Couldn't have said it better myself.
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U.S. Senators Threaten Apple and Facebook With Encryption Regulation
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Couldn't have said it better myself.
Below is the exact quote from Reuters article on this topic:
There you have it. More than just sniveling Graham. It's a "unified front" of both Democrat and Republican Senators that comprise the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Also another text quoted from the article that MR sourced:
Barr is not a Senator. But he's potentially worse! He is an ultra-conservative Attorney General, the highest legal officer of the nation. And as a self-righteous "Christian Attorney General", he will very much push for this legislation because uh…. "PEDOPHILES" is a very very very very scary word for the Religious Right. He is exactly like Graham in this regard. They are using the bogeyman words "Pedophilia" and "Child Abuse" in order to push moral legislation, rather than backing up their stance with science, statistics and/or evidence. After all, Electronic Encryption is a STEM/Science/Tech thing, right?
My point is, if they have a claim to suppress Electronic Encryption, they should argue on the basis of scientific or technological evidence/research/statistics…. and NOT via a moral dog whistle.
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A problem with "back doors" for encryption is that they can (and probably will) be leaked, eventually allowing both cops and crooks to access your files and data. Of course, as much as government snooping organizations like the NSA already spy upon citizens and non-citizens alike with abandon, the government already knows 99% of your habits and whereabouts anyway. Read Snowden's book "Permanent Record" for an eye opener. If you do ANYTHING online or via cell towers your privacy most assuredly is already compromised. We gave up any semblance of privacy with passage of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T act 18 years ago. Encryption may be the last small nod to any protection of privacy, as the use of metadata to track your movements via the GPS on your phones/cars, ubiquitous CCTV monitoring, browsing history, and when/where you swipe credit cards or access teller machines, ensure you are pretty much a known entity regardless of encrypted content of your data. If most of your activities center around your home, place of employment, and paths in between, your place of residence, likely occupation, and daily habits can be surmised regardless of encrypted phone or internet content to/from you. That the government/cops STILL want more information on everyone is rather an exercise in overwhelming redundancy. We're all assumed guilty until proven innocent.
https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/patriot-act
https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/patriot-act
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They can request it. Apple/Facebook doesn't have to comply unless they've got a search warrant.
In other words, no bypassing the 4th amendment. The requirements for obtaining a search warrant is restrictive to keep law enforcement from profiling certain demographics and/or being lazy. If law enforcement has probable cause, the take it to the judge.
If this unconstitutional bill passes, we're just a stone's throw away from "Papers please!" check points all over the country.
This is the same as wire tapping - and those warrants are acquired in a secret court, that the public has no access to, that was set up specifically for the 3-letter agencies. The rational is that you can't have the bad guys find out you are getting a warrant to spy on them. We elect a leader like Trump and yet people still say: "What can go wrong?". Seriously? This isn't about left or right, this is about leaders with a complete lack of a moral compass that are motivated entirely by their own self-interest. They will, ultimately, do anything to protect their grip on power. Check out China, and don't think for a moment that it can't happen here. This whole encryption issue is the wedge.They can request it. Apple/Facebook doesn't have to comply unless they've got a search warrant.
In other words, no bypassing the 4th amendment. The requirements for obtaining a search warrant is restrictive to keep law enforcement from profiling certain demographics and/or being lazy. If law enforcement has probable cause, the take it to the judge.
If this unconstitutional bill passes, we're just a stone's throw away from "Papers please!" check points all over the country.
I had a friend that worked FBI child porn for a few years. Many children in child porn are kidnapped or eventually murdered. If people who want to share those pictures feel like they can do so more securely it could lead to more child abuse. I am not advocating for anything here- but I don't think the connection is tenuous.
The backdoors already exist without any need to break encryption.
The keyboard logs keystrokes and the OS sends screenshots. The microphone records audio. The cameras take photos and videos.
This discussion is about giving lower level law enforcement the same level of access to this information.
The keyboard logs keystrokes and the OS sends screenshots. The microphone records audio. The cameras take photos and videos.
This discussion is about giving lower level law enforcement the same level of access to this information.
I suspect partly the reason companies don't mention this obvious fact is they're worried their customers will start using the FOSS encryption tools and stop using proprietary Apple or Facebook apps that lock people into a platform. Apple tries to sell its products on the promise of privacy and security, they lose that marketing advantage if they admit anyone can have it for free on any device they want to use.
What a pathetically naive response. You think this is about "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." Wrong. This is about free citizens choosing not to share things they don't wish to share with the government, because they're none of the government's business, and the government does not have a right to know everything about you. Feel free to send all your private conversations to the FBI or NSA or DHS if you want to, but don't make the rest of us do so just because you're such an exhibitionist.
I would think that the Snowden leaks would have settled the issue once and for all that government employees (or government contractors) are often corrupt and have plenty of free time to look into everyone's dirty secrets that are outside the scope of their jobs. They violated, and no doubt continue to violate, the privacy of regular individuals just for the voyeuristic pleasure in it, even against government controls or policies. The fact that Snowden himself was able to steal so many top secret government files he wasn't supposed to have access to demonstrates just how poor the government's internal security is.
But if that's not concerning enough to you, I should think the repeated hacks of government servers would concern you, and big tech companies have also been repeatedly hacked. If the key exists somewhere, somebody malicious can and will get it eventually. Then it doesn't matter if you've done nothing the government cares about, what matters is what criminals care about, or what major corporations care about, or what your future potential employers care about. If you've ever had a conversation you wouldn't want your boss, or your mom, or your girlfriend to hear, then it should concern you if the potential exists for a hacker to steal all your data and all your conversations and then post it online for the entire world to see in a nice easily-searched database.
Even if your data does not leak out to the wider world, governments will still collect as much data as they can about you and everyone you know, and they will inevitably use data-mining and eventually artificial intelligence to try to look for patterns among the general population, not merely target individuals already on their radar. Inevitably they will make mistakes, through incompetence or through honest misunderstanding, and innocent people will be hurt. Just look at the TSA's no-fly list, and all the people who have accidentally ended up on the list, even federal politicians! Do you want your own innocent actions viewed as a suspicious pattern, because somebody made a mistake writing an algorithm, or because of some misinterpretation of innocent facts about you? If the government never had any of your data to begin with, because they had no preexisting reason to look at you more closely, you can't be a victim of this sort of problem. If the government is collecting data on everyone, which is exactly what they'll do if they can possibly do it, the odds of you getting denied the ability to travel, or denied the exercising your other rights, or getting arrested on false charges, or getting your offline privacy intruded in follow-up investigations started for no good reason go up dramatically.
And finally, it's a simple reality that all governments tend to become more corrupt and oppressive over time. Even if you can trust the government today to know everything about you, doesn't mean you can trust the government that will still have access to that information in twenty years, or fifty, or a hundred and fifty. Maybe nothing will go bad for you, but what about your grandchildren? Your great-grandchildren? Do you want them to suffer because you thought you could trust government today? Most generations pretty much everywhere on Earth have witnessed major government upheaval, or some kind of civil war, or personally know somebody in their family who did witness it before they were born. It's impossible to know the future, but just looking at history we know we're probably due for some serious problems even here in the United States in most of our lifetimes. Another civil war, another revolution, who knows who will end up in power when the dust settles, and what they will do with the power we give governments today. In the last 244 years, the United States has known two major conflicts in the revolution/civil war vein. There was also that time we got invaded and our capital was burned to the ground. There was the major social upheaval of the 60s and 70s. There was the Great Depression and we had basically a fascist dictator in FDR who only left office because he died. These sorts of things happen with more frequency than most people seem to think. It's downright foolish to put your trust in any government. You might think it's the "good times" right now, but if the government takes every scrap of data they can get of you and everyone else in some big NSA server farm today, they're going to still have it when the bad times inevitably come around.
Thinking it's the government's job to protect you is not only cowardly but foolish. It's your own job to protect yourself, protect your children, and so on. The government can't even protect itself. We're talking about the same government that invited foreign terrorists to come to its own military base for training, and then had to get a couple local sheriff's deputies to stop the terrorist attack because nobody on a US military base has a gun, apparently.
Ridiculous. People creating child porn do it because they get off on having sex with kids or watching kids have sex. There is nobody thinking to themselves: "hey, I have no sexual attraction to children whatsoever, but because I could do it without the government finding out, I'm going to start having sex with kids and posting pictures of it online!" That's so absurd I don't even know why I'm replying to you.
Here's something that's true of basically every criminal. They all think they won't get caught when they commit their crimes. There are some politically-motivated, and religiously-motivated terrorists and activists who are willing to be martyrs, but they aren't really criminals, they're actively trying to get noticed. Everybody else breaking the law is doing it because they don't think they'll get caught, no matter how silly that notion is. Criminals do stupid things all the time and get caught all the time through ordinary police work.
Criminals will use encrypted channels anyway and this will only lead to mass surveillance.
So if when the end run around encryption called for in the threatened legislation directly leads to a data breach, are they willing to give up their government immunity and be sued just like any company that exposes PII due to negligent security decisions. No? But think of the children, house judiciary committee, think of the children.
No, that's just another example of a gross overgeneralization about millions of people based upon an age window. It appears that MSM has found it handy to spread blame for this and that on particular age groups. Every age group has its cross section of crooks and schemers, rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, tech savvy and not, selfish and generous, etc.
The fact is, spying government organizations are comprised of many different age groups, though the higher ups tend to be older just for having been in the snooping arena longer. Ed Snowden was no boomer, though some of his bosses were. A good many of Snowden's peers in his arena were roughly his age. I'm amused at how Trump supporters are constantly cast by MSM as being old white men. Sure, there are plenty of those among them (and not!), but if you'll look at any Trump rally you'll note a lot of younger people as well, and a significant number of women of all age groups. You'll even see a sprinkling of non-white folks of both genders. Another typical aspersion is commonly found on tech-oriented forums, in which younger folk characterize "granny" or "grandpa" as being clueless regarding technology, as per an oft found, "... so simple even my granny can do it ...". Never mind that some of the most brilliant computer scientists still around are in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s. Brian Kernighan, who co-authored with the late Dennis Ritchie the famous book "The C Programming Language", and who - along with Ritchie and Ken Thompson - pioneered the Unix system at Bell Labs back in the sixties, turned 77 this year. Even Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, turns 50 this month. But I digress, I also hate that you feel "Okay boomer" has to be said. I'm a boomer, and neither I nor any of my friends of my age have ever had anything to do with snooping - by crooks or cops alike.
I feel like I gotta reply to this with "OK Boomer" since you're literally a Boomer and you're taking a silly meme way too seriously which is a common Boomer trait.
Anyway, while I'm sure every generation in human history has criticized younger generations (and been criticized in return), as the oldest generation currently alive in large enough numbers to still be relevant, you get to take all the blame for generational warfare because it's what you taught your children to do, and all the other generations who came after you are just following your example. Complaining about getting some return fire, now that your power in society is waning is utterly ridiculous. If you're unhappy with the world, then you didn't do enough to fix things while you had your chance. In many cases you caused the problems (and still are causing problems) that younger generations will have to fix. You're not saints, and while it's certainly unfair to be all grouped together as some monolithic entity, your generation was just as unfair in grouping Millennials together as some monolithic entity our whole lives so you're a hypocrite to complain about getting the same treatment. I'm sure your parents did it to you, but when you had the opportunity not to repeat their mistakes, you did anyway. And so it goes.
You won't be around to enjoy it, but the zoomers saying "OK boomer" to you now will also be generalized and criticized using some silly meme when they're your age, too. Since Gen X invented the internet and Millennials first figured out how to weaponize it, the human race has been selectively breeding better and better memers, so I'm sure whatever Zoomers get hit with at your age by the generations after them will be some seriously devastating stuff. I don't know how they'll ever recover.
Interesting retort, but no, I did not teach my children any such thing, nor did I criticize anyone indiscriminately of an older generation, nor have I had any particular "power" to even wane. The problem with your critique is that it uses the very parameter which I criticized - generalizing what individuals do by their associated age group, which I consider an invalid foundation upon which to base an argument - to criticize me. For example, my taking what you call "a silly meme" too seriously to be a common trait of my whole generation - a "boomer" trait, as it were. That's the problem with your critique. It assumes "boomer traits" to be of substance to counter my argument that a "boomer trait" or characteristic is a false premise. It's a bit circular. In any case, we agree with each other in the content of your final paragraph. It is something that appears to prevail across generations that certain individuals among all age groups ascribe blame to other generations for this and that. It's a two sided coin. No "generation" is the root cause for any particular thing, good or bad. Individuals, and at times their followers, are to blame. Age has little if anything to do with it. For example, we have the "lost generation" to characterize those who came of age around WW1 (even though only a plurality actually fought in that war), the "great generation" for those who fought in WW2 (though that generation - my father's generation - had both hero and villain, as well as those somewhere between those extremes), the "boomer generation", who are all supposed to have been former hippies turned capitalistic plunderers and Trumpers in their aging years (there are some standouts of that character, but they are NOT even a majority of those born between 1946 and 1963). You already gave the standard characterizations of Xers, Millennials, etc., and forthwith blame "boomers" as a group of being responsible. That is false. You have no idea what I blamed or didn't blame my parents for, nor do you have any idea whether or not I repeated any of their mistakes. To say that I did this or that, a person whom you've never met or encountered, due to my being a certain age is not a valid assertion on your part. Whatever a Zoomer might be, I can assure you that whatever I've done in my life will likely never affect them one way or the other, though I hope to have had mostly positive influences on a few that I have gotten to know personally.
Just my "typical boomer response" to the undeserved blame you cast upon me as a consequence of my age - for the record, I had a career in computers and networking at a major university, from which I'm now retired; I'm a Navy veteran from the Vietnam War period (low draft number); I was never a "hippie" though I remain a die hard liberal; I've never voted Republican (and definitely not Trump); I have no particular power, so have nothing to relinquish in that regard; I play bluegrass banjo and sing classically as avocations; I still like tinkering with computers and technology, especially since retirement has allowed me to have fun with it again; and I hate government intrusion and spying. These are nearly all not supposed to be characteristics of "old boomer white guys".
It's simple math. You've been alive longer than younger people. You hold a more substantial amount of the blame for how things are because you've had much more time to try to fix things and much more time to screw things up. Nobody's blaming Zoomers for anything yet because most can't vote and they're too inexperienced to know anything about the world. There are undeniable characteristics of different generations, though, no matter how much you may try to deny it. Your generation had inordinate power simply because of how many of you there were. You had a greater proportion of the vote. You had more members of your cohort from which to draw persuasive voices from to convince the others. Economic metrics bear out the fact that you've also enjoyed much greater economic prosperity to throw your weight around with, and many of your generation still do, to the detriment of your children and grandchildren. Your social choices, particularly the free love movement and feminism leading to tons of divorce are responsible for social ills that previous generations before your own children never experienced in all of human history.
If you don't want to get stereotyped, stop acting like the stereotype. Take some blame and acknowledge fault for how screwed up the world has become, if not individually, than at least as a group. One would hope your generation might've at least acquired a little wisdom to teach us younger people, but instead it's just more complaining when things don't go your way. I don't need to hear about your tastes in music or hear about how you like tinkering with computers. Tell us young guys what you wish your generation had done differently so we wouldn't be in the situations we find ourselves now. If we ignore the lessons of your past, that's on us, but if you sit high and mighty thinking you're faultless than you're of no use, and yes, you will be dismissed as such with a silly meme.
Fine. As I figured, useless to argue this stuff. I can stereotype as well, but won't. We disagree. Perhaps in 40 years, you'll understand or remember this interaction. I don't know. I, as you validly posit, won't be around much longer. Cheers.
Oh all-powerful MacRumors "mods", am I allowed to politically comment on this topic that is in political news or will you ban me for 2 days again because you can't stand criticism of the "great leader" of Apple?
Awaiting your response before I speak further.
Awaiting your response before I speak further.
There's still a huge difference between implementing it, vs doing so seamlessly & pervasively so it actually gets broadly used. That's what's terrifying some politicians: the biggest communications platform is deeply & pervasively integrating strong encryption, securing nearly all data thereon.
Yeah I've got the RSA "It's just an algorithm" and RSA "In four lines of PERL" t-shirts. Yeah it's that simple. Making it trivial for everyone to use (to the point of hard to _not_ use) is what terrifies gov't leaders.