Tag Archives: James Comey

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Canute’s Courtiers Condemn Consumer Crypto

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In 1818, Jeremiah Chubb collected a reward of £100 (a fairly princely sum back then — depending on how the inflation is calculated, perhaps upward of half a million US dollars today) from the British government. After a major dockyard burglary, the government ran a competition to produce a lock which could only be opened with its own key. Chubb’s “detector lock” took the prize.

Were they alive today, Chubb and his brother Charles (they also invented the modern safe) might find themselves doing quite well in a similar business: Encrypting data to keep it away from prying eyes. But instead of reaping rich rewards from the US government for that kind of work, they’d likely have US Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC), not to mention FBI director James Comey, calling for their heads.

Comey visited Capitol Hill on December 9, delivering his latest tantrum over encryption to the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee. He wants America’s tech industry to produce the equivalent of pre-picked locks: Encryption that the government can compromise at will with a court order.

At that same hearing, Feinstein announced that she and Burr intend to introduce a bill requiring Silicon Valley to implement Comey’s demand.

Fortunately for all of us, Feinstein, Burr and Comey are a modern trio of King Canute’s courtiers, operating on a false belief that the state can, by decree, halt the tide of progress. The strong encryption genie has been out of the bottle for 20 years, it’s not going back in, and it recognizes no borders. If this law passes, Americans who care about keeping their data private will just use existing encryption applications or get new ones from abroad.

That said, the Feinstein/Burr/Comey proposal is dangerous in at least two ways.

One is that unsophisticated consumers, users who don’t educate and protect themselves and just use handicapped Feinstein/Burr/Comey applications without strong encryption built in, will suffer from the equivalent of broken locks on their data “doors.” Terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers and regular people who take extra precautions to secure their data won’t be affected. Aunt Sally’s diary and banking information will be.

The second danger is precedent. You wouldn’t remove the deadbolt on your front door, just in case these tyrants wanted to wander into  your house and check your bedroom closet for dead bodies whenever they felt like it, would you? This is the same principle. If we give them an inch they will undoubtedly ignore all stop signs as they take mile after mile, forever (or at least until they run out of gas).

Your privacy and your information are either yours or theirs. There’s no in-between. And there is no room for compromise.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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Comey vs. Crypto: The Last Banzai Charge

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Imperial Japanese Army soldiers give a banzai ...
Imperial Japanese Army soldiers give a banzai cheer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the end of World War II, Second Lieutenant Hiro Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army dismissed rumors of his country’s surrender, fading into the Philippine jungle to fight on.  He held out for 29 years before, still dressed in his dilapidated uniform, he surrendered his sword to his former commanding officer in 1974.

Every time an American politician or bureaucrat floats some cockamamie new scheme to ban, handicap or regulate strong encryption of computer data, I think of Onoda.

The Crypto Wars began in 1991 when Phil Zimmerman released the first version of PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”), a tool that made strong encryption available to the masses worldwide. The wars essentially ended at the same time.  A few bitter dead-enders held out until the mid-1990s, firing off silly proposals for programs like the Clipper Chip and “key escrow,” but it quickly became apparent to most that the strong encryption genie isn’t going back into the bottle.

So here comes FBI director James Comey, waving a rusty samurai sword and screaming “banzai!” as he once again charges the enemy lines, 24 years after his side’s defeat.

Testifying before the US Senate’s intelligence committee in early July,  Comey trotted out the latest alleged threat —  Islamic State militants using strong crypto to protect their communications — and complained that “[i]n recent months … we have on a new scale seen mainstream products and services designed in a way that gives users sole control over access to their data.”

He says that like it’s a bad thing. It isn’t.

He envisions a “solution” in which software and communications providers use strong encryption that works, except when Comey wants to read your email. Even if empowering him to read your email wasn’t a very bad idea, no such solution exists.

A back door for James Comey is a back door for everyone else, too. If the encryption is broken, it’s broken.

The bad guys will always have encryption. Encryption is math and computer code. It’s free, it’s in the wild, and it will remain so. If American companies hobble their encryption, those who don’t like their encryption hobbled will get good crypto elsewhere. Shikata ga nai (“it can’t be helped”).

As for the rest of us, Comey tends toward the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” line. Oddly, I never hear that line coming from him when Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden reveal HIS organization’s secrets.

We use encryption for the same reason we put our snail mail in envelopes: We only want it to be read by the intended recipient. Dealing with that is Comey’s job. Catering to his voyeurism with “back doors” isn’t our obligation.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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