Posted on 02/18/2015 3:26:09 PM PST by Dalek
President Obama talked a surprising amount of common sense on his trip last week to Silicon Valley, where he spoke at a "cybersecurity" gathering at Stanford University. But he undermined some noteworthy remarks about strong encryption--we need it, he said--with the kind of fear-monger hedging that has become almost every politician's refuge from telling the hard truth....
The first was Obama's clear statement that he, personally, favors ubiquitous strong encryption. He thinks everyone should use it but hedges that by saying law enforcement needs a way to break into communications and data....
[W]e need leaders who'll tell the truth--that we cannot possibly stop every attack without turning the nation into a police state that is, in fact, even less safe; that America's founding document, the Constitution, is a deliberate trade-off in which we agree to take some risks to preserve essential liberty.
We need liberty-minded leaders who'll explain that strong encryption does create some additional risks. But they need to add, again and again until the public understands, two fundamental truths. First, securing our conversations and data from outsiders is absolutely essential for our security in all kinds of other ways. Second, those benefits outweigh law enforcement's understandable wish to be able to tap and record every conversation, and unlock every bit of data anyone might be storing on any device. In a digital world, we genuinely can't have it both ways. This is a genuinely binary question: yes or no.
Unfortunately, in suggesting that we'll be clamoring for the ability of police to break into everything, Obama is basically refusing to lead....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Governments HATE encryption because it gives us peasants a means of communication to which they can’t ‘listen’.
What sucks for them is they can’t stop it. Say they get a back door into everything right this very minute, tomorrow some brilliant 20 year old will come up with something new they can’t penetrate.
Sucks to be them.....
Government has become that pervie neighbor that sculks around spying on you through the bushes, trying to eavesdrop on your conversations and rummaging through your trash. You know the type. Not to be trusted in any way, shape or form.
El TURD.
Like the guy next door or a former hefty hag supervisor that would volunteer to go through anyone’s garbage.
Governments not only hate strong encryption, they hate weak encryption.
They have no reasonable argument against the use of weak encryption that has been proven to be breakable. Their problem is that even if everything is encrypted with an algorithm that they can break...what if the decryption takes so long that they can’t decrypt on a mass scale...oh the horror!
By too long I mean it takes them more than a few minutes to decrypt....there is no way to monitor all internet traffic if each group of packets takes a few minutes to look at.
Plus there is the likely possibility that people with a great need for security will simply double encrypt their traffic.
Most encrypted data is safe and the NSA cannot crack it. What they are concentrating on is putting back-doors into the firmware that controls computer hardware.
At the present time the best way to pass secure messages is by using an external encryption device. The device should be simple in design and powered by a cheap, low-end processor...it is unlikely that the NSA has corrupted the innards of microcontroller processors that cost less than a dollar. These types of processors can be easily decapped and scrutinized by gifted amateurs and so any tampering would become apparent. This is the only sure way to pass secure data over an untrusted network! It would matter not if every computer along the path which the data would pass was corrupt as long as a simple external encryption device is used at each end of the circuit...you could pass the data through the NSA’s own computer network and it would still be safe.
Cost to build such a device...less than $20
You could also use it to make an encrypted image of a hard drive and create disk images of a PC via USB.... there is no magic that can reach out through a USB port and corrupt a simple external device designed specifically for security.
The simplicity of such a device is its greatest asset...with great complexity comes the possibility of mischief.
Encryption is great so long as you give Our Glorious Leader the keys.
I don't think that's true. It doesn't take magic to do just about anything over USB. It's just a rather stupid serial bus protocol, after all.
Now if you assure me that your "simple external device designed specifically for security" is impenetrable and incorruptible when it is attached directly to a processor bus inside the computer, then I'll believe you when you say it remains so when attached via USB.
But I have personally watched as corrupted USB devices attacked a computer in seconds, and as a fresh, uncorrupted USB device in another USB port was turned into a similar attack weapon. I know that's not exactly what you're talking about, I'm just sayin' you can't take anything for granted, including a USB attachment.
Bing. Encryption with a back door is a fraud... Much like Obama.
The time is coming...very soon when We The People will speak on this topic.
The NSA and DC time in the sun on internet security will come to an end.
Yep, anything that connects directly to the system bus - usb, firewire, thunderbolt - can theoretically get to the computer’s main memory and it’s game on from there.
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