{"id":15405,"date":"2017-01-24T13:39:04","date_gmt":"2017-01-24T18:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/?p=15405"},"modified":"2017-09-14T18:07:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T22:07:42","slug":"attorney-general-nominee-sessions-backs-crypto-backdoors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2017\/01\/24\/attorney-general-nominee-sessions-backs-crypto-backdoors\/","title":{"rendered":"Attorney General Nominee Sessions Backs Crypto Backdoors"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the presidential campaign was in full swing early last year, now-President Trump made his feelings on encryption clear. Commenting on the Apple-FBI fight in San Bernardino, Trump threatened to boycott Apple if they didn\u2019t cooperate: \u201cto think that Apple won’t allow us to get into [the] cell phone,\u201d Trump said in an interview<\/a>. \u201cWho do they think they are? No, we have to open it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

For that reason, we were curious what Trump\u2019s nominee for Attorney General, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) would say about the role of encryption.<\/p>\n

At his confirmation hearing<\/a>, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy<\/a>, however, he took a much clearer position:<\/p>\n

\n

Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people’s\u2019 digital security?<\/p>\n

Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption<\/strong>, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Despite Sessions\u2019 \u201con the one hand, on the other\u201d phrasing, this answer is a clear endorsement of backdooring the security we all rely on. It\u2019s simply not feasible<\/a> for encryption to serve what Sessions concedes are its \u201cmany valuable and important purposes\u201d and still be \u201covercome\u201d when the government wants access to plaintext. As we saw last year with Sens. Burr and Feinstein\u2019s draft Compliance with Court Orders Act, the only way to give the government this kind of access is to break the Internet and outlaw industry best practices<\/a>, and even then it would only reach the minority of encryption products made in the USA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve done for more than two decades<\/a>, we will strongly oppose any legislative or regulatory proposal to force companies or other providers to give Sessions what he\u2019s demanding: the ability to \u201covercome encryption.\u201d Code is speech<\/a>, and no law that mandates backdoors can be both effective and pass constitutional scrutiny<\/a>. If Sessions follows through on his endorsement of \u201covercoming\u201d encryption, we\u2019ll see him in court.<\/p>\n

Source: Attorney General Nominee Sessions Backs Crypto Backdoors | Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the presidential campaign was in full swing early last year, now-President Trump made his feelings on encryption clear. Commenting on the Apple-FBI fight in San Bernardino, Trump threatened to boycott Apple if they didn\u2019t cooperate: \u201cto think that Apple won’t allow us to get into [the] cell phone,\u201d Trump said in an interview. \u201cWho do they think they are? No, we have to open it up.\u201d For that reason, we were curious what Trump\u2019s nominee for Attorney General, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) would say about the role of encryption. At his confirmation hearing, Sessions was largely non-committal. But in his written responses to questions posed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, however, he took a much clearer position: Question: Do you agree with NSA Director Rogers, Secretary of Defense Carter, and other national security experts that strong encryption helps protect this country from cyberattack and is beneficial to the American people’s\u2019 digital security? Response: Encryption serves many valuable and important purposes. It is also critical, however, that national security and criminal investigators be able to overcome encryption, under lawful authority, when necessary to the furtherance of national-security and criminal investigations. Despite Sessions\u2019 \u201con the one hand, on the other\u201d phrasing, this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2394,513,2395,1836],"class_list":["post-15405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-politics","tag-back-doors","tag-cryptography","tag-sessions","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}