When it was first released back in April, a “discussion draft” of the Compliance With Court Orders Act sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) met with near universal derision from privacy advocates and security experts.  (Your humble author was among the critics.) In the wake of that chilly reception, press reports were declaring the bill effectively dead just weeks later, even as law enforcement and intelligence officials insisted they would continue pressing for a solution to the putative “going dark” problem that encryption creates for government eavesdroppers. …   continue »

The US war on encryption has quieted down recently. The San Bernardino and Brooklyn court cases concerning encrypted iPhones both ended this spring not with a bang, but with a whimper. The disastrous Burr-Feinstein anti-crypto bill has gone dormant — for now.…   continue »

Last week, I criticized the confused rhetorical framework that the Feinstein-Burr encryption backdoor proposal tries to impose on the ongoing Crypto Wars 2.0 debate. In this post, I want to try to explain why technical experts have so overwhelmingly and vehemently condemned the substance of the proposal.…   continue »

This week, we learned the United States will send 250 special operations troops to the war in Syria, bringing the publicly known total number of American troops operating in the country to 300. This news came little more than a week after the Pentagon announced it was sending 200 more troops and Apache attack helicopters to Iraq, pushing the official US troop numbers there to 4,087 (this number doesn’t include units temporarily deployed into Iraq).…   continue »

There’s a lot to say about the substance of the misguided anti-encryption legislation sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr, which was recently released as a “discussion draft” after a nearly-identical version leaked earlier this month. I hope to do just that in subsequent posts.…   continue »

The latest Crypto War is being fought on multiple fronts: behind closed doors, in the courts, and now in Congress. On April 13, Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officially released a discussion draft of the anti-encryption bill they had been promising since last December.…   continue »

Update: The FBI is now explicitly denying that the method described in this post is the one they’re planning to employ — so apparently my suspicion was mistaken and they may well be employing a truly novel technique. The more general point, I think, is still valid: The relative speed with which an outside firm was able to demo a solution once the case hit the headlines should raise legitimate questions about how serious an independent effort FBI made before claiming “necessity” and turning to compulsion to access the phone.…   continue »

That the American public is divided on the current showdown between Silicon Valley and the national security state is to be expected. What is more striking, at least at first blush, is that the government — and in particular, the executive branch — is itself of multiple minds.…   continue »

I wrote about the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to write an iPhone hacking tool for the bureau over at Time last week — and go read that if you’re getting caught up on the case — but we’ve had some added developments over the weekend worth noting. …   continue »

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced a program to better secure the “Internet of Things” and also highlighted the opportunities networked devices provide for the US intelligence community. The juxtaposition of these announcements casts the Internet of Things (IoT) as the latest iteration of a recurring tension about the role of the federal government: On the one hand, the government seeks to secure US persons against technological vulnerabilities, but on the other hand, the government seeks to exploit those same vulnerabilities for intelligence and/or law enforcement purposes.…   continue »