Facebook Fights US Government Demand to Break Messenger Encryption in Criminal Case

[bradl]

The US government considers encryption a weapon, in the context of export laws: no exporting weapons to enemy nations. As you know the Second Amendment protects our right to have weapons. So some people think that it extends to encryption. Problem is despite the Second, weapons can be confiscated in the name of preventing crime, which is what's going on in this case with FB, so the argument doesn't really work.

Not anymore. Back in 1994, Clinton signed EO10326 that transferred all commercial encryption technology off the Munitions list (meaning, no longer a weapon) to the Department of Commerce, making it a commodity. That basically means that it will not be treated as a weapon as far as export regulations are concerned. That EO was part of the reasoning why the US dropped its case against Zimmerman.

Strong commercial cryptography is no longer considered munitions, let alone a weapon.

Also, I don't think encryption is a weapon. But I wonder if the First protects it since it's a form of speech, heh.

The 1A protects it. The 4A protects it also, as well as various decisions handed down by SCOTUS.

BL.

 

[fairuz]

Not anymore. Back in 1994, Clinton signed EO10326 that transferred all commercial encryption technology off the Munitions list (meaning, no longer a weapon) to the Department of Commerce, making it a commodity. That basically means that it will not be treated as a weapon as far as export regulations are concerned. That EO was part of the reasoning why the US dropped its case against Zimmerman.

Strong commercial cryptography is no longer considered munitions, let alone a weapon.

I looked around a bit, and there are answers on StackExchange saying crypto is a munition still but not a weapon, where weapons are a subset of munitions. I didn't know there was a difference. They also say the 2nd doesn't protect crypto, not because it's only a "munition" but for other reasons. Here's one of those: https://law.stackexchange.com/quest...bear-crypto-protected-by-the-second-amendment
It could be that they're wrong, but there are lots of threads saying crypto is a munition. I remember looking this up a while back when I was wondering why I had to say whether my iPhone app "used cryptography" when putting it on the store.

 

[bradl]

I looked around a bit, and there are answers on StackExchange saying crypto is a munition still but not a weapon, where weapons are a subset of munitions. I didn't know there was a difference. They also say the 2nd doesn't protect crypto, not because it's only a "munition" but for other reasons. Here's one of those: https://law.stackexchange.com/quest...bear-crypto-protected-by-the-second-amendment
It could be that they're wrong, but there are lots of threads saying crypto is a munition. I remember looking this up a while back when I was wondering why I had to say whether my iPhone app "used cryptography" when putting it on the store.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States

Legal challenges by Peter Junger and other civil libertarians and privacy advocates, the widespread availability of encryption software outside the U.S., and the perception by many companies that adverse publicity about weak encryption was limiting their sales and the growth of e-commerce, led to a series of relaxations in US export controls, culminating in 1996 in President Bill Clinton signing the Executive order 13026 transferring the commercial encryption from the Munition List to the Commerce Control List. Furthermore, the order stated that, "the software shall not be considered or treated as 'technology'" in the sense of Export Administration Regulations. The Commodity Jurisdiction process was replaced with a Commodity Classification process, and a provision was added to allow export of 56-bit encryption if the exporter promised to add "key recovery" backdoors by the end of 1998. In 1999, the EAR was changed to allow 56-bit encryption and 1024-bit RSA to be exported without any backdoors, and new SSL cipher suites were introduced to support this (RSA_EXPORT1024 with 56-bit RC4 or DES). In 2000, the Department of Commerce implemented rules that greatly simplified the export of commercial and open source software containing cryptography, including allowing the key length restrictions to be removed after going through the Commodity Classification process.

This was during the Phil Zimmerman case with PGP and PGPi versus the US. Like I said, I followed this case very closely during the 1990s, especially before and during the debating over the CDA, as it was my Senator at the time who wrote the bill.

BL.

 

[stylinexpat]

Facebook spying is never surprising

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-pulls-its-data-harvesting-onavo-vpn-from-app-s-1828541718

 

[Sill]

You watch too much TV.

I don't watch tv. Try again.