Guest Post by
Last week, the British Prime Minister told Parliament that he wants to “ensure that terrorists do not have a safe space in which to communicate.”
Strong encryption refers to the act of scrambling data in such a way that it cannot be understood by anyone without the correct key or password — even law enforcement with a warrant, or the software manufacturer itself. It’s used in some of the most popular tech products in the world, including the iPhone, WhatsApp messenger, and Facebook.
A highly respected cryptographer and security expert is warning that David Cameron’s proposed ban on strong encryption threatens to “destroy the internet.”
– From the post: Top Computer Security Expert Warns – David Cameron’s Plan to Ban Encryption Would “Destroy the Internet”
You didn’t think the surveillance state would give up that easily did you? Of course not.
Unsurprisingly, fresh off the heels of the Paris terror attacks, the usual authoritarian suspects in the U.S. government are running around exploiting the tragedy in a bid to further erode privacy and civil liberties.
Bloomberg reports:
The bloodshed in Paris led U.S. officials Monday to renew calls for limits on technology that prevents governments from spying on phone conversations, text messages and e-mails.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said she asked Silicon Valley companies to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies access communications that have been encrypted — or scrambled to evade surveillance — if terrorists are using the tools to plan attacks.
“I have asked for help. And I haven’t gotten any help,” Feinstein said Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “If you create a product that allows evil monsters to communicate in this way, to behead children, to strike innocents, whether it’s at a game in a stadium, in a small restaurant in Paris, take down an airliner, that’s a big problem.”
This woman has absolutely no shame whatsoever.
Brennan said he hopes the Paris attacks will serve as “a wake-up call” for European governments who have been critical of spy programs.
Yes, wake up and give up your freedoms before the terrorists have a chance to take them. That’ll show ’em.
Investigators in France are still piecing together how three coordinated teams of gunmen and suicide bombers managed to create carnage in one of Europe’s most heavily policed cities. So far, five of the seven assailants who died have been identified — four of them French citizens, and one believed to be a Syrian who entered Europe as an asylum-seeker.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said that terrorists are using encryption to communicate — on everything from apps to gaming systems. Last week, Belgium’s deputy prime minister said that “the most difficult communication between these terrorists is via PlayStation 4.”
Players using Sony’s popular gaming system can communicate via direct messages or by voice. A Buzzfeed story said that players, who can be located anywhere in the world, have found even more elaborate ways to communicate, including using “weapons during a game to send a spray of bullets onto a wall, spelling out whole sentences to each other.”
So people are spraying messages to each other in video games, and we’re supposed to believe the threat can be countered by getting access to everyone’s What’s App messages.
New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton on Monday called on technology companies to help investigators, although he didn’t specify exactly how. Technology has been “purposefully designed by our manufactures so that even they claim they cannot get into their own devices after they’ve built them,” Bratton said on MSNBC.
“They need to work with us right now,” Bratton said. “In many respects, they’re working against us.”
So the guy clearly has no idea what he’s talking about, but he’s talking about it anyway.
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on MSNBC Monday that “it’s time we had another key that would be kept safe and only revealed by means of a court order.”
Privacy advocates pushed back against the arguments, saying restrictions wouldn’t make Americans safer.
“Any attempt to mandate back doors or prohibit the technology altogether would basically amount to trying to outlaw math, and any attempt to do so will fail to make us safer against terrorism, while making us all much less safe online and also threatening our digital economy,” said Kevin Bankston, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, in an e-mail.
“In the end, we can hurt ourselves much more than the terrorists can hurt us,” Bankston said. “Indeed, that’s their entire strategy — to make us injure ourselves, our political values, our economies, our security — in our attempt to injure them.”
Indeed, and we seem intent on continuing to hurt ourselves as much as we possibly can.
For related articles, see:
Meet the Institution Most Intent on Destroying American Freedom – (*Hint: It’s Not ISIS)
Big Brother Idiocy – TSA Spent $160 Million on Naked Body Scanners that Fail 96% of the Time
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Discusses The Constitution, NSA Spying and Torture
It’s Not Just Spying – How the NSA Has Turned Into a Giant Profit Center for Corrupt Insiders
Even the Author of the Patriot Act Slams the NSA and Eric Holder on Spying
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Who was it from what Administration said “Never let a crisis go to waste”?
Rahm Emmanuel
This is a camel nose under the tent (or dress). When the gumshoes do it, the terrorist et all will return to HF bursts, microprint behind postage stamps, etc. They rarely caught spies and they will rarely catch terrorist especially while looking for Southern White Male Christians. If we were serious, we’d run the BHO Administration out of town on a Burning Platform ASAP.
Spying and spying some more. What are they really looking
for anyway? I can’t figure it out. Help, please.
susanna….the NSA is not looking for terrorists with their eavesdropping on everything; our bankrupt gov’t along with all the other bankrupt western developed socialized economies are looking for……………….money. I know it is hard to believe, but if you combine all the other actions taken or imposed by our gov’t, it is a world-wide outreach.
Switzerland banking privacy collapsed; U.S. citizens can no longer have bank account in EU – banks refuse due to horrendous reporting requirements on banks and they can be held liable; the taxation on U.S. citizens in foreign countries that have never worked/earned income in hte U.S.
More, but this is a.m. and am still not wide awake.
What a joke.
Bright kids can use open source encryption systems like PGP to make a smartphone application that can’t be cracked by the NSA, so the entire discussion is moot.
PGP, for the uninformed, is Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy, a public key encryption system that appeared back in 1992.
This is OLD news. The reality is that we already live in the Panopticon. Our modern “conveniences” like PC’s and cell phones make it trivially easy for the clowns ruling us to tag us and herd us like cattle. Relatively “old” legislation like the Bank Secrecy Act long ago stripped us of any privacy whatsoever.
Orwell is timeless.
Is paranoia even a thing anymore? I mean, you arent paranoid if they are actually watching you and out to get you, right?
“susanna”
“What are they looking for anyway.”
Dissidents: people who ask wrong questions, or name too many official crimes.
And, to locate these dissidents, the Department of Homeland Security is RECRUITING, TRAINING, AND PROTECTING informers.
By the act of Congress that established the DHS a system was created by which informers could make false allegations against anyone they please with near-total impunity. Of course, such informers aren’t described as informers; rather they are given the title “submitting person” and the DHS Act provided that their falsehoods will never be examined by any court or legislature or law enforcement agency. The legislation even specifies how this immunity is obtained. The “submitting person” only has to give an “express statement” that his lies were “voluntarily given” and that he expected “protection from disclosure”. It’s all there, in the act that created the DHS.
I’m sorry guys, but silly season is over. Even if you own physical gold, live in a cabin in the woods along with a stash of ammo and AK-47’s, you lose. If you don’t fall to the horde of hungry homeless, you will fall to DHS death squads. All the homeless have to do is to wait until you collapse from lack of sleep (24, 48, 72 hours), then they march in, slit your throat and… let your imagination run wild.
If you own stocks or bonds, guess what: you’re depending on criminal and useless classes to deliver your purchasing power at the moment of their greatest victory. Did I mention something about ‘silly season’?
If you want to survive, you have to combine with others of like mind for the purpose of mutual protection, among other purposes. The big question now is, ‘HOW is this to be done?’ And the quick answer is, ‘You must establish First-Amendment assemblies – the only historically-proven method by which men have made their lives and property secure from rule by thieves.’
The American Revolution, for example, was powered by a large network of such assemblies: from town meetings, county meetings, state conventions and, ultimately, to Continental Congresses.
Let’s be realistic: this solution won’t be easy or quick… unprecedented adventures never are.
Righhhhttt. Like Cameron would do away with his encrypted communications used to keep the sheeples unaware of his agenda.
Russia Explains To Clueless US Public Why Obama Can’t Defeat ISIS
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/18/2015 17:15 -0500
Earlier this week, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked President Obama the following question at a press briefing:
“A lot of Americans have this frustration that they see the United States has the greatest military in the world, it has the backing of nearly every other country in the world when it comes to taking on ISIS. I guess the question is, and if you’ll forgive the language, but why can’t we take out these bastards?”
Well Jim, the answer is quite simple and indeed, if you – or any other member of the mainstream media for that matter – would bother to look at things like the declassified Pentagon report that Judicial Watch turned up earlier this year, you’d be less confused.
Allow us, once again, to provide you with the answers you seek, straight from the Pentagon ca. 2012:
…there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
Translation: if Sunni extremists were to establish a proto-state in eastern Syria that would be great because it would destabilize Assad and cut off Iran from Hezbollah thus endangering the preservation of Tehran’s Shiite crescent.
For those who need a still simpler formulation: ISIS started out no different than any of the other rebels the US supports in Syria. They likely received guns, money, and training if not directly from the US, then from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Washington seems to have had some idea that they would seek to capture and hold territory and as far as the Pentagon was concerned, that was just fine. Whether or not the CIA anticipated what would come next is up for debate, but make no mistake, US intelligence knew good and well this was a possibility and let it happen because ousting Assad was (and still is) the top priority.
So when the Jim Costas of the world ask “why can’t we take out these bastards?”, the answer is that if if we did, one of the main forces destabilizing the Assad regime would be gone and not only that, the US would no longer have an excuse to be in Syria, which would leave the country’s political future entirely up to Russia and Iran and that is a decidedly unpalatable outcome not only for Washington, but for Riyadh and Doha as well.
It’s Occam’s Razor Jim: look for the simplest possible explanation and go with that.
Of course that explanation is simply too bad to be true for most Americans and so the public and the mass media will continue to exists in a state of perpetual bewilderment as to why 13 months of aerial bombardment hasn’t done anything to degrade the group.
In case any of the above isn’t clear enough, Sergei Lavrov has commentary which may help to drive the point home, presented below without further comment:
“Despite announcing ambitious plans for its coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), the analysis of those [US-led] airstrikes during over a year lead to conclusion that they were hitting selectively, I would say, sparingly and on most occasions didn’t touch those IS units, which were capable of seriously challenging the Syrian army.”
“Apparently, it’s a kind of a ‘honey is sweet, but the bee stings’ situation: they want IS to weaken Assad as soon as possible to make him leave somehow, but at the same time they don’t want to overly strengthen IS, which may then seize power.”
“The US stance seriously weakens the prospects of Syria to remain a secular state, where the rights of all ethnic and religious groups will be provided and guaranteed,”
“Russia’s assessment of the US-led anti-terror operation in Syria is based on observations of specific results and there are little results, not to say there are none – except the fact that during this period [since August 2014] the Islamic State has grown on the territories they control.”