It’s sad that our politicians think that tech folks can wave a magic wand and somehow make it possible for the government to read everyones’ messages without that also being a way for the bad guys to get in.
While I can respect Hillary Clinton’s admission of not knowing enough about the technology, that admission just about says it all – elected officials in the U.S., from senators to presidential candidates, are constantly throwing their support behind ideas that simply don’t work. While it seems that they seek the exchange with the experts, nothing sticks. While Mrs. Clinton seems to understand that the encryption “back doors is the wrong door” – she still seems to hope there is another “door” only Government officials can walk through and all others are magically kept out.
Politicians might mean well in their search for a means of combating terrorism, but in reality all efforts like these do is weaken encryption for everyone, without any kind of known guarantee in successfully defusing terrorist plots. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal for a new “Manhattan Project” that somehow balances the privacy needs of the public with the intelligence needs of law enforcement is a nice idea for getting to have her cake and eat it too, but that’s all it is.
There is no practical, real-world solution in which governments and law enforcement agencies are given a magical key into an encrypted service that only works for them and keeps the rest of our information safe from hackers or data thieves. The fact of the matter is simple: when you allow any kind of key or back door into encryption, you open the door for potentially anyone to walk through. Any suggestion that there can be a compromise that allows government to do this without undermining how encryption safeguards our privacy is pure politicking.
There are still enough ways to target individuals. Intelligence Agencies should move away from wholesale mass surveillance that only increases the haystack that no needles are found in, and focus on real intelligent individual surveillance of the pundits they know. This would have avoided quite a few of the attacks as most of the terrorists were already known to the authorities.
