Irreal

Everyone interested in the encryption wars knows that the EFF has done yeoman’s service defending our right to have access to strong, uncompromised encryption. Certain parts of the government hate this and insist that they need—for our own good, of course—to be able to read our emails, texts, and other communications.

Recently, the EFF, Access Now, and a few other nonprofits and tech companies met with White House officials seeking to discuss their concerns and to secure a commitment from the administration to ensure Americans the right to have and use strong encryption free of back doors or other crippling measures.

The EFF has posted the results of that discussion and some suggestions for moving forward. They are asking for all those concerned to make your opinions known to the White House through an on-line form. Please take a few minutes to leave a message in support of strong encryption and asking that the FBI and others in the government stop their disingenuous campaign to force tech companies to provide them with back doors and other means of accessing private, encrypted data.

In a world in which the FBI is intent on bullying tech companies into giving them “golden keys” that they can use to unlock encrypted communications, the TSA’s compromise of their own golden keys (used to open luggage for inspection) seemed like an object lesson worth considering. After all, the government asked for special access and ensured us that our baggage would be safe from petty thieves while still allowing the TSA to keep us safe. Instead, the TSA carelessly allowed pictures of the keys to be published and now anyone who wants a set and has access to a 3-D printer can get one.

The TSA’s loss of the master keys seemed like a cogent argument against trusting the government with the far more important and potentially devastating access to our digital communications. Here’s another: the TSA’s reaction to the loss of the keys is “Meh. Most people don’t lock their bags anyway. Besides, the bags are under our control so they’re safe.”

Even if you believe that anodyne fairy tale, it says nothing about, say, a hotel bell hop who suddenly has access to your luggage. As a practical matter, the locks are terribly insecure with or without the master keys but the government did promise that the locks would ensure the safety of your luggage while enabling legitimate government access.

Yet when that same government lost control of the keys, their attitude was, “So what? It’s not our problem.” Is there any reason to believe that the FBI would be any less cavalier if they lost the encryption master keys? Is there any reason to believe that the FBI would be more competent than the TSA is safeguarding those keys?

The possible loss of the encryption master keys is only one—and not the strongest—argument against the imposition of these keys but it’s worth remembering what the government says when they mess up and compromise their exceptional access: “It’s not our problem.”

After Paris and San Bernadino, FBI director James Comey has stepped up his “We’re Going Dark” roadshow, telling everyone who will listen how encryption is making it impossible to stop terrorists. In a Washington Post op-ed, Jihadists are making their plans public. Why hasn’t the FBI caught on?, Rita Katz discloses an inconvenient truth: the vast majority of Jihadist communications are carried out in the clear on social media. Sadly—and dangerously—the FBI prefers to ignore this fact.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said that Elton Simpson, the Garland, Texas shooter had exchanged 109 encrypted messages with an overseas terrorist. The implication was that if only the FBI had their much sought after backdoor, they would have been able to discover the plot and prevent the attack. One of Katz’s inconvenient facts is that those 109 messages were not discovered until after the attack so they could have played no part in preventing it. Here’s another: Elton Simpson was known to the FBI and used Twitter to openly follow and communicate with known terrorists.

One of those terrorists, Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, tweeted the incitement for the attack. Simpson retweeted the message and asked Hassan to direct message him. All of this was in the open, no encryption involved.

It gets better. Katz’s organization, the SITE Intelligence Group, discovered this communication and reported it to the FBI one week before the attack took place. And yet it’s Apple’s, Google’s, and Edward Snowden’s fault that innocent citizens are at risk.

As we’ve recently learned after San Bernadino, the U.S. Government has rules prohibiting its agents from using public social media sites to gather intelligence. Katz says that “the FBI is reluctant to recognize open-source as an important — arguably the most important — tool to track jihadists online.”

Let’s review. The intelligence community has no trouble snooping on our most private communications and demanding that we weaken encryption so that they can read our sensitive messages but they’re reluctant to use public, unencrypted information that is easily available to them, or anyone else, without the need for snooping. As the Garland incident—Comey’s own example—shows, having access to the perpetrator’s encryption key would have made no difference but the unencrypted, publicly viewable information that would have made a difference was ignored even after it was pointed out to the FBI.