low-pass filter on governance that protects the People.
Change requires substantial temporal consensus. That is good. The only places in the world that people might reasonably propose as having a better system are all small places with systems that don't work as well for a large country.
...And even small government a litle too much (Score:5, Interesting)
The Republican police reform bill is a total joke. It bans...let's see now...choking people to death. I thought that was already illegal!
The Democrat bill isn't perfect either, because it doesn't take out civil forfeiture, but it's a big improvement over the Republican bill. It would get rid of no-knock warrants, qualified immunity and easy access to military weapons. It includes a national-level police review board and incentives for state prosecutors to go after police in misconduct cases.
Next up: let's require the DEA to start abiding by the Constitution - and get by on half its present budget.
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The bills are nothing more than meaningless pandering, both sides.
Without meaningful reform nothing will change. As long as the police can get by with lying about the people they arrest they will just create the narratives necessary to justify continuing what they do.
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18 years later and the name *still* sounds like something from a Soviet Bloc country. Is it because they didn't want "National Security" because it collides with NSA?
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To me it raises echos of geheime staatspolizei.
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I'd like to point out that KGB was the acronym for "Ministry for State Security". Sound familiar?
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People seem to forget, it was under a Republican administration that the Department of Homeland Security (such a comforting title) and the TSA were created.
And since then, we’ve had zero airplane hijackings since. Way to go TSA! Keep up the good work!
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That is because we put secure doors on cockpits. Not because we started feeling everyone up and taking naked xrays of them - the security theater is not required.
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People seem to forget, it was under a Republican administration that the Department of Homeland Security (such a comforting title) and the TSA were created. The TSA treats every person as a criminal without providing evidence for any wrongdoing.
Why would it be surprising Republicans would want to endanger the data of billions of people? That would make it that much easier for them to treat everyone as a criminal.
Encryption technology will move off shore, out of reach of the USA government.
Encryption HAS got to be a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
At this point Iâ(TM)m convinced that encryption absolutely has got to be a unanimously good thing because theyâ(TM)ve been coming for it far too often for far too long.
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theyâ(TM)ve
We've always been at war with theyâ(TM)ve.
Basic understanding (Score:4, Insightful)
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Lawmakers are, by and large, lawyers. They are trained to not let cognitive dissonance bother them. They'll happily argue that encryption needs to be breakable on demand, while also firmly believing that on-line banking, government communications, and other internet-based tasks they deem important can be kept 100% secure from the bad guys.
Re:Basic understanding (Score:4, Insightful)
By design only the person who encrypts something can decrypt it.
Not since the invention (discovery?) of Public Key Cryptography in the mid 1970s has that limitation that been true. The more general statement is something like: by design, only the person with the correct decryption key can decrypt something.
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Not since the invention (discovery?) of Public Key Cryptography in the mid 1970s has that limitation that been true.
Tangentially, it's an invention. Maybe someone else somewhere else (Alpha Centauri? It was Aliens!) invented it first. But without knowledge of such, it's an independent invention... even if nature invented it somewhere, somehow.
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If they want access to people's data, why not make a legílation to ban encryption? Oh wait... then they have to stop using it too
Do you believe the US government does not have the ability to create laws which don't apply to the military and law enforcement but apply to everyone else?
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Do you believe the US government does not have the ability to create laws which don't apply to the military and law enforcement but apply to everyone else?
I stand corrected. What you said is, in fact, true. Thank you for that!
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Law and Order (Score:4, Insightful)
The folks proposing this truly believe that the cops are 'going dark'. They like to point out situations like the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, but they like to ignore the fact that "the FBI eventually found that Farook's phone had information only about work and revealed nothing about the plot." This is about a 'law and order' stance and its wrong.
Cell phones provide unprecedented access to one's personal life, way beyond anything that the government would normally have access to. Cell phones need strong protection from government intrusion, not less.
Vote these dipshits out.
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The (executive) government takes a stance towards the prosecutorial side of justics only. They have no vested interest at all for the side of defending the accused, they leave that to the courts. Many states and cities have public defenders (underfunded of course), but we don't have any national public defender office. So the government starts out in an adversarial role as prosecutor - guilty upon first suspicion, everyone is potentially a criminal, courts are an adversary seeking to slow them down, succ
Re: Law and Order (Score:2)
Power grab (Score:1)
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4th.
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4th.
4th protects you from unreasonable searches.
5th protects you from serving as a witness against yourself.
5th is correct, in this case.
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IT/OT is the modern militia.
The 2nd Amendment constrains the government: "the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
First they came for pi... now it's the primes... (Score:1)
What do Republicans have against math, ffs?!?!
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What do Republicans have against math, ffs?!?!
They have approximately 0.14159 reasons to hate math, the same reasons they've had since they were children.
The filter thinks I have a long string of letters. The filter was written by an imbecile who should learn to regex.
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When I was a kid we used 22/7 and didn't bother about decimal expansions. (Unless that was a biblical reference.)
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Because educated voters are a republican nightmare. Why else would DeVos be trying so hard to move money from public schools to private? To keep most of the voters as uneducated as possible and educate the ruling class only. The current administration would like to take away education, health care, environmental protections, safety protections, and more - all in the name of 'less regulation'. Each one of those things a strike against the average American - less for the masses more for the controllers.
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I would go a step further and say "look at who owns the politicians".
It's like football -- it doesn't matter who wins the Superbowl because both teams are getting their paychecks from the same guy -- and he ain't you.
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No, we do pay their paychecks, and we pay them their bribes.
We citizens will never not be partially responsible here. We actively demand that businesses participate in politics while simultaneously bitching about them doing so. Democrats laud big businesses that contribute to their causes just as Republicans do and they condemn businesses that contribute to the causes they hate or gives them a bad name.
The entire SJW movement has figured out how to weaponize the politics and cow businesses into supporting
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Your comment smacks of false equivalence. There are ways the two parties are the same (like working for big businesses) and there are ways in which they are different (like which big businesses they work for. Or human rights issues, on which they differ notably.)
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After 5 clicks, you can read the actual text (Score:5, Informative)
The bill simply requires a company to cooperate with a warrant and decrypt if they have the decryption keys. There is a (not unreasonable) belief that entities such as Google keep track of encryption keys to aid in their search for your data for commercial purposes or in other cases, they may analyze your encrypted data on-screen or in-app and keep sufficient metadata for advertising, but then they don't want to admit this in public so they say they can't cooperate with external requests.
"unless the independent actions of an unaffiliated entity make it technically impossible to do so" seems like a caveat that will allow encryption that is enabled by the user but which other companies have no information about. Moreover, the bill actually strikes the 'requirement for the government to be able to decrypt' which is currently included in the Clinton CALEA laws.
I think independent user-controlled encryption in end-user computing is a really good idea and this bill, however bad it may be at first sight, may drive this.
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Interesting. That *could* be an improvement. If, of course, it isn't amended late in the process, and if, of course, your interpretation of the legal phrasing is correct. And if courts interpret it that way.
OTOH, I have a strong suspicion that any bill submitted during this part of the electoral campaign isn't intended to pass, but is only intended for "see what good guys we are" PR.
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That's what I thought until I read the bill [documentcloud.org]. (This is what I found. Can anyone confirm this is really it, and the latest version?)
Scroll down to "TITLE III--ASSISTANCE CAPABILITY DIRECTIVES" in the linked PDF and use your most perverse imagination. It looks to me like a manufacturer co
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There is a (not unreasonable) belief that entities such as Google keep track of encryption keys
This is Slashdot. You should be tared and feathered for writing "not unreasonable".
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This is Slashdot. You should be tared and feathered for writing "not unreasonable".
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. ... However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
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The bill simply requires a company to cooperate with a warrant and decrypt if they have the decryption keys.
The bill doesn't simply require them to decrypt if they have the ability to do so. It requires them to *ensure* that they have the ability to decrypt. Read 3119 (c). If they're currently offering end-to-end encryption, they will have to stop doing so to comply with this section.
The "unless the independent actions of an unaffiliated entity make it technically impossible to do so" clause gets them out of trouble if users are encrypting their own data using third-party software, but almost nobody is ever go
a paused needed (Score:2)
This bill or others like it will keep being voted upon until passed, party does not matter. This is how some real bad bills got passed.
What matters is who bribes^H^H^H^H^H donates the most to the candidates. And there is nothing stopping people who receive funds from the anti-encryption side to re-submit a bill over and over
What is needed is some kind of stop-gap. For example, if a bill was brought up 3 times and fails, nothing like it can be proposed again for 20 years or so
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What is needed is some kind of stop-gap. For example, if a bill was brought up 3 times and fails, nothing like it can be proposed again for 20 years or so
That's a bad idea, because a) how do you measure likeness and b) what if one party brings up a bill three times (or gets one of their members-in-all-but-name in the other party to do it) and then shoots it down three times so it can't be brought up again?
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That was Cato's strategy. Carthago delenda est!
Law makers and law enforcements (Score:1)
The more things change... (Score:2)
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Welcome to 1996 and the wonderful world of the Clipper Chip.
Wow! for once I agree with (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
The bill will never pass - more hot air (Score:2)
We see this type of crap often too, over the pond. I'm sure it crops up in many other countries where there's still some rights for individual privacy.
Given the list of companies vehemently contesting this bill and the financial clout they have, it's not going to see the light of day - it will never be passed.
However, that, in itself, is somewhat of a problem - the power that the big tech companies now wield is quite astonishing.
It is beyond what pretty much any government ever has had at its disposal.
I rea
Very simple solution (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s democracy in action. Anyone who agrees with the law uses the website, anyone who disagrees doesnâ(TM)t use it.
I expect all politicians, police officers etc. To submit their Passcodes.
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I would expect the website to be hacked within 3ms and all the passcodes of the idiots published online
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When encryption is outlawed (Score:1)
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