Governments cracking down on cyber-liberties?

[m3rc1fulcameron]

In light of the recent attack on Paris by (supposedly) ISIS, do any of you think that politicians trying to push-through bills like CISA in the U.S. will have more success? Since most of these terrorist groups are communicating through encrypted emails or IRC chat online, it isn't hard to believe we will hear discussion about forcing people to provide encryption keys to governments in an act to prevent them from doing so. As we all know, this sort of thing wouldn't actually give intelligence on terrorist attacks (since terrorists don't, you know, care about breaking laws), and would perhapse be an act of security theater even more glaring than the existance of the TSA. Do any of you remember that statement made by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron after the last attack on Paris? While the claim was later denied, I'm not seing any other way to interpret that stament. Sorry if this sounds like a rant; I just wanted to get this off my head.

[m40295]

You created a account just to post that that?

[overwraith]

They might try, but the terrorists are probably communicating more through stego than crypto, I could be wrong, but I have heard that they mostly use stego documents which rely more on security through obscurity, and the fact that they 'look' like legit docs as opposed to actual crypto. Mind you the NSA has been trying to get the edge on cracking crypto for years through all sorts of methods. Political parties, and government parties frequently "Never let any crisis go to waste." If the NSA or someone does install some kind of back door in crypto, then the rest of us don't have much option other than to use it. I remember reading a practical cryptography book (no math, just good and practical API) that whenever a person roll's their own crypto they will almost always get it wrong. If our crypogrophers and the associated programmers are mandated by government to put back doors in they will have to do so, and any other effort to develop one's own crypto without formidable support and testing will inevitably contain bugs. It requires a lot of math, and a lot of computer science knowledge to do crypto right. The details kill open source or home made crypto standards. Essentially without a lot of experience and support any home made attempt will look like amateur night to somebody with the powers of the NSA.

But then there's the question of how do you ensure that everybody follows the rules of such a rediculous rule. If a person walked into somebody's house and said "oh, we would like to be able to read all your emails, encrypted documents, network traffic, phone calls, etc, and while we are at it we would like to take a look into all your safes in your house..." that person would probably get shot. I'm just saying how would you enforce something which is quite obviously tyrrannical?

Edited November 15, 2015 by overwraith

[vailixi]

In light of the recent attack on Paris by (supposedly) ISIS, do any of you think that politicians trying to push-through bills like CISA in the U.S. will have more success? Since most of these terrorist groups are communicating through encrypted emails or IRC chat online, it isn't hard to believe we will hear discussion about forcing people to provide encryption keys to governments in an act to prevent them from doing so. As we all know, this sort of thing wouldn't actually give intelligence on terrorist attacks (since terrorists don't, you know, care about breaking laws), and would perhapse be an act of security theater even more glaring than the existance of the TSA. Do any of you remember that statement made by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron after the last attack on Paris? While the claim was later denied, I'm not seing any other way to interpret that stament. Sorry if this sounds like a rant; I just wanted to get this off my head.

This thing with France is obviously an imigration issue. Keeping those people out of the EU in the first place would have been the best solution. What difference does it make what they say on the internet if they can't get here?

Edited November 16, 2015 by vailixi

[overwraith]

I actually have not read the article yet... The way the borders are in europe though, I would tend to agree with your observation about it being an immigration/border sec issue. But certain political parties won't admit that to themselves.

[cooper]

Well, the initial knee-jerk response by France to the attack was to bomb a bunch of targets within Syria, including a training ground and a weapons depot.

That raises 2 questions with me:

1. If you knew these legitimate targets were there, why wait until a tragedy like this occurs before you strike against it? (I'm guessing this operation was already planned and they're publicising it to act tough in the public opinion)

2. How many times in history did a violent retaliatory attack convince an opponent that you're actually the good guys, as opposed to an oppressor/the guy with the biggest gun?

Back to the legislative response. The problem is that people demand the government does *something* to prove they're actively controlling the situation.

Easiest solution? Close the border. If we keep them out they can't harm us. Sounds logical, until you understand just how much people travel legitimately and in fact those that want to harm you will not have a lot of problems acquiring false ID papers so you're keeping 'the good/neutral folks' out without helping prevent the bad guys from coming in.

Alternate solution? Trust nobody and spy on everybody. Seems like the path of least resistance but what you end up with is information overload in the near-term (think GCHQ claiming it had intercepted comms on the russian airplane bomb but didn't get to processing the information until long after the blast) and the general overreach in information gathering can result in the government knowing stuff about you that's nobody's goddamn business. They might try to both turn down the volume of collected data and assuage citizens that what they're doing isn't that sinister by collecting "meta-data". This EFF slide nicely sums up why metadata isn't any less sinister.

Do I have a better solution? No, sorry. But we the public demand one from our elected representatives. So they're going to go with one of these anyway simply because we the public can't accept the reality that most likely no obvious solution exists.