Written by Ann Brown

Jan 15, 2020

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor turned whistleblower, recently declared: The most powerful institutions in society have become the least accountable to society.

In 2013, Snowden copied and leaked highly classified information from the NSA when he was a CIA employee and subcontractor. He handed over documents to journalists that detailed surveillance programs run by the NSA. The documents revealed that the NSA has tapped cell phone and Internet communications of people in the general public.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 68: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin talks about the recent backlash against Lebron James for not speaking up for Joshua Wong and the violent Hong Kong protestors.

At a recent Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Snodwn asked the audience via video link: What do you do when the most powerful institutions in society have become the least accountable to society?

He added: Thats the question our generation exists to answer.

Snowden, who was charged with espionage and theft of government property and had his passport revoked, is living in asylum in Russia. He recently released a memoir, Permanent Record, for which the U.S sued him, alleging he violated non-disclosure agreements he signed when he worked with the NSA and CIA.

They dont like books like this being written, Snowden said. We have legalized the abuse of the person through the personal, he said, adding that the widespread collection of data by governments and corporations entrenches a system that makes the population vulnerable for the benefit of the privileged.

According to Snowden, there is too much attention being placed on data protection when it should be focused on data collection, which he says is the true problem. The problem isnt data protection, the problem is data collection, he noted. Regulation and protection of data presumes that the collection of data in the first place was proper, that it is appropriate, that it doesnt represent a threat or a danger.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. Introduced last year, GDPR threatens to impose fines of up to 4 percent of a companys global annual revenues or 20 million euros ($22.3 million) whichever is the higher amount, CNBC reported.

Today those fines dont exist, Snowden argued, and until we see those fines every single year to the Internet giants until they reform their behavior and begin complying not just with the letter but the spirit of the law, it is a paper tiger.

See the original post:
Edward Snowden Says The Most Powerful Institutions In Society Have Become The Least Accountable - Moguldom

WASHINGTON The deadly shooting of three U.S. sailors at a Navy installation in December could reignite a long-simmering fight between the federal government and tech companies over data privacy and encryption.

As part of its probe into the violent incident, deemed a terrorist act by the government, the Justice Department insists that investigators need access to data from two locked and encrypted iPhones that belonged to the alleged gunman, a Saudi aviation student. The problem: Apple designed those iPhones with encryption technology so secure that the company itself can't read private messages.

The squabble raises two big questions. First, is Apple required to help the government hack its own security technology when requested? Second, is government pressure on this issue the prelude for a broader effort to outlaw encryption technology the feds can't break?

THE QUARREL SO FAR

The Justice Department and Apple have been in talks recently over the Saudi students iPhone. Justice officials contend that they still havent received an answer about whether Apple has the capability to unlock the devices.

During a news conference Monday announcing the findings of the Pensacola station investigation, U.S. Attorney William Barr said its critical for law enforcement to know with whom the shooter communicated and about what, before he died.

So far, Apple has not given any substantive assistance, Barr said. We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of the American people and prevent future attacks.

Apple rejected that characterization. "Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing, the company said.

TRYING THE BACKDOOR

Our phones hold countless messages, files and photos tracings of our everyday life and work. But in 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the government was spying on U.S. citizens. Tech companies like Apple and Google began taking steps to shield those digital tracings from prying eyes though often not their own by mathematically scrambling them with encryption.

Apple was one of the first major companies to embrace stronger end-to-end encryption, in which messages are scrambled so that only their senders and recipients can read them. Law enforcement, however, wants access to that information in order to investigate crimes such as terrorism or child sexual exploitation.

Barr and other top cops call the problem going dark, as data they used to be able to scoop up with wiretaps has become harder and harder to read.

Although most law enforcement officials are vague about how to solve the problem, security experts say the authorities are basically asking for an engineered backdoor a secret key that would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.

But the same experts warn that such backdoors into encryption systems make them inherently insecure. Just knowing that a backdoor exists is enough to focus the world's spies and criminals on discovering the mathematical keys that could unlock it. And when they do, everyone's information is essentially vulnerable to anyone with the secret key.

WHAT LAW ENFORCEMENT CAN DO

Forcing tech companies to engineer backdoors into their security systems would almost certainly require an act of Congress. Legislators, however, have never come close to agreeing on what such a law should look like.

But there are alternatives. Four years ago, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of asking a federal judge to force Apple to break its own encryption system. The legal move involved an iPhone used by the perpetrator of a December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Apple acknowledged that it could create the software the feds wanted, but warned that it would be a bad idea. The software could be stolen by hackers and used against other iPhones, the company warned, and might also lead to similar demands from repressive governments around the world.

The FBI ultimately dropped the case shortly before it was to go to trial, saying a third party had found another way of getting into the phone. It never disclosed who that party was; there is an entire industry of shadowy companies such as the Israeli firm Cellebrite that discover or pay for information on flaws in encryption systems. These firms then develop tools to essentially create their own backdoors.

Such companies do significant business with governments and law enforcement. Companies like Apple, meanwhile, do their best to close such loopholes as soon as they learn about them.

WHERE THINGS STAND NOW

Apple is reportedly bracing for another possible legal fight over encryption with the Justice Department. So far, though, there's no clear sign that the government is headed that way .

Theyre just public shaming and asking nicely, said Bruce Schneier, an encryption expert at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Hurting everybodys security for some forensic evidence is a dumb tradeoff.

Barr said the growth of consumer apps with end-to-end encryption, from Apple's iMessage to Facebook's WhatsApp and Signal, have aided terrorist organizations, drug cartels, child molesting rings and kiddie porn-type rings. But the government's legal options could be limited.

For one thing, DOJ's own inspector general slammed the department in the aftermath of the San Bernardino case, noting that it had made few attempts to break into the iPhone itself before filing suit. The FBI unit tasked with cracking phones had only sought outside help the day before the department asked a judge to compel Apple's assistance, the inspector general's report found.

The same report found that an FBI section chief knew an outside vendor had almost 90% completed a technique that would have allowed it to break into the phone, even as the Justice Department insisted that forcing Apples help was the only option.

Civil liberties advocates have also protested. The American Civil Liberties Union called Barrs demands dangerous and unconstitutional.

Here we are again, Schneier said. It's stupid every time.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

See more here:
AP Explains: The Justice Department's New Quarrel With Apple - The New York Times

For all the public sparring between the two inflated egos known as Donald Trump and James Comey, the president and the former FBI director have some important commonalities. For starters, they both hate it when the common people keep secrets from the ruling class of which they represent competing factions.

The point of agreement between the two political antagonists became clear on January 14, when President Trump complained that Apple executives "refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements." Some of us poked at our ears, wondering if we were hearing echoes. After all, not so long ago, as head of the FBI, Comey tried to force Apple to unlock encrypted cell phones and raged that Apple, Google, and other companies "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

Trump agreed with Comey back then, too, by the way; in 2016, he called for a boycott of Apple until such time as the company helped the FBI break iPhone security.

Apparently, not as much divides these two men as they like to let on.

In public, Trump calls Comey a "disgrace" and Comey fires back at a man he calls a "strange and slightly sad old guy." Butaside from the fact that they're both correct about each other's flawsthat's intramural combat between power addicts over who should wield the power. That the public should be poked, prodded, and intruded upon is a given for Comey and Trump. And it's a sentiment that binds so many of our would-be lords and masters in public office.

The shared nature of official nosiness becomes clear when you remember last November's bipartisan vote to extend the Patriot Act, a measure that the Electronic Frontier Foundation says "broadly expands law enforcement's surveillance and investigative powers and represents one of the most significant threats to civil liberties, privacy, and democratic traditions in US history." Even as Democrats debated impeaching Donald Trumpa move they later approvedthey overwhelmingly joined with the Trump administration to support the surveillance bill's extension.

Trans-partisan hand-holding on surveillance state measures is certainly nothing new among the political class. The Patriot Act originally passed during the presidency of Republican President George W. Bush, but with plenty of cross-aisle support.

"I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," senator and current leading Democratic presidential wannabe Joe Biden boasted to The New Republic after the Patriot Act's passage. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill."

Biden's anti-privacy efforts extend back so far that he inspired Phil Zimmermann to complete the development of PGP encryption software.

Later, as vice president, Biden threatened countries that considered offering asylum to surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, frets that the data encrypted communications will "allow companies to hide from 'government spying'such as text messages and chatroom transcriptshave proven to be 'key evidence' in previous regulatory and compliance cases."

It seems Trump and Comey are in good company on the issue. Well, good-ishfor a certain D.C.-centric value of the word.

"Lawmakers are giving big tech firms an ultimatum: Give police access to encrypted communications or we'll force you," The Washington Post reported last month.

"It ain't complicated for me," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told representatives from Facebook and Apple at a Capitol Hill hearing in December. "You're going to find a way to do this or we're going to do it for you."

"You all have got to get your act together or we will gladly get your act together for you," said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who also sits on the judiciary committee.

Ranking Democratic member Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), meanwhile, said she is "determined to see that there is a way that phones can be unlocked when major crimes are committed," whether tech companies like it or not.

And so on. Trump and Comey's frenemy act opposing communications privacy for people who don't draw government paychecks is the rule, not the exception.

Sure, there are some surveillance skeptics and privacy advocates among the political class. But they're rare, and except for a very few civil liberties-oriented and government-skeptic types who are usually on the outs with the real powerbrokers, they're awfully unreliable on the issue.

The problem is that the Trumps, Comeys, Grahams, Bidens, Feinsteins, Blackburns, and Warrens of the world largely agree that the government that defines their lives and gives them importance should be vastly powerful. The rationales they come up with depend on the specific priorities of the politician in question, the cultural moment, and the audience, but they're forever arguing in favor of an intrusive state from which we can keep no secrets.

"It had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority," whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote of his growing awareness of what lay behind the surveillance state in Permanent Record, his 2019 memoir.

Substitute "violent criminal elements" or "criminal action by Wall Street" or "child abusers" or any other justification politicians might come up with if you wish, but it all leads in the same direction. Ultimately, the members of the political class may fight tooth and nail, but it's not over whether Leviathan should paw through our communications. They just disagree over who should be in charge of the pawing.

Read more:
Trump and Comey Are United Against Encrypted Communications - Reason