On 09/29/2010 01:48 PM, Chris Penn wrote:
I have seen discussions on liberal and Conservative news channels/Sites, since this thread started, related to this purposed encryption legislation and I have seen nothing from the FED denying any of it.
What is the FED? I'm not familiar with this acronym. Is this a shorthand reference to the federal reserve? If so I don't see why they would be commenting on legislation that isn't related to financial policy.
They were talking about this on O'Reilly last night (best entertainment of TV), and of course they loved the idea. Most people do not seem to understand why this is a bad idea.
Sure. The general pop never does.
The idea, with respect to encryption, is that ISPs, and any other communication company, will have to give their encryption keys to the FED, if a judge signs off on it, in a more expedient way then is currently possible. In theory this will make eavesdropping on communications faster and more efficient.
No... based on the NYT article, the proposed law (which again is not before congress and is currently only speculation) requires the systems to be able to spit out plain text and hand that over. It doesn't require turning over the encryption keys. From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1>
"No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a U.S. court order," Ms. Caproni said. "They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text."
One example discussed on CNN and FOX was BlackBerry's RIM encryption. Some of you may remember that the UAE (and Saudi Arabia) threaten to ban blackberry services because they would not hand over this information freely to the respective governments.
That is true. Keep in mind that two systems exist. BES (used by enterprises with Zimbra or Microsoft Exchange. Admin sets up unique encryption keys etc) and BIS (used by carriers like t-mobile. Not sure of the nature of the encryption). So to my knowledge the UAE would only be able to get into BIS systems. This is trivially bypassed by deploying BES or using an IMAPS connection.
Without some denial from the FED or white house, I am starting to think that this is not just FUD.
All sorts of rumors fly about. Responding to every one would be very time consuming. :)
Let's be incredibly mindful of the facts in this situation and avoid jumping to conclusions. I'm very disappointed in LWN and EFF for parroting a NYT article that seems to be pure conjecture. No bill is before congress at this time. To my knowledge no proposed bill text is out there.
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