FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone
thehill.com
thehill.com
This disgraceful, emotionally manipulative statement is an obvious lie. Police/FBI/etc have have access to far more information about criminals than any point in history. The average person (criminals included) leaves behind an incredible amount of "digital exhaust". They should be able to build a complete pattern-of-life easily with 3rd party data (e.g. ad tracking), various side channels, and the massive amount of metadata[1] recorded every time criminals used their phone.
Of course, using all of that data to find a criminal requires actual detective work specific to each case. Encryption (especially on a phone examined after a crime) isn't preventing law enforcement from investigating crimes; it is, however, harder to automate. This anti-encryption argument is really about automated mass surveillance, not finding specific criminals.
[1] "We kill people based on metadata" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc
Digital forensics is way outside typical leo training and believe it or not you can make a lot more money in the private sector with IT training.
Local, state and federal case loads get backlogged behind, leaving the highest priority cases to get staffed.
That's the problem: attempting to prevent important new technology (actually-secure encryption) from being used is not a substitute for updated training that provides "typical leo" with digital forensics skills that are increasingly needed.
Susan Landau's 2016 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Apple's encryption on the San Bernardino shooter's iphone:
>> "Instead of embracing the communications and device security we so badly need for securing US public and private data, law enforcement continues to press hard to undermine security in the misguided desire to preserve simple, but outdated, investigative techniques."
>> "We need 21st century techniques to secure the data that 21st century enemies—organized crime and nation-state attackers—seek to steal and exploit. Twentieth century approaches that provide law enforcement with the ability to investigate but also simplify exploitations and attacks are not in our national security interest. Instead of laws and regulation that weaken our protections, we should enable law enforcement to develop 21st century capabilities for conducting investigations."
>> "Developing such capabilities will involve deep changed for the Bureau, which remains agent-based, not technology-based."
I think, she was referring to classic investigative measures using modern tools and infrastructure.
I think that at this point of the 21st century, this is 100 % detective work.
I'm sure he left evidence that goes well beyond his own phone if he was planning and plotting with others. They should have no trouble piecing this together with or without his phone.
Sometimes, like in this case, it's complicated because they're only out to a few people. I would still rather err on the side of what close friends say rather than family. The family probably had no idea. They rarely do until someone's ready to come out to everyone.
Yeah I was thinking of the same. If they came out to their friends, it's probably who they wanted to be and felt most comfortable sharing with. It was also how they would have liked to have been remembered.
Also, I have yet to hear anyone argue that we should “violate” the 2A, but I have heard lots of 1A discussion about how we could frame laws or discuss whether 2A is worth keeping in its current state.
If Apple does not give you the tools to decrypt messages on their phones, doesn't that make it "impossible" to automate, where automate is defined as any version of "decrypting the data on the phone"?
The second thing is to log iMessage data on the server-side (since it has to be decrypted at some point). This would allow them to produce it, but would miss any apps installed on the phone used for alternative communication.
I don't like to see this so much as Apple refusing but there really isn't a way for Apple to enable easy full access without a backdoor, which is an unrealistic expectation.
iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, so that's also not an option. Apple would have to inject a key they controlled into a user's list of device keys. (Which they can do, and the UI doesn't notify users if it were to happen.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Although it seems like it would be a RAM-only thing
[0] https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-... [1] https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/
Not sure if you're joking there -- maybe you meant magazines?
Like so many other gun regulation ideas, it seems superficially reasonable based on "danger" but it's almost never the case that items like that contributed measurably to gun deaths. They don't need to be banned -- they are niche items. Mass shooters who have access to them rarely use them. They rarely use 40 or 50 round magazines. Indeed, people rarely purchase magazines larger than the standard 30 rounds.
We can reduce gun ownership...
That is not a legitimate policy goal. The earlier poster points out that gun ownership is not correlated with crime at all. We shouldn't set policy goals that are merely about partisanship -- trying to cut down on gun owners because we don't like them -- rather than a clear public benefit.
...increasing liability for dealers.
I would like to better understand what you have in mind here. In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
A 2014 review in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded having a firearm in the home, even when it’s properly stored, doubles your risk of becoming a victim of homicide and triples the risk of suicide. [0]
Guns are intrinsically dangerous, in much the same way as certain aggressive dog breeds and industrial explosives. While many/most people can safely raise rottweilers, store dynamite, and keep guns, some will not. Is there a marginal benefit associated with the removal of each marginal gun? Obviously. Is gun ownership reduction a legitimate policy goal? Obviously. It's strange that you think otherwise.
> In general, modern legal systems reject holding one person responsible for the crime of another. If a mass shooter lawfully purchases a firearm, what possible liability could a dealer have?
Part of a more involved system of background checks would necessarily involve more action by dealers to verify that the customer's purchase is legal. Prosecuting and holding liable individuals who fail to follow established precautions when selling dangerous products is not unusual.
[0] https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/1814426/accessibility-fir...
30 rounds is standard? That's terrifying.
Anecdata but the NZ shooter had large clips (many dual large clips taped together in fact), and Las Vegas shooter had some crazy "niche" shit.
If it's so niche that nobody cares then what's the harm in restricting things like that? People don't need 40 round magazines to shoot targets.
They don't even need semi-auto to shoot targets, but that's crazy talk.
A ban on "large capacity" (greater than 10 rounds) magazines was implemented 25 years ago [0]. In actuality, it did very little except to drive demand (and increase prices) for such magazines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
> We can reduce gun ownership Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2) * 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3) * 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4) * 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5) * 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
[1] 30k deaths per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf, minus 23k suicides per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhamcs/web_tables/2015_ed_web_... [2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm [4] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... [5] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/22/med... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/05/7435796...
[2] https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/
[3] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
[4] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FbxWw1fYoGc
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/14/gunsmi...
[6] https://www.propublica.org/article/why-do-democrats-keep-try...
[7] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-yellow-light-for-red-flag-law...
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
If California's laws decreased the frequency of shootings, we'd expect California's shootings per year per person to be better than Texas.
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
How many of those had an out of state purchase like the most recent one though (Gilroy)?
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
Flash suppressors make shooting at the range more comfortable, and ar15s don’t have “1000 yards of range”, but hunting rifles often do.
And what business is it if anyone in a free country wants to own more guns than you feel happy for them to?
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
I'd like to do the same here.
Guns last a lot longer than 30 years. 80-120 years sounds more like it. They are not going away anytime soon even if you do ban them (which wont happen).
The police in Hong Kong would be a lot more respectful if the (massive, dense) crowd was armed with more than laser pointers. The riots in LA where Korean shop owners defended their property. Etc., etc. Hell there were violent protests in Ferguson, MO not long ago.
"Gun Control" was originally just a mechanism to keep the (black, brown) population from owning guns; just a way of disarming the black/brown population. Look at the past laws, and current policing!
Some people in the US think "It can't happen here, now we should get rid of guns!" - as we watch the authorities putting children in cages, and protests in other countries where the police beat up protesters, and riots where people defend their loved ones and property, the rise of White Nationalism from "simmer" to "boil" and people still think we shouldn't have guns?
There's absolutely no way, in hell, Americans would willingly disarm - nor should we.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
or Thomas Jefferson in 1787:
"We have had 13. states independent 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure."
And if you kill many more of the enemy than they do of you despite being vastly outnumbered, you can justifiably say you gave a lot more than you got, which is a victory of sorts in its own right.
So there's that...
Not necessarily insurmountable, but potentially a significant obstacle.
Lots of people care a whole lot about gun rights. And all you need to do is win 1 Congress and presidency, to temporarily reverse the law, and allow people to purchase these guns again, and reverse all the effects of the law.
My current preference would be:
1. A weapons licensing program requiring training and passing a test both on general use and much more heavily on safety and responsibility/ethics. Biennial refresher course for license renewal.
2. A complete ban on gun ownership for any violent crime history or history of mental health issues, or known affiliation with a group classified as a terrorist group or criminal gang, or any other well known factors which significantly increase the risk of gun related murder, allowing unlicensed persons access to your firearms, including mandatory immediate surrender of arms and amo for anyone with a gun license if any of these points should become relevant after the fact.
3. Significant funding for means of identifying other factors that could help reduce gun deaths and implementing laws that integrate such factors once they have been demonstrated, as well as education to help the public at large identify the factors that are statistically relevant to gun deaths.
That's such a painfully white suggestion - to readily remove liberties so hard won, in a way that will only effect people of color.
You do know gun control has historically only effected black/brown populations right?
I don't understand your parenthetical assertion that domestic abuse and mass shootings are not crime. Of course, they certainly are crime.
Guns don't kill people, encryption doesn't kill people, backwards nutjobs kill people. Politics in America, currently, can entirely be summed up as the Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme.
Even a nutjob armed with the latest encryption, still needs a gun to kill people.
To be fair, it can also prevent people from being killed in extremely oppressive regimes, just by association with 'x' out-topic (e.g.: the gay community).
I dunno, I'm pretty sure a determined enough assailant could beat someone to death with a hardcover copy of PGP Source Code and Internals.
or defend their owners, or hunt, or...
If I had to bet, I'd say at least 25% of US guns have been used within the past year, and 99.9% of those will not have been used to kill others.
They have no such actual position regarding encryption killing people, they're entirely flexible, able and more than willing to sway with the wind when it presents. Whether or not encryption kills people, so to speak, is not their concern, it's nothing more than the opportunistic excuse framing. They'll use anything that will stick, anything that gets the result they're seeking.
Having a backdoor in software NOT only enables US government and other cyber criminals to have access. It also enables other governments like Russian, Chinese, Israilean, North Korean governments too! Keep that in mind too.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Austral...
We'll really need sources for claims like that...
* Nearly all iPhone users use iCloud.
* If obeying 'local laws' is enough for Apple to allow external access to iCloud, the same logic must apply to the iPhone.
* Note that Apple refused similar requests by American courts.
I feel like most times I hear iCloud mentioned by non techies they are confused about what it is. Like when their storage is out and they get nagged about it.
Here's a link to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Maybe, in that scenario, gun-rights voters end up carrying privacy-rights US policy influence, but then we might also have a lot of other US people thinking privacy is not for them, in their own day-to-day lives.
Politics and perceptions are way outside my expertise, but things like this sometimes come to mind when working on technical stuff with privacy&security implications.
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." plus "Encryption hinders us from finding people who commit crimes."
More like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" plus "Pareto is a pain and maybe if we fight encryption we can get public support but we don't want to break it because post hoc analysis doesn't actually help us catch the next guy because Pareto is a pain."
There are two main issues: government abusing its power, and weakening security of everybody. I meant to focus more on the second.
You can oppose banning/weakening encryption because you believe encryption is an irreplaceable tool for security.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe that would actually be an ineffective tactic for preventing crime.
You can oppose banning encryption because you believe such bans violate inherent civil liberties.
There's another one that's really hard for me to explain -- You can oppose banning encryption because you've read Shannon or have a general sense of how RC4 worked and it feels just gross to ban basic operations, like shuffling information in a particular way. It's a bit like banning addition, or like banning pig latin.
I hear rebuttals and debates around the first three, but I don't think there's an effective rebuttal to the last one, which is just a paradigm shift. It's like, "I don't support this because I do not understand information the way you do."
Maybe we should print copies of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" and leave them in hotel rooms, like the Gideons do with Bibles.
Though, this reeks of the Executive branch making a scapegoat out of tech to distract from the gun industry, just like getting Walmart to pull game adverts and talking about "red flag" laws.
The correct framing: "Encryption maintains the status quo by denying law enforcement access to data that previously was not stored"
Is it somehow morally reprehensible? Because it would be ineffective? Do you want the govt to see your dick pics?
I'm curious about about your flat out rejection of this proposal.
We on HN and every one that really understand the matter will need to keep fight for ourselves and others.
But I believe trying to find a answer to your question a great exercise that contributes very much. I just don't have a good answer.
Maybe something like, they cant even keep our PII safe... what di you think will happened with our key
You can’t explain it in one sentence, you have to explain cultures, subcultures, how each subculture interacts, etc.
It won’t matter anyway, it impacts the average person in the most indirect way imaginable.
They already have sooo many tools they can use, both with a warrant and bypassing it via FISA. They had all this domestic spying stuff and still couldn't prevent the shooting!
They get nothing with phone access, so why even bother brining up compromising everyone else's security just because they failed to use all their current surveillance means to detect and prevent the shooting to being with?! You want more access? Why? That's fucking unbelievable.
And whilst they have a metric shit-ton of spying capabilities on US civilians, those are not really intended to avoid crime. (Maybe the shift of perception of what is terrorism might change that, though)
> The Dayton shooter left no manifesto.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/7/20758473/trump-invasion-el-paso...
A manifesto isn't necessarily honest. It describes how shooters want the world to view their actions, not necessarily the actual motives behind their actions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
. Were other people involved?
. or other organisations such as extremists organisations?
. Did he have people egging him on (even if totally uninvolved otherwise), or was he a complete loner?
. Is there a hidden motive here that's not obvious?
. Further evidence of stable and rational thinking, or mentally unstable?
. Is it possible he was aided by legal loopholes, or some failures in process that need patching?
. Could he have left any nasty surprises behind?
. Does his behaviour indicate something that would allow prediction of similar crimes and perhaps their thwarting?
. Photos/films of something of interest like supporters, discussions of further action, whatever
In this case, once a crime is committed, all info needs to be gathered. I'm saying that as someone who is disturbed at extensions of state powers, but once there's a crime, I'm all for picking up everything and analysing it.
> and mostly it is redundant with other sources
The main means of communication other than face-to-face is telephone calls and this newfangled web with its many features. Both are provided by a modern smart phone, which most people seem to live through. Therefore you can expect most to all non-F2F comms to go through the phone (typically; not necessarily).
So I can't accept what you say (yet).
> If he used the phone for contacting co-terrorists there are trails in many other locations
These being? You can move about freely in the states, and he was a domestic terrorist.
> unless he really knew how to hide his tracks
Agreed, but it seems most domestic terrorists are bad planners or stupid AFAICS. People like Ted Kaczynski seem to be the exception, most are idiots who will boast online or ask "how can i maek teh THTP" from google.
I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access. It is a balance though, and USAins may draw the line differently from brits like me.
I draw the line on the side of privacy. I'm absolutely fine with potential unresolved loose ends in a criminal investigation if it means we actually get to practice real security and gain all the privacy that entails.
Regardless of that, I'm not convinced that the actionable information they could obtain is unique to the phone; there are always several avenues of inquiry for evidence-gathering. It smacks of laziness by law enforcement to suggest it's somehow impossible without encryption backdoors.
> I care greatly about privacy but when there is legal cause as people have died, my feelings are the law must have access.
You can't have both, if there is a backdoor, it is always there, and it will be used for lots of stuff.
Terrorists have been on the radar of secret agencies and police in countless cases. Unfortunately, if the police interviews a potential terrorist or mass killer for "behavioral irregularities" or whatever you call it, this will only radicalize the person more and prevent nothing. Or, at least, it is not a very effective intervention. If there is no crime, the police cannot do much.
To be clear, the NSA could probably easily eavesdrop into all cell phone activity within the US and collect heuristic indicators, and it's very likely that they could predict most of these mass shootings quite well based on these indicators. The problem is that this would be unconstitutional and based entirely on thought crimes like "conspiring to commit a terrorist attack". The laws for this are in place and used against international terrorism, but they are highly problematic and shouldn't be extended to domestic terrorism.
Social workers and maybe mental health support by people who do not have to report to the police probably work much better against radicalization and decrease the probability of an incident. I might be wrong but my guess is that in the US almost zero efforts are spent by social services to improve the social situation of right wing gun nuts and de-radicalize them. Again, no need for getting what's on their phone.
To establish legal precedent.
If you're fine with phone encryption, you gotta expect the same for computers.
The technology is a bit hush-hush, but it is already possible to read brainwaves, and "interrogate" someone through fMRI. Just thinking about your password may reveal it, if they are allowed to force your brain near a reader.
The first serious (public) ventures into this technology was around 2000. Advances in machine learning then made it possible to read objects and concepts that were not in a training set. It was used and tested extensively in Guantanamo Bay. The legal status is still ambiguous, but I guess that it is used just in very special cases (where the detainment itself may be legally ambiguous, such as at a black site).
The Legality of the Use of Psychiatric Neuroimaging in Intelligence Interrogation (2005) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/906b/8afdd39ecda3a265987a09... [pdf]
(Disclaimer: I don’t agree with this position but I have a lot of friends who think the government can do no wrong)
Are we going to go through this for every administration now?
Even if you do not have a problem with giving government keys to, say, the iPhone, then you have to deal with every piece of software someone writes to enable encryption.
You'd literally have to convince every person in the world to not write or use encryption software in "the wrong" ways. And, that's impossible because encryption exists to protect society from criminals. I don't see another way around this.
No. Nobody cares about this or that shooter (there'll be another one next week) but the next time there's a 9/11 you can be sure encryption will feature in the news and in a subsequent law.
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill, probably
Well, AG Barr is probably sober. I'll give him that.
Possibly, but Rahm Emanuel said it about 11 years ago [1].
They don’t stand here saying “we need to deal with white supremecists”, they say “we need the ability to violate everyone’s rights”. They already have a public track record of mass illegal surveillance.
I don't understand this. How would getting into his phone post facto stop the shooting? Do they have a time machine?
I've been watching the count of up/down votes.
Folks are actually downvoting my comment; please carry on. But why I'm the hell do you want the government to be able to have unwarranted access to your devices?
Previously any letter you sent was not copied,read and stored in a searchable format by the FBI/via/nsa. Maybe if you were targeted but not wholesale dragnet. Now it is and even more accessibility is being asked. This is a kgb dream machine.
You're not supposed to think critically or ask any questions. Just quietly go about your life, be an obedient citizen, don't make any ruckus, and, of course, trust the government -- they know what's best for you and me and have nothing but our best interests in mind! Unfortunately, they won't be able to stop all of the pedophile terrorists from getting to us if they don't have access to everything. They're "going dark", remember!?
Why don't you want to give them this access anyways? Just what is it that YOU are hiding? What don't you want them to see?
---
> ... crimes that could have been prevented if law enforcement had been given lawful access to encrypted evidence.
That's an earlier quote from Barr (prior to these shootings).
The implication is that if they had access to all of the encrypted communications in real-time (iMessages, WhatsApp, etc.) that law enforcement maybe could have prevented these deaths from happening (nevermind their "track record" for preventing these types of incidents or the fact that most of these shootings are conducted by a single person)...
...but if they aren't able to read all of our messages then of course they can't do anything and so people will continue to die.
By the same reasoning, had the shooter ran away because he drove a car faster than police ones, we should ban all sports cars then?
Lawmakers tell FBI it's too late the dead don't come back to life, and ask what the fuck were they all doing before the massacre given all the warning signs (regarding both the shooter and the readily availability of firearms for purchase)...
1: https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/07/fbi-iphone-third-party-t...
2: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/08/fbi-paid-900000-to-unloc...
There are technical articles out there explaining it in more detail. On my phone now or would paste some URLs.
There is also a blackhat talk from Ivan Krstic (one of the top security people at apple) where he goes surprisingly deep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U
This will not work for many reasons, most importantly:
- Key escrow or government-enabled crypto doesn't work
- Creating classes of encryption doesn't work (Excluding a group and not allowing them to use the same crypto as another group)
- If someone is going to do something unlawful, they will use something else that isn't accessible by the government; take away phone encryption and they will simply use something else
Unless those points are solved, the whole 'should we allow it' discussion is pointless anyway.
Tacking on to that: most of that stuff doesn't work because you can't really physically enforce it; it's an intellectual barrier which due to the way we can simply talk to each other as humans is super easy to circumvent. This was tried with export controls, but that didn't actually work for the information itself; only for commercial products.
Is it that they need the phone to tell them that white supremacy and assault rifles are things that exist in the US?
Do they need the phone data for a conviction?
I don’t understand what they expect to do with whatever they find that they can’t get from other sources.
They can get location history and a pretty good idea what and who he communicated with from ISP and cell logs, etc.
Access to the phone I think is overrated. Getting access to social media accounts, email accounts, text message, chatting apps, and cloud backup probably gives them more than 80% of what they need.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-...
I don't know much about American law. I was under impression that things are reserved to states unless important reason for them to be handled on federal level.
It also appears some federal legislation has been passed that directs the FBI to provide assistance to state authorities in this cases:
https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
The only difference I can think of is the ease of an offline brute force attack due to the fact that you can remove a hard drive somewhat easily and then image it and use an entire datacenter’s power at attacking the passphrase. But a strong passphrase (note, not a password) stored only in your head should be quite secure.
No meaning not proof? Say I FileVault my drive and elect not to store my Recovery Key in iCloud, but write it down. Drive should be FBI safe. No?
No, definitely not the easy access to military weapons for any disillusioned nutjob. That's nothing to worry about. Move along, nothing to see here.
As with all strategic information, they could still possess the ability to backdoor / crack this phone but deem that ability a strategic asset. Only using it in private or when the stakes are much higher than an already committed crime.
More so than even using this event to claim that "guns are the problem" or the sole factor in this issue.
We all know the FBI can access the information on this phone, they're just playing into the hands of emotional trauma and emotionally driven people who are ill informed to de-value the perceived sanctity of privacy and data security...
That would have been a more suitable situation, I’m sure.
Wait, I'm wrong. Even essentially insignificant changes to gun laws at the federal level are harder than banning crypto.
2nd amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
10th amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The first 10 "amendments", which are roughly/essentially contemporaneous with the original document, are referred to as the "Bill of Rights".
I have a hard time understanding what does acceptance of danger and self-control have to do with assault rifles? Can't those be exerted with a pistol?
Also I fail to understand how people don't see guns as a liability. Just having one in the house would cause me a lot of headache. Guns can be stolen, kids might find it etc..
FWIW use of the term "sacred" is somewhat iffy as many an atheist has picked up a gun to defend himself.
America was taken over and settled by Europeans who brought firearms for hunting and protection. There were already 20-100 million indigenous American Indians here: they covered the land. But the Europeans brought diseases that few American Indians had resistance to, and most (up to 90%) of the American Indians died of disease before they had so much as _seen_ a white man. Indian societies collapsed and re-coalesced from the fragments. Meanwhile...
https://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-...
Newly-arrived Europeans advanced into a "wilderness" that held the burnt-out remnants of multiple civilizations. Only the very earliest arrivals saw the destruction their diseases had wrought in front of their advance.
With the Europeans came ideas of real estate (ownership rights to land etc.) which the American Indian tribes previously maintained by allegiances and territorial behavior. Anyway, conflicts ensued, new allegiances formed, broke and reformed. This all involved conflicts, fighting and wars. In every step, guns were used by both sides (e.g., American-Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaigns
Early settlers were often on their own. They often had disputes and unpleasant encounters with their own and others. The gun could be used for protection as well as an important food-gathering tool. Although the American Indians could do so easily, living in the wilderness without a firearm was difficult and rare for someone of European descent.
So the use of firearms goes back to the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Guns were always available in the New World and remain available today.
Nothing than
1) a total banning of sales,
2) a law that requires existing owners to return them for destruction,
3) 5 years jail minimum time for anybody even seen with one (and 20 years if they were involved in any criminal act while carrying it, regardless of the act),
4) and a mass confiscation campaign can't fix...
"mass incarnation"?
Like
https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.dL31G5Y3BQIg5Xv075saegHaHa&pi...
??
Is this some new Internet meme (e.g., "spam") that I missed?
Your options are basically to either force everyone to use short keys that can be brute forced by the NSA (and anyone with cash to throw at AWS) or to set up a trusted-third party to store everyone's private keys and then either enforce long key lives or come up with a mechanism to transport the keys to the third party as old ones expire.
Weakening encryption would lead to massive issues for both corporate and personal security. What's worse is there wouldn't be anything stopping anyone from rolling their own crypto without the NSA's permission (it's literally just math), so it'd be business as usual for terrorists and black-hats.
Similar things could be done for many forms of encryption at rest secured by a TPM based on a PIN or fingerprints. (Though I am not sure about fingerprints).
This can essentially be done without key escrow. Though you could see this as key escrow where the signing key for code that accesses the TPM as the master key.
To quote the onion: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
O majestic scholarship how elusive you are! I thought I knew you and yet you are my world!
Possibly related: https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-the-...
But we aren't just surrendering our rights to fear and alarmism.
We are surrendering our rights to authoritarians (and they are bi-partisan, by the way).
seems like more or less a move to create a "think of the kids or innocents" moment to keep things from "going dark".
My definition of freedom is that no initiated force is allowed.
That includes no forcing tech companies to put backdoors in their phones.
I'm OK with retaliatory force used in self defense, and I consider having a government and having taxation to fund it to fall under that umbrella. So I'm not an anarchist. Rather, I'm a certain breed of classical liberal.