Posted on 12/10/2015 7:36:28 PM PST by dayglored
A leading Democratic senator will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption. The potential bill would allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability “to look into an encrypted Web."
"I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."
A spokesman for Feinstein's office told the Daily Dot in an email that the senator has been working with Judic.Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on the issue of encryption and that Burr's office is taking the lead on potential legislation.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is actively warning America's biggest technology companies about the "public safety and national security risks" of encryption, according to FBI Director James Comey.
Deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, California, and elsewhere around the world have reignited a major U.S. debate about encryption. Feinstein cited Paris as a reason the debate against encryption had evolved so quickly. Despite these concerns, the attackers in both of Paris and San Bernardino did not use encryption to organize or execute the deadly strikes, according to authorities.
The lack of evidence showing that encrypted communications played a role in either the Paris attacks, which killed 129 people, or the San Bernardino shooting, which killed 14 people, has not deterred law enforcement, who believe the technology is making their job more difficult and Americans less safe.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailydot.com ...
Yeh right....Go into the mosques. Every one of these monsters is associated with a mosque.
Good evening, pingmeisters, this is one that affects us all, so have at, if you wish...
She is a radical government supremacist.
Absolutely no chance of abuse.
(Feinstein who else?) Is that a serious question? Really? Who else?
PRETTY MUCH ALL OF THEM! THAT’S THE PROBLEM!
It would be easier ask “Which ones would not?” Short list, there.
Get your crypto app now!
This simply cannot be done. Uncrackable encryption is widely available in open-source code.
I have right here on this very computer the C source code for Blowfish. I could compile it into a library, and call this library from my web application. Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world could do the same thing.
But in fact, there are many ways to do it that do not require any coding. I’m not going to say how you would do it, but it is definitely possible to communicate back and forth in complete secrecy, so nobody even knows that this communication exists. It does require considerable technical knowledge, but it certainly can be done. Since it piggybacks on common protocols, there’s no way to stop it.
I've been using PGP for over a decade (actually GnuPG in recent years). Great stuff. 4096-bit keys. Go ahead and break it...
PGP / GnuPG. Unbreakable if you use 4096-bit keys.
But if you send emails back and forth encrypted in PGP, the existence of your communications will be known, even if the content is not.
The FBI could get a search warrant, go to your house, copy your keystore, and install a keylogger on your computer. This would enable them to obtain your private key when you typed in the passphrase to your keystore.
Of course, there are ways to guard against this. How paranoid are you? Is your computer case secured by a lock? Do you store your keyboard in a safe when you are away?
If they crack into my computer they are going to be very bored.
Is Feinstein going to volunteer to be held responsible for the unintended consequences when the master keys end up in the wrong hands and everyone’s data is compromised?
If you want to see real paranoia, look at the Google archive of alt.anonymous.messages. Hundreds of encrypted posts appear every day. No one knows who they are from, no one knows who they are to. Someone, somewhere has a key that will read them, and maybe he does so. It would be easy enough to call them up anonymously at a public computer, and copy them to a thumb drive for later decryption.
I think that’s called “prior restraint”, which is Constitutionally prohibited.
She’s saying, “The government MUST be able to snoop on what you’re saying.”
I think this is easily defeated.
Imagine what priceless prize falls once you trash the “right to privacy”?
That’s right...it is the heart of Roe V. Wade.
Some how its okay to spy on every man, woman and child in america instead of just focusing on muslims.
I rarely have to encrypt anything in an email, and when I do I only encrypt the part I'm concerned about. My correspondents are all people I would readily acknowledge as such.
> The FBI could get a search warrant, go to your house, copy your keystore, and install a keylogger on your computer. This would enable them to obtain your private key when you typed in the passphrase to your keystore.
Of course they could. But I don't think they will bother. I live in the woods on a rural hillside in upstate NY. I don't make trouble for anybody. I like privacy in my lifestyle, and occasionally in my communications, that's all.
> Of course, there are ways to guard against this. How paranoid are you? Is your computer case secured by a lock? Do you store your keyboard in a safe when you are away?
If I thought there was a chance of that, I would, or perhaps I'd just find another way to deal with my computing needs. As it is, there is very little chance that they know about me, much less care about what I say. My existence as dayglored is public, but I'm not too concerned about that exposure.
Just remember: when encryption is outlawed, only Muslim terrorists will have encryption.
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