[Cryptography] Justice Dept. Revives Push to Mandate a Way to Unlock Phones

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 3/28/2018 5:26 AM, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> The only move that beats an opponent motivated to kill you for your
> secrets is the motivation to die to keep them.

That you have secrets worth killing for is hard to detect at the best of 
times, and you can make it a good deal harder.

But in any case, not going to kill you for your secrets.  The government 
is far more interested in detecting which people have secrets, than in 
forcibly extracting those secrets.

Similarly with their efforts to suppress Christianity, they are not so 
much throwing Christians to the lions, as making Christianity 
inconvenient and low status - if you want to continue being a Roman 
Catholic, and not celebrate adultery, gay sex, and transsexual 
prostitution, if you don't want to have female headship preached at your 
wedding, have to find a Latin Mass Church and attend that, which is 
perfectly legal, and will not even get you fired, but which most people 
will not do.

It is not that they demand your secrets on pain of being thrown to the 
lions.  They demand your secrets on pain of minor inconvenience.

Whatsapp two party encryption is secure and easy to use, but they have 
as default automatic backup in the clear to Google servers, where google 
AI will go through your data looking for interesting things.  Lately 
automatic backup in the clear to Google has been added to all sorts of 
things, for example Viber, while other forms of backup have been made 
more difficult.

Whatsapp group chat is also insecure, in that the servers can invisibly 
add themselves or the NSA to the group chat.

Signal group chat is secure, and does not get backed up by default. 
(Losing potentially inconvenient data is a feature, not a bug), but 
there are approximately one thousand times as many Whatsapp users as 
signal users.

Whatsapp one on one chat is secure, but that is mainly because the 
security agencies get the metadata, being more interested in who you are 
chatting with, than what you are chatting about.

They are not going to kill you for your secrets, just make keeping 
secrets somewhat inconvenient, just as they are not going to throw 
Christians to the lions, just make practicing actual Christianity 
somewhat inconvenient.

By making secrecy mildly inconvenient, people practicing actual secrecy 
stick out, the government collects the metadata on people practicing 
actual secrecy and then they pay attention to those people.  But 
torturing those people into revealing their secrets would reveal the 
tracking, would reveal what the government is paying attention to, so 
they don't do that and are unlikely to do that.