Obama wants backdoor in your encryption

dmnEPC

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Dec 23, 2010
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President Barack Obama said Friday that police and spies should not be locked out of encrypted smartphones and messaging apps, taking his first public stance in a simmering battle over private communications in the digital age.

“If we find evidence of a terrorist plot… and despite having a phone number, despite having a social media address or email address, we can’t penetrate that, that’s a problem,” Obama said. He said he believes Silicon Valley companies also want to solve the problem. “They’re patriots.”

Obama Sides with Cameron in Encryption Fight - Digits - WSJ

I know I don't need to tell you guys what a bad idea this is. You just can't have a security with a backdoor. The fear of terrorism does not trump privacy and or security. If they put any kind of backdoor in, there is no way to keep the "bad guys" from looking for and or finding that back door.

This is going to be a big fight. Call your congressmen today!
 


Surprised they don't already have backdoors into most stuff.

You can't buy a printer that doesn't have the identifying info printed into each page, and some of the newer ones can detect USD and actually refuse to scan it.

I just figured that type of shit was everywhere that matters. Can't imagine NSA struggles with the common encryption algorithms.
 
Have to admit, this new push confuses me. What exactly is Obama hoping for here? He thinks he's going to add a backdoor into RSA, DSA, AES, SHA, PGP, and so on? How does he plan to achieve this dubious goal? They're already written math algorithms -- you can't just add a back door. That's not how it works.

You can try to find a weakness within it, and crack it, but you can't add a back door. You can create a new algorithm that does have a back door, but that's not going to impact any of the existing algorithms everyone uses. Does he think he's going to sneak some commits into OpenSSL, or something? Ummm, no...

The only way for this to work is go after individual companies, company-by-company, and ask them to open up their systems to the government. This is why there's not a chance I would ever use something like Windows built-in encryption. Obviously, Microsoft is buddy-buddy with the govt.
 
Have to admit, this new push confuses me. What exactly is Obama hoping for here? He thinks he's going to add a backdoor into RSA, DSA, AES, SHA, PGP, and so on? How does he plan to achieve this dubious goal? They're already written math algorithms -- you can't just add a back door. That's not how it works.

You can try to find a weakness within it, and crack it, but you can't add a back door. You can create a new algorithm that does have a back door, but that's not going to impact any of the existing algorithms everyone uses. Does he think he's going to sneak some commits into OpenSSL, or something? Ummm, no...

The only way for this to work is go after individual companies, company-by-company, and ask them to open up their systems to the government. This is why there's not a chance I would ever use something like Windows built-in encryption. Obviously, Microsoft is buddy-buddy with the govt.

I don't know that he is going to try to push for that. But I do know it really pisses them off that apple and google have implemented encryption on the base level of their phones. This brings encryption to the masses. They didnt mind it when just the geeks where using encryption. But they can't have Mr and Mrs Jones having it "automatically" turned on.

Either way it's all bullshit. As soon as these devices are "opened" all that protection goes away. Everything is in the "cloud" and it's not as if accessing cloud data is a real challenge for the intelligence community.
 
Well he did invoke the magic word "patriotism".

Everyone knows encryption trembles in the face of it.
 
LOL they don't need it. They have back doors at the hardware level. Doesn't matter if you're using Windows/Linux/ or super secret BSD. They have back doors in your CPU microcode, BIOS firmware, the firmware on your NIC etc...
 
LOL they don't need it. They have back doors at the hardware level. Doesn't matter if you're using Windows/Linux/ or super secret BSD. They have back doors in your CPU microcode, BIOS firmware, the firmware on your NIC etc...

Maybe I'm an idiot (actually I am an idiot, but that's besides the point), but why is that people keep forgetting and/or ignoring this?

Also, the intelligence community isn't pissed at Apple or Google for shipping phones with encryption because it is actually illegal for those companies to export technology that is deemd to be against the national security interest. Do you know what that means? That means that the national security interests of the US are not at all worried about anything that Apple or Google has done.