And so the crypto war begins
2019/10/03
Saw this buzzfeed article today on hacker news. Attorney General Bill Barr is going to ask Facebook to stop End-to-End encryption of messages in their apps. This may be the beginning of the end of secure communications online.
When users send messages on WhatsApp the contents is encrypted before being sent using keys only available to the people in the conversation. What Barr is asking is to allow the government to be able to spy on communications for the sake of "finding terrorists." But with the way this administrations has been acting, I see absolutely no reason to believe them.
But beyond their political motives, the issue with allowing these back doors is there are no feasible ways to know if those using the back door are good or bad. A hacker can use the back door as easily as law enforcement. Proponents of adding back doors can claim all day that it will never happen but every day we see more and more systems broken into without an intentional hole existing in their security.
Further more, I have yet to see anyone discuss the appropriate punishment for government officials, and law enforcement when these back door are broken into. If the keys are misplaced and everyone's personal information is available, who gets punished for it? When shit hit the fan with Equifax not a single thing happened. Even the Class Action Lawsuit turned into a joke. If people want to break security I think we need to have an honest discussion on which of our representatives goes to jail and for how many years per incident. You pass a law which allows information of millions of people to be leaked...life without parole doesn't seem like enough. You cannot remove that lost data from the internet. As we are seeing with the Equifax scandal, people will forever have to deal with this problem.
I know its just a pie in the sky idea as no legislator will ever allow themselves to go to jail for their own shitty laws, but it would make me feel better if for once a person of power went to jail for screwing up people information, bank accounts, etc.