Monthly Archives: October 2017

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Encryption: Christopher Wray’s “Huge, Huge Problem” is an Age-Old Inconvenience

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Less than three months into his tenure as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray wants you to know that the Trump administration’s policy on encryption is business as usual: Keep trying to break it, keep pretending it’s a new obstacle, keep thumping the rail and demanding unrealistic limitations on it.

In an October 22 speech to the International Associations of Chiefs of Police, Wray complained that in the first 11 months of 2017, his agents found themselves unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices.

“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray complained, citing various criminal activities as hobgoblins before going on to the usual faux-reasonable claim that “there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to make the public safe.”

Wrong, Mr. Wray. There’s no “balance” involved. Encryption is a fact of life that you’re just going to have to live with. And it’s been that way for a long, long time.

Theoretically unbreakable encryption has been around since at least as early as 1882 when Frank Miller invented and described the “one-time pad.” A pen, a piece of paper, and a way to generate random numbers is all anyone needs to frustrate Christopher Wray’s desire to read our mail.

In the Internet age, Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy “public key” encryption framework is more than a quarter century old, still going strong, and available in various forms for most computer operating systems.

Yes, encryption can frustrate criminal investigations. Some of the Zodiac Killer’s hand-encrypted messages remain unbroken more than 40 years after his killings ceased.

Whining about it won’t change it. The “balance” Wray and his counterparts in other federal agencies and abroad (such as UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd) keep calling for amounts to outlawing properties of math and logic that they find inconvenient.  Maybe they should do something about that pesky gravity while they’re at it.

If the encryption whiners get their way on policy and legislation, they’ll face two utterly predictable outcomes:

First, “the bad guys” — terrorists and criminals, real and imagined — will continue to use strong encryption. The problem with outlawing math and logic is that neither criminals nor math and logic give a hoot about human desires masquerading as “laws.”

Second, countries where governments try to require “back doors” in encryption and other similarly stupid ideas will become losers in the race to the future. Tech companies in those countries will either go out of business or move their operations to jurisdictions where they’re allowed to serve their customers without Christopher Wray’s permission.

Government is not an immovable object. Encryption is an unstoppable force. Go away, Wray.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Cure for Weinstein is a Cultural Change

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Woman Being Stalked (stock photo from Pond5)

How many women did Harvey Weinstein victimize?  When did he  start down the continuum leading from Hollywood’s shamefully tolerated “casting couch”  overtures to  increasingly flagrant sexual harassment, and finally (if we believe his accusers, as I think we should) open sexual assault? We’ll probably never know.

But one thing we do know: There was a first time, a Victim Zero. While neither that victim nor the others should be blamed for what happened to them, it’s worth asking why there followed a Victim One, and a Victim Two, and so forth, spanning decades, before Weinstein was finally brought low for his depredations. And why so many others remain in the shadows, sexually victimizing women and men, adults and children, with impunity.

We need a culture change. The current culture of planting seeds of fear — the “stranger danger” mentality and such — before victimization and offering sympathy after clearly isn’t getting the job done. Instead of #MeToo after the fact pageantry, this problem calls for the inculcation of a strong, affirmative #NotMe attitude — an unwillingness to be Victim Zero, or to remain silent as other victims inevitably follow.

What must be rooted out is the sickness in our culture that lets sexual predators leverage fear into opportunity to commit their crimes and shame into an ability hide those crimes.

It has to start with parents and  extend to friends, mentors and  communities. Our children need to be brought up to understand that there’s nothing they can’t bring to the rest of us, and that we will back them completely should they encounter someone who attempts to victimize them.

We have to shift the fear away from would-be victims and strike it into the hearts of would-be victimizers. We have to make it preemptively clear that we will always ostracize those who harass and punish those who assault, not those who are harassed or assaulted.

We must send our young people out into the world understanding that when they walk away from — or, if necessary, run away from or defend themselves against — a Harvey Weinstein, it will be Weinstein, not them, who pays the price. And while systems of criminal  justice must and should presume innocence and work diligently to establish the truth, victims must know, to their very core, that they enjoy a starting presumption of belief from the rest of us.

The goal is simple, but this is a war. As Carl von Clausewitz pointed out, “everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” It’s not going to be easy. But I believe we can prevail, for ourselves and for our loved ones. Let’s make a better world, a world in which our Harvey Weinsteins become outcasts, not billionaires.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Hillary Clinton: Cold Creepiness with a Side of Corruption

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Photo from MaxPixel, Creative Commons CC0.

 

On October 16, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton took her public pity party (and not so subtle hopes of somehow magically overturning the 2016 election) abroad, calling out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a tool of Russian intelligence …. a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator” in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s show “Four Corners.”

Clinton’s evidenceless accusations don’t seem to  carry much weight with Assange himself. He doesn’t find her “a credible person.” “It is not just her constant lying,” he says. “It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement. Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen.”

Was Clinton’s latest lunge at Assange and WikiLeaks a preemptive strike? An attempt, perhaps, to get ahead of extreme ugliness in the coming news cycle?

On the same day, the US  Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that its former director, James Comey, had begun drafting his concluding statement on the “Servergate” investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information — a statement technically exonerating Clinton, although between the lines the final draft clearly admitted that she didn’t face indictment because, well, she’s Hillary Clinton — months before even interviewing Clinton and other key witnesses.

Then, a day after Clinton’s diatribe, news broke that the FBI knew as early as 2009 about Russian attempts to gain control of 20% of the US uranium supply and new uranium sales opportunities in the US through corrupt means, but covered that information up for several years.

In fact, the cover-up remains at least partially in force. The Hill reports that in the run-up to last year’s election, the US Department of Justice (then under control of Hillary Clinton’s co-partisans in the Obama administration) threatened the FBI’s confidential informant in the case with criminal prosecution for violating a non-disclosure agreement if he sued to recover the money he’d spent helping the FBI make its case.  The informant’s lawyer is now seeking DoJ permission to talk to Congress about the case.

During the period in question, Russian sources paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to Hillary Clinton’s husband (former president Bill Clinton) and donated millions more to the family’s Clinton Foundation. And Clinton, at the time serving as US Secretary of State, dutifully bulldozed a  path through the American bureaucracy for Vladimir Putin. That sequence of events looks like what most people would call “bribery” and “influence peddling.”

What was that about nihilistic opportunists who do the bidding of dictators again?

If there was in fact collusion between the Russian government and a 2016 presidential campaign, it’s reasonable to ask: Were the Russians working with Trump’s campaign to defeat Clinton, or were the Russians paying back Clinton’s campaign for her faithful service to them by helping her gin up her claims of a Trump/Putin conspiracy? Or both? Or something else?

The effort to “Get Trump” may eventually bear fruit, but it’s starting to look like the effort to “Get Clinton” may do so first.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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