Europol Chief Warns About Computer Encryption 161
An anonymous reader writes The law enforcement lobbying campaign against encryption continues. Today it's Europol director Rob Wainwright, who is trying to make a case against encryption. "It's become perhaps the biggest problem for the police and the security service authorities in dealing with the threats from terrorism," he explained. "It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore." This is the same man who told the European Parliament that Europol is not going to investigate the alleged NSA hacking of the SWIFT (international bank transfer) system. The excuse he gave was not that Europol didn't know about it, because it did. Very much so. It was that there had been no formal complaint from any member state.
Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption isn't new so why are they crying about it now? It makes no sense unless they are trying to sneak another fast one by the rubes in the general public. Tell your elected officials to stop whining about encryption and embrace it. Also, tell them we're tired of all these invasions to our rights to privacy because of an existential threat.
No, encryption is NOT going away and you're not getting a back door. Eff off and get to work on something useful and stop playing games!
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Encryption isn't new so why are they crying about it now?
Easy there ... watching your horse bolt away over the hill can be very upsetting you know!
Re:Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:5, Insightful)
PGP isn't exactly known for being user friendly. Gmail does not support it out of the box. The average person just can't be expected to understand that kind of cryptography.
That said, if you encrypt the device, encrypt the transport method, and the receiving device, that's pretty damn secure in about 98% of situations. WhatsApp just rolled out end to end encryption for their service as well, and they only charge a dollar a year (I think). That's encryption the average person can use. When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure. Compare that to the plain text emails I get from my boss about what I might consider vastly more important things at the office.
The golden era of unencrypted plaintext email is just about dead, I think, is the problem for intelligence agencies. At least for those people outside of gleaming glass corporate offices.
Re:Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:5, Interesting)
When an 18 year old mother of two in Sao Paulo can review her grocery list with her mother via secure encryption and neither of them know they're even doing it, that's a whole new level of secure.
Sounds like the kind of secure you wouldn't notice if it was disabled.
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PGP isn't exactly known for being user friendly. Gmail does not support it out of the box. The average person just can't be expected to understand that kind of cryptography...
And since when does survival include the weakest members of the herd?
Those that figure it out will survive. Those that don't, wouldn't have bothered to learn anyway. Apathy thins the herd nicely.
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Hmmm. From a terrorist's point of view, those who bypass encryption entirely will survive, at least for long enough to do what they intend. A one-to-one conversation on a beach or other exposed place is a good way of achieving this, and it would appear that they know it.
Those IS nutjobs seem to have learned that the best way to avoid being trapped in the mesh of surveillance programs is to fragment their operations to the extent that they all operate as lone wolve
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If you've got a keylogger (or any king of process) running locally, no amount of encryption is going to save you. That's how they got some of the ISIS members, by just running a TOR node and sending infected page to everyone that got out through their node. As a result they infected ISIS members using TOR along with everyone else on the TOR network vulnerable to their infection.
Knowing they're inside the firmware of your HDDs, I think they're aware of this.
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This is more a discussion about mobile devices, which (unless you jailbreak them) don't trust the user.
Barring a root exploit (which do exist for a bit, and are patched when found), a keylogger on android is much less of a possibility. With Apple, the crypto is handled in hardware, and a keylogger gets to be near impossible (though phishing is not).
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Not quite exactly what I was talking about, but close: http://www.pcworld.com/article... [pcworld.com]
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I'm actually surprised he mentioned communications, although I suppose man chat apps do use encryption now which is probably more of a concern than email. The main issue law enforcement tends to have is with encrypted data on storage devices. In the past once they had your phone or computer they could datarape it effortlessly, nowadays it's often completely impenetrable, or at least as hard to crack as the user's password.
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If the target, the target's friends and target's friends friends are all using encryption for 98% of communications, while you can still crack it (presumably?) you have to know what you're looking for in advance, like you would when applying for a warrant. That sort of defeats this huge plaintext scanning system the NSA and English governments have been putting in to place for the last half decade or more. Without all the supplemental background information their job gets exponentially harder and there's mo
Re: Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a hint for the under-informed: If you don't know you're using encryption, someone else is managing your keys. If someone else is managing your keys, they can let cops, intelligence agencies, and other kinds of bad actors in without you knowing it.
Better than nothing? Sure. However, a little understanding of what it is and is not good for can go a long way, and that's exactly what must people don't have.
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WhatsApp just rolled out end to end encryption for their service as well
Right. And exactly how is WhatsApp supposed to monetize you and data-mine you if your messages are encrypted? I'm of the opinion that this is a marketing gimmick with Whatsapp sitting as the man in the middle.
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There are JavaScript (and other client-side-but-in-the-browser) implementations of all kinds of encryption algorithms out there. The mega.co.nz site does client-side encryption before uploading to the server (so they never get the plaintext)
I see no real reason why you couldn't have a client side/browser extention/JavaScript/whatever implementation of something like PGP/GPG where the private keys never get seen by the web mail provider (it would mean each device you want to send email from has to have its o
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Re:Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:4, Insightful)
Encryption isn't new, but tansparent on-by-default encryption is. Remember just how tech-dumb the average person is - you'd be lucky if you could get them to realise a web browser and the internet are not the same thing. Most governments weren't too worried (US aside) when encryption was something available only to the moderately skilled, especially in communications where the lowest standard has to rule*. After the NSA scandal though, companies are starting to design encryption into their products at a lower level, such that the user benefits without even having to know what encryption is.
*Would you like to explain to your mother how to use gnupg to encrypt emails?
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Europol talks about terrorists - I'm not sure they count as average, since they have a vested interest in secure/secret communication.
Simply, that random parent doesn't know, care about or understand encryption, does not mean random terror-group doesn't (and didn't already a decade+ ago).
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besides the fuck it's going to do good for anyone if they snoop on everyone all the time anyways if they will not even do anything unless some 3rd party then tells them to do something about the crime.
like with the swift: did they tell the member states about the hack? how the fuck could they complain if they're not told about it.
Re:Oh For Crying Out Loud (Score:5, Insightful)
They are crying now because some companies no longer want to cooperate with them by developing deliberately weak standards (e.g. cell phone encryption) and by providing illegal backdoors for wiretapping without warrant. So they want to be able to force them by law, which means that they need to convince politicians first.
In my pessimistic opinion, the most probable outcome of this debate is that companies will bow (again) to the authorities like they did before and provide the backdoors voluntarily, presumably in the form of vulnerabilities that are not published.
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I agree - the damage caused by not having encryption will be severe. The criminals will still be able to find ways around it while the average person will be exposed to all kinds of evil.
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Eff off
Correction: EFF off.
Bumper-sticker idea...
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The government is our enemy, regardless of what country we live in. Even the so-called "bastions of freedom" have fallen to the police state mentality.
The government SHOULD fear the citizens, not vice versa.
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Europol is not investigative (Score:5, Informative)
Europol not investigating is not strange. That is not their job. Cross border investigations are handled by the police in the memberstates, but with coordination from europol.
Whatever people believe, europol is not an european fbi. Although, it would probably improve things if they did become one...
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If they uncover criminal activity isn't it their duty to inform the victim?
Citizens are not to be trusted. (Score:5, Funny)
Your Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's changed the very nature of counter-terrorist work from one that has been traditionally reliant on having good monitoring capability of communications to one that essentially doesn't provide that anymore."
You backed us into a corner by monitoring non-suspects.
It's your fault.
Dickhead.
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He should just come out and say what he really means, to show that he is at least honest about what he wants us to submit to. He wants to violate our privacy. He wants to take away privacy in exchange for some small amount of security.
Say that, and at least some people will respect you.
Re:Your Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna pretend you're actually interested in the answer, but let's face it, we're really talking past each other, to our fellow Slashdotters. Thank you for smoking.
The reason for the mass move to encryption -- like Wikipedia and Google moving to default HTTPS, and people like me working on making encryption more approachable by the masses -- was the revelation that non-suspects were being monitored. That is why there is now a haystack within which to hide the needles, and that is why the encryption is now too strong for the intelligence agencies to break when we really want them to be able to.
Moreover, while I'm here, and since I want terrorists to get caught, let me add this: The solution is not increasing the level of distrust between citizens and government. The solution is restoring the reasonable, moderated, level of trust that we used to have in the executive branch. That starts with the ones who created the rift, and that is not the people who were sending all their traffic in the clear; it is the assholes who recorded it all and denied they were doing it.
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The solution is restoring the reasonable, moderated...
And so naturally he gets modded "Flamebait"
Because obviously.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, terrorists are well known as the most law abiding citizens on the planet.
Or maybe this guy thinks the universe will just make prime numbers and whatnot stop working because he doesn't like what they can do.
Both are equally likely to produce useful counter-terrorism results.
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Hey, these guys didn't go into policework because they were experts at math...
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Both are equally likely to produce useful counter-terrorism results.
The most effective thing to do for counter-terrorism is to keep blowing up families in the Middle East and occupying "holy lands". Keep bombing villages until democracy emerges.
To do so, we need ever-stronger Nation States, and giving them the ability to monitor all of their subjects' domestic communications is a good rung up on that ladder.
Also, Facebook is the real danger to world peace - so be very upset about their ad network and don't
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To play devil's advocate: By outlawing encryption, the amount of "law-abiding citizens" that use it will drop precipitously. Then, when the NSA intercepts an encrypted signal, it becomes far more likely that both ends are $BOOGEYMAN, and their resources won't be spread as thin. Even if both ends are decidedly not $BOOGEYMAN, they are either foreigners, citizens with little regard for the law, or a combination of the two, and
When every citizen is a potential terrorist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When every citizen is a potential terrorist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, screw that. What they are basically saying is "make our jobs easier for us", but what they are failing to point out is that by doing so they are also leaving people exposed to everyone else that might want to eavesdrop on random communications, and in particular all those people/organizations/countries that they are meant to be securing each other against. If *you* have access to it, then so do your opponents - so the real question, and the one that really needs to be addressed, is which is the lesser of the two evils - having your nation secure from outsiders, or making the job of securing your nation against internal threats slightly easier? Given the complete failure of the security & intelligence services to demonstrate they can achieve the latter even before encryption become a big issue I'd say that's a complete no brainer.
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We've been seeing a lot of this recently. From the RIAA/MPAA who would like the ability to get the personal information on multiple people on the flimsiest of evidence of copyright infringement (because actually gathering evidence on each one and suing each person in the appropriate district is too hard) to the government law enforcement agencies who feel that asking a court for a warrant - even when said court never turns them down - is too m
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This is a fundamental sticking point that I haven't heard any cop talk about.
The US Constitution purposely makes it hard to go after someone. This is not a bug in the system, but a feature. When cops argue (in effect) "you're making it just too hard" realize that they're bashing the Constitution. Maybe they feel times have changed enough the Constitution should be changed, but while it's around, you follow it. Just like us normal folks have to follow laws we may not like.
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/Oblg. "Government: Terrorists who extorts its citizens to prevent another group of terrorists from taking over its job."
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I am Greek
You're also a moron.
Re: When every citizen is a potential terrorist... (Score:4, Interesting)
He thinks it is bad now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the arrogance of the NSA and other national security agencies, they can expect encryption to increase radically. This is a natural consequence of their refusal to abide by due process as well as generally doing whatever the hell they want because they "can".
That attitude is a double edged sword. And they are just now feeling the bite of the other edge as the global community responds to their behavior.
Not only will the sophistication of encryption spread by it will go from being an option to being a default status quo. In the not too distant future, if they want access to data, they will need to get the cooperation of the owner of that data... or get nothing at all.
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For most of its history, the Fourth Amendment has never been about protecting privacy, but rather protecting against using the state's power to disrupt innocent people's lives.
The SCOTUS decision of Katz v. United States counters that assertion, particularly in the realm of wiretapping.
Besides, how do you know that an ongoing unreasonable warrantless dragnet over the entire country isn't a disruption? It's insidious, even more so when the public wasn't aware of it.
To use the mandatory Slashdot car analogy, if a police officer asked you first, how often would you grant permission for him to pull you over, regardless of your speed?
To lawfully pull you over, the police officer must have probable cause to do so - to do otherwise is proscribed by the Fourth Amendment. It may be as trivial as a broken taillight, but probable cause nonetheless.
By conducting indiscriminate monitoring of the speed of vehicles, he's probing your vehicle's status, and that's invading your privacy.
W
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Besides, how do you know that an ongoing unreasonable warrantless dragnet over the entire country isn't a disruption? It's insidious, even more so when the public wasn't aware of it.
Exactly. Where, from the outside, can you tell the difference between "We're collecting all this phone traffic, but we're only looking at it when it touches the specific individuals we already suspect of criminal activity and are investigating" and "We're collecting all this phone traffic; let's run the pattern-recognition software over all of it to see if we can turn up any criminal activity we can use to boost our arrest numbers"?
Re:He thinks it is bad now? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if you never found the camera your neighbour installed in your bathroom you'd never know he'd been watching you and your family naked, but that probably wouldn't stop you being pretty pissed about it when you found out.
When your government begins using mass surveillance on the entire population, and does so in secret and against the protections your government tells you that you have, it should be a pretty obvious sign that you can't trust them.
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And if you never found the camera your neighbour installed in your bathroom you'd never know he'd been watching you and your family naked, but that probably wouldn't stop you being pretty pissed about it when you found out.
Unless by "neighbor" you mean "Google", and they offered a drone to fly out some drain cleaner 30 seconds after you need it... then it'd be kinda cool.
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In regards to natural responses... do the windows of people that live in bad neighborhoods have bars on them?
Yes they do.
Why is that?
Natural response.
People respond to threats.
Action leads to reaction. Invade people's privacy, show that you unbound by due process, that you'll do whatever you can do, and that the limits of your power are literally whatever anyone allows you to do... then you have created a situation where everyone does what they can to limit your capabilities by locking down the encryption a
How many people called it here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should make a query that extracts the Slashdot commentaries that have predicted this exact situation for a decade.
The prediction goes like this : "If you keep doing stupid shit like that, people will start encrypting their computers and communications to protect themselves from your unimportant shit and this will help the very few people who encrypt their computers and communications to hide serious crimes."
The more you turn everyone into a criminal, the harder it will be to find the actual criminals.
It's time to decriminalize the population, so people become once again able to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.
Re:How many people called it here? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the point is not to catch real criminals, the point is to dig up dirt on anyone and everyone, so when the time is right - you could use it to your advantage.
"Don't you see it's for your own protection, and for your children, protecting all of your from pedophiles, terrorists and the scary monster in your closet. And if you don't buy this argument, then obviously you are an enemy of the state, because if you don't have anything to hide - you have nothing to fear. Oh, and don't forget - arbeit macht frei."
Snooping agencies will fight tooth and nail to keep their snooping powers because they don't give a rat's behind about the read bad muthus out there - because that's entirely different playing field, you can't go after them directly, they are well protected and shifting balance includes a lot of political play, but the smaller fishes can be caught with a wider net, and to get leverage all you need is a right to snoop on anyone at any point in time. It's too convenient to give up.
Re:How many people called it here? (Score:4, Interesting)
Snooping agencies will fight tooth and nail to keep their snooping powers
The problem with fighting tooth and nail is that it's strategically stupid to fight directly against a larger and stronger army.
The privacy arms race benefits the people, only a false feeling of safety and anonymity stops the people from making it practically impossible (or impossibly impractical) to spy on the general population.
A front attack, however strong it may be, will fail.
Some of us are accusing the agencies of being intrusive, but this is a different problem. This is about having been intrusive in a strategically unintelligent way.
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..The more you turn everyone into a criminal, the harder it will be to find the actual criminals.
So, what you're saying that you trust their judgement on the matter of who is a criminal so long as *you're* not being tagged as one?
Ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
For those of us who work with technology, it is difficult to understand how ignorant the leaders are, and what we could do to fix the problems ignorant leaders cause.
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Most government leaders are profoundly ignorant about technology.
They are no different than the general population...
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They are not so much ignorant, as they are pursuing their own agenda. Don't think for a second that they don't have an army of tech-savy advisors and specialists that are at their beck and call, should they need a detailed explanation about how it works. But they benefit from pretending they don't know and targeting the general public that doesn't know either in order to pursue their own goals.
How could they know? (Score:2)
How would someone who isn't technically knowledgeable know if someone IS technically knowledgeable? In fact, a lot of incompetent people want high-paying jobs. Incompetent people may sound wonderful to a manager.
Spies vs Comm Monitoring (Score:2)
Sun Tzu almost 3000 years ago said he'd rather have 1 good spy than 10,000 good soldiers.
So what yields better results, spies you hire or machines who take no pay? Yeah, I know, spies are difficult, messy, and must be paid in cash.
My guess is what you catch with machines is bad guy wannabees. Real terrorists are probably already using unbreakable steganography. The chance of getting 500 bytes of info out of a 500 KB image, if you can figure out which image has hidden data in it, is next to none.
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There is one thing that Sun Tzu stressed above all else in The Art of War: War is very, very expensive. Only start a war if you are confident not only of victory, but of a rapid victory - for if you win after ten years of fighting, you'll have emptied the treasury and destroyed your own economy. A lot of his instruction isn't about how to fight, but about when not to fight.
It's only going to get worse. (Score:4, Interesting)
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>We live according to the laws of mathematics and physics
Nope. Laws of nature/universe. Maths and physics only (try to) describe those.
boo hoo (Score:3, Insightful)
You are more likely to die by crossing the street, falling down the stairs, heart attack, or cancer than by terrorism.
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You are basically saying that to die of old age is more common that terrorism, war/terror kills people of all ages that's why it's so scary. There are 1000x more 70+ who die common types of heart failure like ischemia than 30 year olds
Reference: (Score:2)
Ischemia deaths in Sweden by age [xn--ddsorsak-n4a.se] you can compare that to the graph for traffic accidents with stationary objects [xn--ddsorsak-n4a.se]
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Or, to put a different spin on what you said, is the money spent on counter-terrorism the most cost effective way of minimizing death of any kind? Could the spending be deployed in different endeavours that would outweigh the lives saved from terrorism? (Not that we have a lot of proof it saves any lives at all from terrorism).
He's right (Score:3)
[encryption] has become perhaps the biggest problem for the police (...)
He is right. Eavesdropping everyone everywhere in all possible ways without any ethical limit made everyone aware of
- the privacy intrusion risks posed by non encrypted communication
- the privacy intrusion risks posed by weakly encrypted communication
- the privacy intrusion risks depending on the communication media being utilized.
Shut uuuuup (Score:3)
Maybe if law enforcement types didn't keep banging on about how useful encryption is for terrorists, fewer terrorists would actually hear about it in the first place.
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I seem to recall discussion of encryption-using terrorists in the 80s and 90s. It's not a new concept.
What is a new concept is having nearly-unbreakable encryption available for $2 at an electronics shop in the nearest major village, ready to be deployed to an untrained operative, and available in a large enough quantity to be sure that every message the organization sends is secure.
That's what's spooked the spooks.
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No, it is not. What spooks them is ordinary citizens being able to talk without them being able to listen in. These people are pathological paranoids and very, very afraid of the general population. Terrorists are not even using email or cellphones these days, the US drone-kill "strategy" made sure of that.
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Terrorists do not use encryption for communication. With encryption, you can still determine sources and destinations and that gets people drone-killed on the mere suspicion of being terrorists. Of course, those that survive have become smarter, as part of an ordinary evolutionary process under predator pressure.
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mmm encryption is bad (Score:2)
So, let me get this right (Score:2)
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If you didn't encrypt your conversation, they could listen in to it, determine you two weren't terrorists, and move on to the next unencrypted conversation or focus on the small number of encrypted ones.
If more people encrypt conversations, though, the government won't be able to rule out that you are a terrorist since they won't be able to listen in on you.
In short, you're guilty until proven innocent and you're making it hard for them to prove you innocent. [mock outrage] How DARE you do that! [/mock out
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While this sounds convincing on the surface, it is utterly false in reality. You cannot determine from the contents of communication whether some people communicating are terrorists if they have at least minimal OpSec. You can, to a degree, identify groups when you have one member, but that works regardless of encryption.
These days there are only two kinds of terrorists (disregarding the ones created by the FBI): The dead ones and those with good OpSec. Of course, there are not many of either, and the whole
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FYI, I wasn't being serious in my comment. (Probably should have used Sarcasm tags to make that clearer.)
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I halfway though so, but a lot of people may not notice that what you propose is actually not going to work, hence my comment.
So? (Score:2)
The cat is out of the bag. Crypto and its application is an academic subject now, with plenty of companies and open-source projects using the fruit of the work. That is to say, for another ten-fifteen years or so. Then, quantum will start taking it all apart. The amateurs will not have the resources to follow there.
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The cat is out of the bag. Crypto and its application is an academic subject now, with plenty of companies and open-source projects using the fruit of the work. That is to say, for another ten-fifteen years or so. Then, quantum will start taking it all apart. The amateurs will not have the resources to follow there.
So, basically, the cat is either out of the bag, or dead, and we won't know for another ten-fifteen years, time at which the cat wave collapses.
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Great. Now those terrorists are attacking Schrodin
Crying about encryption just another symptom (Score:2)
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Willing to kill but respect a ban on encryption? (Score:2)
How incredibly likely... You are a fanatic willing to kill scores of innocents but won't use encryption because it's illegal? This has to be the most stupid idea in a long time!
BANNING ENCRYPTION WILL NOT PREVENT TERRORISTS FROM USING IT !!!
Sorry for shouting but it's so bleeding obvious!
The only people that will respect such a ban would be normal law-abiding people and they are not likely to be interesting to Europol and similar.
unintended consequenses on extreme measures (Score:1)
No encryption == full employment for police (Score:2)
Because without good encryption, commerce will be WIDE OPEN to fraud as criminals acquire information required to steal money from people, like bank account numbers, passwords, locations of money, etc.
If we can't use encryption to protect our information from criminals itching to use it for fraud, then fraud will explode and we'll need LOTS of cops to track down all the criminals.
We should tell them to take a hike, because:
1) Cops will never catch fraud before it happens
2) Cops will never recover all the
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That was my first reaction also. The government likes to speak about terrorism, but ID theft, credit card fraud, and other types of financial crimes are a whole lot more prevalent. Now imagine if encryption were to disappear tomorrow. All those personal details whizzing about the Internet unencrypted? Financial crimes would skyrocket. Either that, or nobody would do business online and a huge sector of the economy would collapse overnight. Even *IF* banning encryption meant all terrorism was stopped th
Really? (Score:2)
What happened? Did he order an expensive full attack on an encrypted container with dozens of people and they got a shopping list after 2 years?
The terrorists win (Score:2)
IF we cannot body scan you
IF we cannot read your emails
IF we cannot read your medical records
IF we cannot detect your location
IF we cannot determine your political beliefs
then one day that will become
The terrorists win IF we cannot read your mind
Because if you're innocent why would you want to hide anything right? because data collection agencies, corporations and the government have done such a stellar job making sure that information is handled ethically and protected privacy in an adequate manne
Poor you, your job is difficult. (Score:2)
Tough shit. Nobody said it would be easy.
There's an old saying.... (Score:4, Insightful)
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption. And the government, but then I'm being redundant.
This is his job (Score:2)
His job is to point out things which cause them problems. If those things are valued by constitutions and lawmakers, they will not be listened to, and Europol (in this case) has to change its game to deal with it. If he kept quiet about every headache they deal with, he should be removed from his position. Instead, he does his job, and the technically literate people who can't understand what his job actually entails start moaning about how infeasible it is or how it tramples basic human rights.
Every post
How did they ever catch criminals before phones? (Score:2)
I always hear that we can't catch anyone if phones are encrypted, or computers are encrypted. Evidently there were no police techniques available before 1995, and all criminals got off easy. All those police shows where people gathered non-cell-phone based evidence must have been something like science fiction, but for cops.
They abused the privilege, now they pay (Score:4, Insightful)
They abused the privilege, now they pay the price. I've no sympathy for any of the intel agencies out there who've claimed they're only interested in identifying endpoints and sessions, yet now are crying about the traffic content being encrypted. Encryption simply limits CSEC, GCHQ, NSA, et. al. to the endpoint identification they said they want.
It's too late to change your mind. I use RSA2048 exchange of AES256 keys, hard coded into all my applications. If you don't have the Java export-strength encryption enabled, I don't want to bother supporting your code. You're just begging to be intercepted without export-strength encryption.
I'm tired of being snooped on. I'll take my right to privacy seriously, thanks. I don't even trust pre-generated keys for the RSA2048 server encryption -- I generate them on the fly at server startup so that even the person running the server doesn't know what the keys are.
The problem goes beyond encryption (Score:3)
Lie. If caught, lie more. (Score:3)
As far as we know, not a single terrorist attack would have ever been averted if encryption had been breakable. This person is either terminally stupid or exceptionally dishonest. In either case he is a serious threat to society and should be removed from his position immediately.
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To be fair, the only reason I would use encryption on my own initiative is "keep your fucking noses out of my private life and my reasons for that are none of your concern."
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No, if you use encryption, their job becomes hard. This is bad (as defined by them, not me) because:
A) They want the power to look at everyone anytime they want to make sure you're not a terrorist (or some other criminal). Encryption prevents this.
B) They don't want to have to actually work hard to do their job. Why do research and obtain warrants and deal with privacy-protection measures when you can just trample over everyone to get what you want? The quickest path between point a and point b is a st