The Spies Won't Give up on Backdoor Demands

[CraginS]

In the recent past we noted how U.S. top law enforcement and spies have revived the demand for backdoors. The ball is in the UK court, now:

Note this 7/30/19 (or for the other side of the Pond, 30-7-19) article,

British spies must have 'backdoor' access to encrypted Facebook and WhatsApp messages to combat chil...

Once more, 'it's for the children.'

Sometimes I wonder if we need a separate topic area for Privacy and Crypto Wars discussions.
For convenience, I refer all to the following threads:

05-26-2018 09:53 PM
FBI dramatically overstates how many phones they can't get into

09-04-2018 09:07 PM
Crypto Wars, Again (and again, and again, and again ...)

05-31-2019 12:13 PM
UK GCHQ demand for backdoor key criticised by tech giants in open letter

‎07-23-2019 04:34 PM
Encryption back doors.

[rslade]

> CraginS (Advocate I) posted a new topic in Industry News on 08-01-2019 09:25 AM

> In the recent past we noted how U.S. top law enforcement and spies have revived
> the demand for backdoors.

Yeah, it's always about child pornography, drug cartels, and terrorism. Regardless of how little evidence there is that encryption backdoors would help any in any of those areas.

I'm a little concerned, this time around. Politicos seem to be completely immune to the facts, so "what part of 'backdoors make an algorithm weak' do you not understand" doesn't work. (The complete and utter failure of the Clipper Chip doesn't even seem to have caused any embarrassment, let alone lessons learned.)  Last time out, American businesses finally stopped the calls for weak crypto by noting that, if American businesses couldn't sell strong crypto, other countries would, and it would just cripple business. This time around, big tech companies seem to be in bad odor, so their arguments are likely to be disregarded.

[vt100]

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@rslade wrote:

> CraginS (Advocate I) posted a new topic in Industry News on 08-01-2019 09:25 AM

> In the recent past we noted how U.S. top law enforcement and spies have revived
> the demand for backdoors.

Yeah, it's always about child pornography, drug cartels, and terrorism. Regardless of how little evidence there is that encryption backdoors would help any in any of those areas.

I'm a little concerned, this time around. Politicos seem to be completely immune to the facts, so "what part of 'backdoors make an algorithm weak' do you not understand" doesn't work. 

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I think that in the interest of all, a rudimentary information security comprehension awareness test should be administered to everyone running for the public office.