California Considering Requiring all Cell Phones to have "back door" to encryption.

Sunday 24 Jan 2016 Los Angeles Times had a report by Melanie Mason that said:  "Lawmaker targets smartphone encryption."  Assemblyman Jim Cooper of Elk Grove is sponsoring a bill  (AB1681)to require all cell phones produced in the state to have an ability to be decrypted using a "back door" by police agencies.  The bill also requires smartphones sold to be able to be remotely disabled.
Assemblyman Jim Cooper is a retired Captain in the Sacramento Sheriff's Department, and states this capability is necessary to stop human trafficking.  Yes, I think it might help the police stop human trafficking.  I suspect their real reason is to use it in  their terribly frustrating "war on drugs."  He is probably using the human trafficking example as a Trojan horse to get such a bill passed, since most people would be against human trafficking, but probably less than half of the voting population is in favor of continuing the war on drugs.  We really cannot trust our prosecutors and police to not "stretch" the use of this "crime fighting tool if they got it.  They would eventually use it to become a serious abuse of powers.  Every time they have been granted an additional power, they have abused it, such as the RICO laws, property confiscation,  and the "3 Strikes" law.  The requirement in this law to be able to remotely disable a smartphone is described as disabling it for "unauthorized users" -- but that also implies that the police could disable the phone to prevent someone from erasing incriminating information on it.

It is also very strange that a Democrat would be sponsoring a bill to tear down our individual rights -- that is usually what Republicans advocate.  Cooper also claims that the big tech companies are putting profits over people by fighting such a proposal.  I would put it the other way -- his bill puts the profits of the immense "police/counter drug" industry over the rights of individuals.

Samantha Corbin, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, disagrees.  I also disagree with the proposal.  We need to draw a line in the sand for our individual rights for privacy.  It is a difficult area to figure out where to draw that line -- but this is one of them.  There are a lot of flaws in the proposal:
1. If police do have a court order to be permitted to explore the contents of a cell phone, then there are computer resources that must be available to help them do it by "brute force" decryption.  Yes, the police department may have to pay either private companies, or NSA to perform the task.  Criminals using mobile phones have to use some sort of password, and it is possible to crack fairly long passwords within 24 hours or processing using modern computers and algorithms.
2. If a back door is put into encryption of all mobile phones sold in California, anyone with criminal intent will buy their cell phones from out of the state -- or out of the country if all states passed similar laws.
3. If such a law was passed, that same "back door" could be used by others.  What is to stop political opponents from using it to spy on competitors?  What happens when the "back door" is discovered by someone and made public on the internet?  
4. Third-party applications could be installed on phones that would add another layer of encryption on top of the manufacturer's encryption.  If such a bill passed, most of us, and certainly most criminals would begin using such applications.  Yes, it would encumber the use of the phones, but the cost would be reasonable compared to the risks involved.

The right answer is to pass a law that requires an owner of a mobile phone to unlock a phone when presented with a legal search warrant with probable cause.  The owner should be entitled to at least one appeal, where counter argument could be presented before having to unlock the device.  The search warrant should be written to only look for certain information, and not be permitted access to everything on the phone.  If the owner of the device refuses to unlock the phone, there should be some sort of immediate jail sentence (if nothing else but "contempt of court")  and the owner should be fined and required to reimburse the cost expended to "crack" the encryption using high-powered computers and algorithms.

Special Place in Hell

Wow, this really looks like the Government over reaching to quash freedom of press, freedom of speech!  Matt Welch of Reason.com was given a subpoena to provide identifying information for people who had posted comments on his website! See this opEd in the LA Times.  The Attorney General and New York State attempted to obtain that information with a subpoena!  They even issued a "gag order" to Reason.com to prevent them from telling anyone about it, or notifying the people who had written the comments.
I do agree with many that Ross William Ulbricht got an absurdly severe sentence for operating a website.  Yes drug dealers may have used his website.  But dealers also use AT&T's phone lines, but does AT&T executives go to prison?  Dealers were probably very cagey.  Yes he may have known about money laundering going on with bitcoins.  But that is pretty hard to track also.  Is it a web site's responsibility to police all traffic on it?  I also don't think that the police actions to stop money laundering have ever been tested in the Supreme Court.  I think that simply handling money exchanges would be found legal under the US Constitution.
I also wonder if Shaun W. Bridges, the Treasury agent who was involved in the investigation may have "contaminated" the evidence against Ulbricht. He managed to steal a lot of "bitcoin" himself, and has been sentenced.
At any rate, I really am amazed that the Government would go after someone who writes a comment "There's a Special Place in Hell" for the judge.  The mere fact that someone in the Government attempted to do that, should be a crime.  But I doubt that whoever issued that subpoena or gag order will ever be tried or convicted of a crime.

Police "slow" to comply with 'Stingray' policies

Jeff McDonald reported in today's (1/14/2016 )San Diego Union Tribune that the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) has been very slow to comply fully with the state law that requires them to publicly post information about their use of 'Stingray' cell phone tracking systems they use.  The Stingray systems are mobile devices that allow the user to intercept cell phone calls and track the user's locations.  Stingray systems also allow the user to disrupt, or block phone calls from specific cell phones.  They can force cell phones to increase their transmitter power, force them to use weaker encryption keys, and, with that information, can actually listen in on cell phone calls.
The Federal Government encouraged local governments to acquire and use the devices by offering generous "grants to help them buy the devices from Harris Corp.  Apparently the Department of Homeland Security and FBI are behind that effort.  The article says 17 states are using the devices.  I suspect that more states are using them without their citizen's knowledge, and given that the Federal agencies are pushing the state and local police to use them, probably the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, ATF, Border Patrol, etc are also using the devices.
Of course the agencies justify their use of these devices to protect America from terrorists.  But I suspect their primary use is simply to track and catch recreational drug smugglers and marketers as part of their endless  (and very profitable)"war on drugs."

For years, state and local police departments have been using stingray systems to track and eavesdrop on citizens without wiretap approvals, or warrants.  I'm sure all of those agencies knew that the use of the systems was against the law, and against the basic premises of our US Constitution, but they felt their "higher purpose" (war on drugs) was an end that justified the use of these means. I'm sure they can claim they caught some "bad guys" using stingrays, and they may also claim that there have only been a few "abuses" of the systems.  But who knows?  What kind of checks and balances have been built into the use of the systems to verify that some police officer might not have tracked his wife or girlfriend?  How do we know someone hasn't used it to get information about a political opponent or business competitor?  
The State of California Government wanted to put some controls on this technology to reduce the chance of abuse.  Senate Bill 741 was signed into law on October 8 2015 which makes it a crime to possess or use such a tracking device without going through the procedures defined in the law.  Police have already had 3 months to comply with the law, but according to this article, most have only paid lip service to the law, and have not complied with the intent and spirit of it.   I'm pretty sure that if I had and used such a device myself, I would probably have the device confiscated, be arrested and thrown in jail under this law.  But, of course, the police can take their time to comply with the law.  They clearly do not want the public to know that they are using the device, who they share the information with (probably all Federal agencies), and how long or where they keep the data they collect.  It does make sense to not let the supposed bad guys know about the system, because it would be easy to simply turn off cell phones and not be tracked.  Since so many cars now have similar trackable communications systems (such as "On Star," "Ford Order," "Toyota Safety Connect," "Nissan Vehicle Tracking Recovery System - VTRS,"  or Chrysler's MOPAR Electronic Vehicle Tracking System ), I suspect that these stingray systems can also track vehicles using similar technology, they may also be able to eavesdrop on conversations held within the car.  Nobody has seemed to bring that subject up.
This California law affects State and local police agencies, but probably does not affect Federal agencies.  So I'm not sure we have a chance of protecting our public's right to privacy with just a state law.    George Orwell's "1984" dystopian world came 30 years later than he predicted.  And instead of carrying out a continuous war against two other continental alliances, we are carrying out war against "drugs" and "terrorism."  Yes, we aren't looking for "thoughtcrimes" but we are trying to identify and stop crimes before they happen.  We try to catch people selling chemicals that might be used in fabricating drugs.  We try to stop money flow that might happen to be related to drug smuggling or donations to Palestinian causes.  We try to stop people from recruiting others to join ISIS fighters. These are all similar to "thoughtcrimes" and now we are using technology to track our citizens without their knowledge.