[Cryptography] Decrypting the Encryption Debate

[Arnold Reinhold]

In 1999, I wrote a white paper for the Cato Institute called “Cryptography the Global Tide of Change” on the futility and negative consequences of the Clinton Administration’s efforts to suppress strong cryptography, then primarily through export controls. (https://www.cato.org/publications/briefing-paper/strong-cryptography-global-tide-change <https://www.cato.org/publications/briefing-paper/strong-cryptography-global-tide-change>) Among other things, I wrote:

“The stated reason for U.S. government opposition to public access to strong cryptography is to preserve the government’s ability to gain access to criminal communications through wiretaps and computer data files seized as evidence. Such claims usually invoke a troika of evils—drug dealers, terrorists, and child pornographers— though decades of wiretapping have not halted those crimes.”

In some ways, not much has changed, the same troika of evils are still invoked. But in other ways there have been vast changes. Here are some of the tools and resources now available to law enforcement that did not exist, and mostly were not even imagined, back in 1999:

o Ubiquitous use of cell phones, with GPS that track owners’ movements whenever they carry them 

o Ubiquitous use of text messaging and email, with metadata easily available even if text is encrypted 

o Numerous forms of insecurity in commercial hardware and software, enabling penetration of all but the most secure systems

o Password cracking tools that are capable of trillions of hashes per second

o Widespread social media accounts where users volunteer copious personal data

o Dramatic drop in cost of mass storage, enabling “full take” storage of metadata and intercepted content (about a factor of 1000, http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte)

o Big data warehousing, holding every credit card purchase, other financial transactions and anything else they can get

o Widespread use of cloud storage, coupled with third party “business records” exclusion from Fourth Amendment guarantees U.S v. Miller, Smith v Maryland

o Widespread video surveillance, interconnected and linked with face recognition and AI filtering

o Inexpensive license plate readers

o Electronic transit fare collection that tracks riders

o Voice recognition and voice to text programs in multiple languages

o Quality automatic language translation

o Electronic medical records

o Passports with RFID

o Federal driver’s license standards that are effectively creating a national ID card

o Automated DNA sequencing

o DNA databases large enough to zero in on a suspect through their relatives, even if the suspect’s DNA isn’t in the database

o Millimeter radar looking through walls

o India’s attempt to create a cashless society and China’s efforts towards total citizen control (1984 Rev 2.0), creating model for the future that others will soon clamor to employ

I’m sure I’ve missed a few. In short, law enforcement has never had it so good. They’re hardly “going dark.”. 


Arnold Reinhold
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20181212/79479201/attachment.html>