New US Legislation Pushing for Backdoors in Encrypted Devices

So here's the deal. - This proposed law is all about forcing companies to create a backdoor for the government to snoop on encrypted info. - A ton of people are against this bill. - If it actually goes through, it would seriously mess up privacy rights in the US. A group of US Senators rolled out this new anti-encryption bill dubbed the "Legal Access to Encrypted Data". If it passes, it would let the government peek into encrypted data by making manufacturers of encrypted devices and software build in a backdoor, totally undermining the whole point of encryption. Lindsey Graham, who heads the Senate Judicial Committee, had something to say about it. Check out more details and the source here.

Are a lot of terrorist organisations not advanced enough to know what's best to use for security... Also if this goes through I doubt companies are going to make separate versions without back doors... (perhaps this could incentivise Asia to produce different devices or Europe/australasia to start producing better secure devices that don't have random holes for the US government).

Where "technology" is actually Telegram and Tor and maybe WhatsApp, it turns out that criminals don't use as much security as you see in movies. Even if all hardware makers were forced to make hardware backdoors, they still must spend the time penetrating into these networks and protocols that they use. In Tor's case they're never going to be able to backdoor an old device made before this requirement, and as for the other protocols then they will have to do a massively inconvenient bit inspection from the hardware level, guessing what kind of program is using the encryption hardware right now! So not only is he addressing the problem in a completely absurd way, he's also doing it in a futile way. Three letter agencies are fabled to have the most powerful computers and smartest mathematicians at their disposal but analyzing some encrypted third party app's source code for the exact algorithms to replace can't be automated by these things/people and is probably beyond their capacity, which means they have to rely on mediocre and average software devs to figure out what it's doing, often with NO assistance from the app vendor in question as oftentimes the code is obtained by turning it into them, not by bidding and taking them as clients. So all this time these vendors are under no obligation to provide technical support to the feds for their code, and without that support, they need to bring in other developers who have no clue or inside knowledge how the app works and are just as likely to introduce incorrect algorithmic interpretations into the backdoor as any other software developer who makes bugs and security vulnerabilities. In fine: hardware backdoors are a massive waste of time and a PITA to implement, and that's if they are ever implemented at all because budget cuts happen often, so more often than not the hardware backdoors are used by nobody other than... the criminals themselves (cf. WannaCry).

Just because they are not advanced enough does not mean that there will be people who will be exploiting this backdoor, remember that there are people that will get curious and once they discover this backdoor meant either they tell it to someone and the word of mouth goes on or they post it in the Internet either through written post or video, either way it will reach the malicious intent people. True privacy is what we should be aiming for and not those compromised one.

Google and Apple underline the largest market for smartphones and computers, they can cooperate secretly to leave hidden doors that enable governments to access data. This may not be announced publicly but it is the easiest way. I think the Chinese government is doing this and some governments might do that if things get out of control. Many *older* hardware devices have a lot of back doors when they are physically accessed. So if they can physically access these devices, decoding will be easier for them. As for forcing back doors, this will facilitate the task, imagine instead of decrypting a private key, install malicious programs in the device and it will reach the currencies easily. When crises happen, I think many governments will start defining a word of privacy.

Afaik Google have to reveal their source code to other companies, would Samsung not try to remove something like this? They're the main innovation hub for Google and have a larger market in Europe (probably more than they can get from the US)... Any cypher punk trying to prove a point would just dump the keys on the net and wait for everyone to start using them to access others' data... It'd prove a point again the government, this could also be done by operatives in ex security services who can sell their skills as PIs in phone hacking. It'd be something journalism will be back to buying up!