Free Republic

Children are being raped, citizens murdered, and lost souls trafficked for sex and the police can't do anything about it thanks to Apple and Google, senior government lawyers and a top cop have claimed. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr; Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London Police; Paris' chief prosecutor François Molins; and Javier Zaragoza, chief prosecutor of the High Court of Spain, said that the current situation is unsupportable and legal changes are needed to keep the public safe. "The new encryption policies of Apple and Google have made...

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that encryption makes it harder for law enforcement to track down “evildoers” — and called for a “much better, more cooperative relationship” with Apple, Google, and other tech companies that are building uncrackable private communication apps into their new products. “If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job — while protecting civil liberties — to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst,” Bush said in South Carolina at an event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, a group with close ties to...

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said Tuesday that the government should have broad surveillance powers of Americans and private technology firms should cooperate better with intelligence agencies to help combat "evildoers." [...] "There's a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job," Bush said. "I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way."

At the Aspen Security Forum two weeks ago, James Comey (and others) explicitly talked about the "going dark" problem, describing the specific scenario they are concerned about. Maybe others have heard the scenario before, but it was a first for me. It centers around ISIL operatives abroad and ISIL-inspired terrorists here in the US. The FBI knows who the Americans are, can get a court order to carry out surveillance on their communications, but cannot eavesdrop on the conversations, because they are encrypted. They can get the metadata, so they know who is talking to who, but they can't find...

p>The Obama administration’s central strategy against strong encryption seems to be waging war on the companies that are providing and popularizing it: most notably Apple and Google. The intimidation campaign got a boost Thursday when a blog that frequently promotes the interests of the national security establishment raised the prospect of Apple being found liable for providing material support to a terrorist.Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the LawFare blog, suggested that Apple could in fact face that liability if it continued to provide encryption services to a suspected terrorist. He noted that the post was in response to an idea raised by Sen....

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - A Moroccan accused of helping the September 11 suicide hijackers received training in encryption techniques at an al Qaeda camp in Iran in 1997, an Iranian defector said on Friday. But his testimony to a German court was promptly undercut by comments from Germany's intelligence services, who questioned his credibility and said his evidence was worth very little. Hamid Reza Zakeri, the cover name of a man who says he worked in Iranian intelligence and defected in 2001, was testifying toward the end of Germany's second major trial of suspected members of al Qaeda's Hamburg cell....

Why We Encrypt Encryption protects our data. It protects our data when it's sitting on our computers and in data centers, and it protects it when it's being transmitted around the Internet. It protects our conversations, whether video, voice, or text. It protects our privacy. It protects our anonymity. And sometimes, it protects our lives. This protection is important for everyone. It's easy to see how encryption protects journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists in authoritarian countries. But encryption protects the rest of us as well. It protects our data from criminals. It protects it from competitors, neighbors,...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

FBI Director James Comey fired back on Wednesday at Silicon Valley companies that are calling for stronger encryption of their products. "Some prominent folks wrote a letter to the president yesterday that I frankly found depressing," Comey said in a discussion at Georgetown University Law Center, referring to a letter signed by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies, as well as civil-liberties groups and Internet-security experts. "Their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption." There can be benefits to securing devices from hackers, Comey acknowledged, but he argued there are also "tremendous costs" to...

Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print Why have federal prosecutors subpoenaed a New York Times reporter?by Gabriel Schoenfeld 02/18/2008, Volume 013, Issue 22 Investigations of national-security leaks in Washington are not all that rare. But until Judith Miller of the New York Times was sent to jail for 85 days by a special prosecutor digging into the Valerie Plame imbroglio, investigations of such leaks in which journalists are subpoenaed were about as common as unicorns wandering the National Mall. We now have another such unicorn. On January 24, a federal grand jury in Alexandria issued a subpoena to...

Since the revelations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server exploded last week, questions have swirled regarding her account’s level of information security. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” Clinton averred at a brief press conference on Tuesday. Some are… skeptical about the assertion that the nation’s top diplomat never received any classified material via her email account at an agency that is often criticized for over-classifying information.“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said an unnamed former official...

Just heard this....i am the classic Apple hater but I am greatly impressed by Apple non-compliance on decryption keys... Though this may be just to ensure sales outside America...Outside the Obama/NSA zone/ FedGuv

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...

It’s been a year and a half since Edward Snowden revealed to the world just how much private information the National Security Agency has been collecting on just about everyone. The massive spying operation raised privacy and Constitutional concerns and set off alarms with reports that some employees had used the system to keep tabs on their love interests. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the government has done little to reform the program and reassure the public. Even relatively weak legislation that fails to address core concerns has stalled in Congress. Action has come, however, from Silicon Valley. The new Apple...

Bloomberg, link only

The kings men also viewed their power as necessary as Comey does today. They could simply enter someone’s home and search all your papers. If you wrote anything derogatory against the king, off you went to prison. This is what inspired the American Revolution and the Fourth Amendment that there had to be a reason to search not just arbitrary desire to want to know and lets see what we can find as the NSA and FBI do today. This is the very essence of LIBERTY. You cannot pretend to be the leader of the free world with people like...

Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user information. The move, announced with the publication of a new privacy policy tied to the release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, amounts to an engineering solution to a legal quandary: Rather than comply with binding court orders, Apple has reworked...

The abrupt announcement that the widely used, anonymously authored disk-encryption tool Truecrypt is insecure and will no longer be maintained shocked the crypto world--after all, this was the tool Edward Snowden himself lectured on at a Cryptoparty in Hawai'i. Cory Doctorow tries to make sense of it all.

Over the past 24 hours the website for TrueCrypt (a very widely used encryption solution) was updated with a rather unusually styled message stating that TrueCrypt is “considered harmful” and should not be used.

I’m a national security hawk. But, I’m also a free-market, anti-crony capitalist. I’m a Catholic, I’m a dad and I’m a businessman. And an American. For all these reasons, I stand with Rand in his lawsuit against Barack Obama and his co-defendants: the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey. “Paul’s suit, filed in conjunction with conservative group FreedomWorks,” says the New York Daily News, “alleges that the NSA’s bulk collection program, under which the agency has collected the telephone metadata of many Americans, violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,...