The War On Encryption

"Over and over again as people keep talking about the Apple / FBI encryption stuff, I keep seeing the same line pop up. It's something along the lines of "but the FBI needs to know what's on that phone, so if Apple can help, why shouldn't it." Let's debunk that myth. The FBI absolutely does not need to know what's on that phone. It might not even care very much about what's on that phone. As the Grugq ably explained last week, there's almost certainly nothing of interest on the phone. As he notes, Farook destroyed his and his wife's personal phones, indicating that if there were anything truly important, he would have destroyed the last phone too. Also:

FBI already has a massive amounts of data, all of which indicates that Farook and Malik were not in contact with a foreign terrorist organisation, nor were they in contact with any other unknown terrorists.

Even if, despite all evidence to the contrary, Farook and Malik were somehow in invisible traceless contact with an ISIS handler, that handler would not have revealed information about other cells, because that would violate the most basic tenet of security — need to know."

" Honestly, the only reason that the FBI wants to force Apple to create the special operating system for this particular phone is the precedent that it can go to court and force a company to build special hacking tools to remove security features from customers. That's a big deal. The information on the phone is almost certainly not a big deal at all."

from Techdirt article


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   Folks, as many insiders and whistle-blowers have pointed out in recent years -
properly implemented encryption works. Not using it is a sheer act of foolishness at this point.  
   I get sick of hearing the oft parroted, "the powers that be can break any encryption and nothing is safe". Well, guess we better hang it up then kids, game over. This point of view is nothing more than IPB (intelligence prep of battlefield) in my opinion; get everyone to throw their arms in the air and acquiesce to just operating in the clear all the time. And just like that, they win.
   It is true that there are "broken" encryption standards out there. It's also true that no such agency paid a cool $10 million to RSA Inc to weaken their random number generator a number of years ago (this only affected a specific protocol).
Learn which encryption works and which doesn't. The information is out there.

   The feds are leading the charge to sway public opinion into believing that everything should be "backdoored", for public safety and patriotic duty of course. The number one computer operating system in the world is backdoored already (and has been for some time) and evidence suggests that there are serious holes in number two's OS as well (whether intentional or not remains to be seen). There are solutions to these issues if you are not afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your brain dirty. It's really not all that hard.

   I will be teaching a clinic on the above in March in Washington state, you can go to Groundrod Class
for the details.


....meatspace is great, just not always an option...


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  "The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable." -Anon., U. S. Privacy Study Commission, 1977


 And from the late Justice Scalia...

"There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all."
Antonin Scalia