Feds pull 180 on Encryption Policy

They just remembered China exists

10 years ago a disillusioned NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, leaked details of the agency’s scandalous PRISM program. Feds were in an uproar and edgy teenage me thought of Snowden as an American hero. Today my views have evolved to be more nuanced, but nobody cares so I won’t linger on them.

20 years ago, before my time, the Feds bore down on a man named Phil Zimmerman with the full force of the State Department. It was all because he was the creator of some “Pretty Good Privacy” software in the form of an encryption algorithm of the same name. Today you’re likely familiar with its shorthand, “PGP Encryption.”

From e-mail providers to banks you can’t throw a rock in silicon valley without hitting somebody that uses a derivative of PGP. At the time, however, the State Department classified it as a munition and went for the jugular with Zimmerman. They didn’t like somebody exporting a capability that foreign governments and criminal groups could use to evade US surveillance. In a way it was the best endorsement the technology could have asked for and it was rapidly adopted.

Only sustained advocacy by civil rights organizations and overwhelming public outcry saved Zimmerman and allowed his encryption technology to proliferate throughout the civilian security environment.

The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires telecommunications carriers to build backdoors into their systems to enable wiretaps for law enforcement purposes. Infrastructure created through CALEA is also commonly used by US Intelligence Agencies to hoover up communications from pretty much everyone.

Fedgov has considered encryption technology a threat to National Security since its very beginning. The capability to hide any communication from them is seen as the greatest possible affront to the Intelligence Community. “To Hell with the fourth amendment!” might as well be the NSA’s official motto, and how is that going for them?

Well…

Having just experienced the blowback from the greatest security breach in American history it seems Federal agencies are changing their tune.

After Chinese hackers allegedly took advantage of these built in backdoors during the notorious Salt Typhoon attack, something they’ve been warned about and dismissed for decades now, they’ve suddenly woken up to the obvious danger these systems present.

So are they planning to get rid of them? Well, no, but they’ve decided to stop attacking encryption technology and start pushing it. This is not because they believe people should have an inalienable right to privacy but because encrypted communications require more resources and time for an attacker to access. Mass encryption would not be a foolproof solution but would make it prohibitively costly to achieve the kind of intelligence coup the Chinese just did.

China may be able to penetrate a highly centralized surveillance apparatus but do they have the computational resources to decrypt those trillions of messages? Certainly not right now. It would force them into a “harvest now, decrypt later” approach, giving US forces and citizens a critical time horizon where they can rely on their communications remaining secret even if the network is compromised.

European Security agencies do not seem to have gotten the message yet.

Private conversation with European security officers has led me to believe that they remain self assured and arrogant about this whole affair. After all, it wasn’t their surveillance networks that got infiltrated. This whole thing, as far as they’re concerned, is just another example of silly incompetence from us backwards Americans.

Right …

I’m not sure what it’s going to take to make the Europeans realize that China is not some mythical imaginary threat- a boogie monster with no real world capability to strike at them. Probably they’ll have to experience their own Salt Typhoon, and then the whole “silly Americans” attitude is going to age like milk in an Arizona summer.

The European Union has shown no sign of relenting in their ruthless campaign to suppress encryption technology. Companies like Telegram and Signal who offer rigorous encryption are treated like terrorist organizations. Europe is constantly demanding backdoors be built into not just the communication systems, but into the encryption itself.

A majority of Members of European Parliament have actually in complete seriousness proposed a “master key” that could be used to unlock any encrypted message. Don’t worry though, only they would be able to use it. You can’t see it right now but one of my eyebrows is raised so high it’s about to put a hole in the roof.

European spies take heed: Now is your chance to get this right and avert catastrophe. Our failure here today is like that first radar warning at Pearl Harbor. Now’s the time to, god forbid, follow America’s lead and reverse course on encryption.

The Chinese are not fools and they’re not some podunk terrorist group. They’ve repeatedly demonstrated the ability to break top level Corporate and Government encryption. Now the vulnerability created by built in backdoors is no longer theoretical but has resulted in one of the greatest gifts to foreign Intelligence in world history. This is like when the German enigma codes got broken except if all of German society was using the Enigma machines to order lunch, argue about debts, and flirt with their mistresses.

With Congressional data being hoovered up like so much cat fur during spring cleaning, Beijing now knows more about their personal pressure points than we the American people do.

Uncle Xi knows who has a gambling problem, who’s cheating on their wife, and where they’re taking their highly poisonable bodies to eat dinner. This is, to put it mildly, a bad thing. We will be reckoning with the consequences for at least a decade and probably longer given how much time the average politician stays in power.

The moral of the story is this: That crazy guy living in the woods screaming about aliens and taping over his webcam because of Government surveillance might have a point. Well, about the surveillance at least. The jury’s still out on aliens.

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