Why the Fight over Encryption is at an Impasse

MIT's Technology Review had a good article by Tom Simonite that summarizes the standoff between the Government agencies and technology companies over encryption of communication and files.  See this article.

The Government agencies claim that they need to be able to decrypt and monitor all of our phone calls, emails, texts, and computer files in order to "fight terrorism."  The privacy advocates, and technology companies say that if our Government is given a "backdoor" into all communication encryption, other governments will ask for the same thing.  Also then there would be nothing to stop "bad actors" from either stealing, or figuring out that same back door, and be able to interfere with all of our personal communications, banking, trade secrets etc.  

Tom Simonite implies that he thinks that the issue will not be decided until we have a new president in office.  He believes that Trump and Rubio would side with the Government, while Cruz and Sanders would side with the tech/privacy advocates.  Hillary Clinton has a vague "in between" stance. 

The Government agencies claim that if they had access to encrypted messages, calls, and files, they could prevent acts of terrorism.  They say they are still having difficulty opening files related to the San Bernardino shootings.  I'm very skeptical that they will be able to identify and prevent acts of terrorism before they occur.  However I can see that it is useful after the fact to use when prosecuting criminals.  The problem is to identify conversations related to planning a crime and separating it from all of the other general noise in the system.

I believe everyone should have access to the toughest encryption possible for our calls, texts, emails and computer & cloud files.   

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.   

Is the Cyber Security Information Sharing Act actually at Trojan Horse?

When I first heard about Cyber Security Information Sharing Act (CISA) concept, it appeared to make some sense.  If one company encounters a cyber attack, or discovers a serious vulnerability, it should be required to notify a government agency and its peers ASAP to help protect all other government agencies and companies, as well as the overall network.  If a company reports such an attack or vulnerability in good faith, and the report was later determined to be a false alarm, the company should not be subject to a lawsuit for false reporting.  A law that would allow that seems fair and reasonable.  It would help protect all users of the internet and help to catch the "bad guys."

The concept of the bill sounds good, but like a Trojan Horse, it may have an enemy hiding inside it -- a serious attack on privacy.  According to recent articles about the CISA) (See this one in The Guardian by Sam Thielman), the big database companies Government law enforcement agencies, and credit reporting businesses have piled onto this bill with heavy lobbying and big campaign donations in order to expand the bill to increase surveillance over all Americans with no recourse or liability to them. See this on TechCrunch.  They will be able to buy, sell and exchange information about what sites we visit, what we buy, our banking etc.  We will not be able to know when the exchanges occur, or to whom they were given.  Information about us could be available to all Government agencies, and since most corporations are international businesses now, the same information could be made available to Governments of other countries.

I believe the CISA bill should be stripped of those provisions before it is passed.  However I have my doubts it will happen.  We have a "perfect storm" in congress now.  Republicans have always voted to increase Government law enforcement, and have consistently been against any attempt for individual freedoms.  Democrats who typically stand up for individual freedoms, appear now to think of themselves as trying to appear to be tough on terrorism, may vote to approve the bill as written.  Pretty scary!

We had a similar situation in 1998 when the terrible Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed.  The concept that as publishing moved to the digital world, laws needed to change to reflect the new world of the internet.  That was the "horse" -- but the Trojans inside were much more evil, and, of course, lucrative, for the industry.  We had a Republican majority in congress, and Bill Clinton as Democratic President.  The President wanted to support the movie industry and the Republicans were getting tremendous pressure (and huge political donations) from Disney, and the publishing industry.  The Disney and the publishers wanted to be able to merge and expand their monopolies across print, radio and TV, and didn't seem to care about individual rights.  Disney also wanted to prevent their very old "Mickey Mouse" copyrights from expiring and being transferred to the public domain.  The law passed easily and the large corporations reaped windfall profits of hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 17 years. 

Chase Bank: "No Cash in your Safe Deposit Box" -- Really?

I just received a letter from Chase Bank about my annual renewal for safe deposit box rent.  I scanned through the letter, and it looked like sort of the standard stuff that we get every year from banks.  It had a cover letter and 5 pages of typical "boilerplate."  Then I spotted something that said "Contents of the Box:  You agree not to store any cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value"  -- That seemed like something new!  I didn't remember that!
I always thought that the reason people had safe deposit boxes was to keep extra cash, so that if the banking system collapsed they'd have cash to use to survive.  I figured that most of the boxes probably had bundles of $100 bills.  However, I don't think we have ever kept money in a safe deposit box.  It always seemed dumb to not be able to get some sort of interest on the money -- particularly if it was losing value each year due to inflation.  So if I left $100 in the box for a year, I would then only be able to buy $97 worth of stuff if we had 3% inflation.  But if I could get 6% interest on the money, I could buy $103 worth of stuff.  But, during the past few years, we've had almost zero (officially) inflation, and the interest I'm getting on a $6000 bank balance is less than 10 cents/month, so maybe people would be tempted to keep money in their bank box!
After I read this letter, I looked on the internet.  Apparently Chase's change in policy did hit the news in April.  See this link.  Some people and organizations are concerned about this change.  I found this web page: http://www.infowars.com/report-jpmorganchase-bans-storage-of-cash-in-its-safety-deposit-boxes/
Paul Joseph Watson wrote an article for Alex Jones "infowars" website that the "war on cash" continues, and attributes it to the banking industry trying to get away from handling cash.  It doesn't seem like anyone else is concerned.  Apparently there is an obscure law that prohibits taking cash out of "circulation" --which is interpreted as putting cash into a safe deposit box.  I suppose the Feds could prosecute someone for putting currency in a safe deposit box.  But according to this Marketplace Report, 80% of US Currency is in $100 bills, at least 30% of that is outside the country, and the US ships overseas pallets of $100 bills, each worth $64 million--sounds like moving a lot of cash outside of US circulation, doesn't it?  .
I'm very suspicious that this change in policy may be coming from our Government's war on individual privacy.  Could this change have been part of the Government's settlement with Chase for their part in the mortgage industry meltdown?  I'll bet we will see other banks do the same thing -- probably due to Government pressure.  Government would like to be able to see every financial transaction we make at any time they want.  It makes it easier to catch bad guys, drug dealers, blackmailers, etc.  We saw in the recent Dennis Hastert case that the Government is charging him with money transfer crimes and lying about it.  Not any concern about child molestation, of course.  Government was concerned when he withdrew amounts less than the $10,000 limit for being reported.  By forcing everyone away from cash, the Government will now be able to track us much closer.  Yes, they may be able to catch criminals -- but they will also be able to know more about who we donate to for political campaigns too!  Of course the multi-millionaires like Koch Brothers will still be able to keep their donations anonymous -- but not the rest of us!

FBI Behind Mysterious Surveillance Aircraft over US Cities

This article By JACK GILLUM, EILEEN SULLIVAN and ERIC TUCKER Associated Press was in the San Diego Union Tribune reveals the huge flight of aircraft used by many of our Federal law enforcement agencies.  Apparently they use lots of "tricked out" Cessnas  and fake companies to "protect the pilots & crew."  

FBI behind mysterious surveillance aircraft over US cities | UTSanDiego.com

The fact of the planes being used doesn't surprise me!  I can picture myself in a leadership position with one of these agencies trying to do my job in "fighting crime"  I would try to use every tool possible to do the job, and would attempt to balance the cost/benefit of each technique.  I'm sure that there are a lot of crime-fighting situations where use of small aircraft with photo and electronic eavesdropping equipment would be much more effective than using agents on the ground.   The article quotes the FBI as saying that the planes weren't a "secret" -- but it is clear that the FBI wasn't telling everyone about it either!  

One reason that the FBI is flying planes rather than using drones is that their policy currently allows "piloted planes" to do the spying, while it forbids drones from doing it.  Was this a "loophole" in the rules?  Or is it intentional?  I find it difficult to understand the differences between a drone carrying cameras and listening devices relaying information back to an agency and a plane piloted by a human doing exactly the same thing. 

The flying of planes is very expensive!  Pilots are relatively expensive too!  Think of the costs involved to the taxpayer for just this FBI effort.  Now imagine these costs for border patrol, DEA, as well as State and Local police forces -- it will really add up!  The employment of so many pilots doing this may be part of the reason for the current dire shortage of pilots that is causing many of the small regional airlines and airports to have to shut down.  I'm sure pilots would much rather fly these cesna-based FBI missions than passenger flights!  I'd bet that the FBI can also offer much higher pay than the small regional airlines.  

However, drones are now starting to be used!  Drones will be much cheaper to operate, won't require licensed pilots, and will have fewer constraints.  Because they will be cheaper, I would imagine that the cessna planes and pilots will be reduced and replaced with drones.  Because drones will be less expensive, I would think that the agencies will use them even more than they do today!  What effect will that have on our privacy?  

My other concern is that I believe that most of the efforts of our FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshalls, Border Patrol, and State & Local Police involves fighting the "drug war"  -The agencies like to tout how much the "street value" is of the drugs that they confiscate -- but we NEVER hear about the total cost to the various Government agencies in order to make that arrest.