December 2015 – Page 2 – DoGoodSoft's Official Blog

McCaul wants new commission on encryption and law enforcement

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said he plans to introduce legislation that would allow the creation of a “national commission on security and technology challenges in the Digital Age.”

The legislation “would bring together the technology sector, privacy and civil liberties groups, academics, and the law enforcement community to find common ground,” Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said in a Dec. 7 speech at National Defense University. “This will not be like other blue ribbon panels, established and forgotten.”

He said the ability of terrorist groups to use encrypted applications while communicating is one of his biggest fears. “We cannot stop what we cannot see,” he said in reference to recent attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris.

McCaul described the Islamic State as not a “terrorist group on the run” but a “terrorist group on the march.” He said 19 Islamic State-connected plots in the U.S. have been thwarted by government officials. But he added that terrorist groups are using the Internet to expand.

“Americans are being recruited by terrorist groups at the speed of broadband while we are responding at the speed of bureaucracy,” he said.

FBI Director James Comey has been a vocal critic of end-to-end encryption in commercial devices, and his advocacy has received a mixed reception on Capitol Hill. During an Oct. 27 hearing, Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), a former CIA officer who has private-sector cybersecurity experience, criticized Comey for saying encryption thwarts counterterrorism efforts and for “throwing certain companies under the bus by saying they’re not cooperating,” a charge that Comey denied.

In an interview, Hurd welcomed McCaul’s proposed commission by saying, “I think getting a group of industry experts from all sides of this issue to talk — and to not talk past one another — is ultimately a good thing.”

Hurd, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said he would planned to speak with McCaul to make sure the commission had the “right folks in the room.”

He added that the right people would be leaders of technology firms whose encryption services have been at the center of debate and law enforcement officers who might be able to identify situations in which agencies would need to get around encryption, Hurd said.

But those situations still seem elusive. When he was a CIA officer working on cybersecurity issues, Hurd said he did not think of encryption as an insurmountable roadblock.

“Guess what? Encryption was around back then,” he said.

Hurd pointed out that intelligence can be gleaned from the contours of encrypted channels — such as communications between IP addresses — without decrypting the communications.

“I still haven’t gotten anybody to explain to me a very specific case where the investigation went cold” because of encryption, he said of his conversations with law enforcement officials.

McCaul sounded a more dire note by saying, “I have personally been briefed on cases where terrorists communicated in darkness and where we couldn’t shine a light, even with a lawful warrant.”

He said countering Islamic State’s use of encrypted messaging is “one of the greatest counterterrorism challenges of the 21th century.” At the same time, he was careful not to target encryption technology itself, which he described as “essential for privacy, data security and global commerce.”

In a Dec. 6 speech from the Oval Office, President Barack Obama announced plans to seek public/private cooperation on challenges posed by encrypted communications. He said he will “urge high-tech and law enforcement leaders to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.”

However, it is not clear if that message represents more than a change in tone from current policy. The administration had previously said it would not seek legislation to push companies to retain customers’ encryption keys and share them with law enforcement agencies.

U.S. CIO Tony Scott told FCW in a November interview that “at the end of the day, I think the better policy is probably not to require these backdoors” for law enforcement.

Although a new law could potentially cover U.S.-based providers and devices manufactured by U.S.-based companies, encryption applications would still be widely available beyond the country’s jurisdiction.

“All the really bad people who are highly motivated to keep their stuff secret are going to use the encryption method that doesn’t have a backdoor,” Scott said.

McCaul used the bulk of his speech to call for tighter restrictions on the Visa Waiver Program, as outlined in a bill introduced this week that would require high-risk individuals who have visited a terrorist hot spot to undergo an intensive screening process before entering the United States. He said that approach would also strengthen intelligence sharing with allies and help prevent passport fraud.

Apple, Google encryption is a blow to public safety

A November 2015 report of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York City sets forth succinctly a huge public safety problem of which most Americans are unaware:

“Most people today live their lives on smartphones, and, in this regard at least, criminals are no different. While in the past criminals may have kept evidence of their crimes in file cabinets, closets and safes, today that evidence is more often found on smartphones. Photos and videos of child sexual assault, text messages between sex traffickers and their customers, even a video of a murder victim being shot to death — these are just a few of the pieces of evidence found on smartphones and used to prosecute people committing horrific crimes.

“Last fall a decision by a single company changed the way those of us in law enforcement work to keep the public safe and bring justice to victims and their families. In September 2014 Apple announced that its new operating system for smartphones and tablets would employ, by default, what is commonly referred to as “full-disk encryption,” making data on its devices completely inaccessible without a pass code. Shortly thereafter, Google announced that it would do the same.

“Apple’s and Google’s decisions to enable full-disk encryption by default on smartphones means that law enforcement officials can no longer access evidence of crimes stored on smartphones, even though the officials have a search warrant issued by a neutral judge.

“Apple and Google are not responsible for keeping the public safe. That is the job of law enforcement. But the consequences of these companies’ actions on public safety are severe.”

Smartphone encryption will hamper many criminal investigations. E-mails, text messages, voice messages, photos and other data — all of which could lead to the perpetrator of a crime or finding an abducted victim — will now be fully encrypted simply so Apple and Google can increase their profits by advertising enticing claims of privacy.

And this is not just about domestic criminal investigations. What happens when the U.S. military captures or kills the next global terrorist, locates his phone and acquires … nothing.

This is not an issue of government overreaching into the private lives of citizens, as some make it out to be. No smartphone or other device can be accessed by law enforcement without a search warrant issued upon probable cause assessed by a neutral magistrate.

This isn’t about privacy, and it shouldn’t be about profits. It’s about the safety of American citizens and others around the world.

Congress can stop this serious public safety risk tomorrow by its inherent powers under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The time to act is now.

Encrypted messaging app Signal now available for desktops

The much-lauded encryption app Signal has launched a beta program for a desktop version of the app, which will run through Google’s Chrome browser.

Signal Desktop is Chrome app that will sync messages transmitted between it and an Android device, wrote Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptography expert who had helped develop Signal, in a blog post on Wednesday.

The app comes from Open Whisper Systems, which developed Signal’s predecessors, Redphone and TextSecure, which were two Android applications that encrypt calls and messages. Both have been consolidated into Signal.

Signal Desktop won’t be able to sync messages with iPhone just yet, although there are plans for iOS compatibility, Marlinspike wrote. It also won’t support voice initially.

Signal, which is free, has stood out in a crowded field of encrypted messaging applications, which are notoriously difficult to engineer, and has been endorsed by none other than former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The mobile version of Signal for the iPhone and Android uses end-to-end encryption for voice calls, messaging and sending photos.

Open Whisper Systems itself can’t see the plain text of messages or get access to phone calls since it doesn’t store the encryption keys.

Signal is open source, which allows developers to closely inspect its code. There has been growing concern that software vendors may have been pressured into adding capabilities in their products that would assist government surveillance programs. In theory, having open-source code means such tampering could be identified.

Why Government and Tech Can’t Agree about Encryption

Your g better and better at protecting your privacy. But Uncle Sam isn’t totally comfortable with that, because it’s also complicating the work of tracking criminals and potential national-security threats.
For decades, tech companies have steadily expanded the use of encryption — a data-scrambling technology that shields information from prying eyes, whether it’s sent over the Internet or stored on phones and computers. For almost as long, police and intelligence agencies have sought to poke holes in the security technology, which can thwart investigators even when they have a legal warrant for, say, possibly incriminating text messages stored on a phone.

The authorities haven’t fared well; strong encryption now keeps strangers out of everything from your iMessages to app data stored on the latest Android phones. But in the wake of the Paris attacks, U.S. officials are again pushing for limits on encryption, even though there’s still no evidence the extremists used it to safeguard their communications.

While various experts are exploring ways of resolving the impasse, none are making much headway. For now, the status quo favors civil libertarians and the tech industry, although that could change quickly — for instance, should another attack lead to mass U.S. casualties. Such a scenario could stampede Congress into passing hasty and potentially counterproductive restrictions on encryption.

“There are completely reasonable concerns on both sides,” said Yeshiva University law professor Deborah Pearlstein. The aftermath of an attack, however, “is the least practical time to have a rational discussion about these issues.”

Encryption plays a little heralded, yet crucial role in the modern economy and daily life. It protects everything from corporate secrets to the credit-card numbers of online shoppers to the communications of democracy advocates fighting totalitarian regimes.

At the same time, recent decisions by Apple and Google to encrypt smartphone data by default have rankled law enforcement officials, who complain of growing difficulty in getting access to the data they feel they need to build criminal cases and prevent attacks. For months, the Obama administration — which has steered away from legislative restrictions on encryption — has been in talks with technology companies to brainstorm ways of giving investigators legal access to encrypted information.

But technology experts and their allies say there’s no way to grant law enforcement such access without making everyone more vulnerable to cybercriminals and identity thieves. “It would put American bank accounts and their health records, and their phones, at a huge risk to hackers and foreign criminals and spies, while at the same time doing little or nothing to stop terrorists,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in an interview Monday.

Lawmakers on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence remain on what they call an “exploratory” search for options that might expand access for law enforcement, although they’re not necessarily looking at new legislation.

The FBI and police have other options even if they can’t read encrypted files and messages. So-called metadata — basically, a record of everyone an individual contacts via phone, email or text message — isn’t encrypted, and service providers will make it available when served with subpoenas. Data stored on remote computers in the cloud — for instance, on Apple’s iCloud service or Google’s Drive — is also often available to investigators with search warrants. (Apple and Google encrypt that data, but also hold the keys.)

Some security experts suggest that should be enough. Michael Moore, chief technology officer and co-founder of the Baltimore, Maryland-based data security firm Terbium Labs, noted that police have managed to take down online criminals even without shortcuts to encryption. He pointed to the 2013 take down of Silk Road, a massive online drug bazaar that operated on the “dark Web,” essentially the underworld of the Internet.

“The way they figured that out was through good old-fashioned police work, not by breaking cryptography,” Moore said. “I don’t think there’s a shortcut to good police work in that regard.”

Others argue that the very notion of “compromise” makes no sense where encryption is concerned. “Encryption fundamentally is about math,” said Mike McNerney, a fellow on the Truman National Security Project and a former cyber policy adviser to the Secretary of Defense. “How do you compromise on math?” He calls the idea of backdoors “silly.”

Some in law enforcement have compromise ideas of their own. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office, for instance, recently called for a federal law that would require smartphone companies to sell phones they could unlock for government searches — in essence, forcing them to hold the keys to user data.

In a report on the subject, the office called its suggestion a “limited proposal” that would only apply to data stored on smartphones and restrict searches to devices that authorities had already seized. Privacy advocates and tech companies aren’t sold, saying it would weaken security for phones that are already too vulnerable to attack.

Marcus Thomas, the chief technology officer at Subsentio and former assistant director of the FBI’s operational technology division, argued that it’s too late to turn back the clock on strong encryption, putting law enforcement in a “race against time” to obtain investigatory data whenever and wherever it can. But he urged security experts to find ways to help out investigators as they design next-generation encryption systems.

The idea of allowing law enforcement secure access to encrypted information doesn’t faze Nathan Cardozo, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, provided a warrant is involved. Unfortunately, he says, cryptographers agree that the prospect is a “pure fantasy.”