Attorney General Barr, Encryption, and the Media

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1 min read

First, I hate click bait articles like this.
Barr didn’t say “encryption creates security risk,” but rather he’s repeating what the FBI director said last year:

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is increasingly unable to access data from some electronic devices that could help in prosecuting criminals and terrorists, which is an ‘“urgent public safety issue,’ said Christopher Wray, director of the agency”

He did say: “There have been enough dogmatic pronouncements that lawful access simply cannot be done. It can be, and it must be.”
Second, he’s correct inasmuch as the State wants access and doesn’t have a publicly supported backdoor. “Security” here means “Government access to anything they want with the veneer of legality.”
Third, he’s flat out wrong about one issue that the article actually gets right.
“There is no way to give the FBI access to encrypted communications without giving the same access to every government on the planet,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy.
What’s funny is the State actors already have backdoors. It looks like they want to make one that’s publicly accepted.

3 Comments

  1. I suppose that it’s possible that open source cryptography has gotten good enough that the federal government simply lacks the resources to brute force all the systems that they’d like access to.

    • That’s possible but with Quantum computing the cryptographical strength isn’t a problem to crack. Plus, I have no idea how many backdoors they’ve inserted over the years.

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