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katyshannon

Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman's iPhone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html

apple fights decryption order san bernardino iphone terrorism constitution privacy government politics history crisis policy obama new york times

shared by katyshannon on 18 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Last month, some of President Obama’s top intelligence advisers met in Silicon Valley with Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook, and other technology leaders in what seemed to be a public rapprochement in their long-running dispute over the encryption safeguards built into their devices.
  • But behind the scenes, relations were tense, as lawyers for the Obama administration and Apple held closely guarded discussions for over two months about one particularly urgent case: The F.B.I. wanted Apple to help “unlock” an iPhone used by one of the two attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, but Apple was resisting.
  • When the talks collapsed, a federal magistrate judge, at the Justice Department’s request, ordered Apple to bypass security functions on the phone.
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  • The order set off a furious public battle on Wednesday between the Obama administration and one of the world’s most valuable companies in a dispute with far-reaching legal implications.
  • This is not the first time a technology company has been ordered to effectively decrypt its own product. But industry experts say it is the most significant because of Apple’s global profile, the invasive steps it says are being demanded and the brutality of the San Bernardino attacks.
  • Law enforcement officials who support the F.B.I.’s position said that the impasse with Apple provided an ideal test case to move from an abstract debate over the balance between national security and privacy to a concrete one
  • The F.B.I. has been unable to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by the police along with his wife after they attacked Mr. Farook’s co-workers at a holiday gathering.
  • Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California issued her order Tuesday afternoon, after the F.B.I. said it had been unable to get access to the data on its own and needed Apple’s technical assistance.
  • Mr. Cook, the chief executive at Apple, responded Wednesday morning with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He maintained that the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week.
  • Apple argues that the software the F.B.I. wants it to create does not exist. But technologists say the company can do it.
  • pple executives had hoped to resolve the impasse without having to rewrite their own encryption software. They were frustrated that the Justice Department had aired its demand in public, according to an industry executive with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
  • The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have the White House’s “full support,” the spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday.
  • His vote of confidence was significant because James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has at times been at odds with the White House over his aggressive advocacy of tougher decryption requirements on technology companies. While Mr. Obama’s national security team was sympathetic to Mr. Comey’s position, others at the White House viewed legislation as potentially perilous. Late last year, Mr. Obama refused to back any legislation requiring decryption, leaving a court fight likely.
  • The dispute could initiate legislation in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike criticizing Apple’s stance on Wednesday and calling for tougher decryption requirements.
  • Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential contender, also attacked Apple on Fox News, asking, “Who do they think they are?”
  • But Apple had many defenders of its own among privacy and consumer advocates, who praised Mr. Cook for standing up to what they saw as government overreach.
  • Many of the company’s defenders argued that the types of government surveillance operations exposed in 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, have prompted technology companies to build tougher encryption safeguards in their products because of the privacy demands of their customers.
  • Privacy advocates and others said they worried that if the F.B.I. succeeded in getting access to the software overriding Apple’s encryption, it would create easy access for the government in many future investigations.
  • The Apple order is a flash point in a dispute that has been building for more than a decade. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The F.B.I. began sounding alarms years ago about technology that allowed people to exchange private messages protected by encryption so strong that government agents could not break it. In fall 2010, at the behest of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, the Obama administration began work on a law that required technology companies to provide unencrypted data to the government.
  • Lawyers at the F.B.I., Justice Department and Commerce Department drafted bills around the idea that technology companies in the Internet age should be bound by the same rules as phone companies, which were forced during the Clinton administration to build digital networks that government agents could tap.
  • The draft legislation would have covered app developers like WhatsApp and large companies like Google and Apple, according to current and former officials involved in the process.
  • There is no debate that, when armed with a court order, the government can get text messages and other data stored in plain text. Far less certain was whether the government could use a court order to force a company to write software or redesign its system to decode encrypted data. A federal law would make that authority clear, they said.
  • But the disclosures of government surveillance by Mr. Snowden changed the privacy debate, and the Obama administration decided not to move on the proposed legislation. It has not been revived.
  • The legal issues raised by the judge’s order are complicated. They involve statutory interpretation, rather than constitutional rights, and they could end up before the Supreme Court.
  • As Apple noted, the F.B.I., instead of asking Congress to pass legislation resolving the encryption fight, has proposed what appears to be a novel reading of the All Writs Act of 1789.
  • The law lets judges “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”
Alex Trudel

Europe Is Spying on You - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-on-you-mass-surveillance.html

europe spying politics history US culture crisis economic education

shared by Alex Trudel on 27 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • STRASBOURG, France — When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping.
  • France recently adopted a controversial law on surveillance that permits major intrusions, without prior judicial authorization, into the private lives of suspects and those who communicate with them, live or work in the same place or even just happen to be near them.
  • Meanwhile, Austria is set to discuss a draft law that would allow a new security agency to operate with reduced external control and to collect and store communication data for up to six years. The Netherlands is considering legislation allowing dragnet surveillance of all telecommunications, indiscriminate gathering of metadata, decryption and intrusion into the computers of non-suspects. And in Finland, the government is even considering changing the Constitution to weaken privacy protections in order to ease the adoption of a bill granting the military and intelligence services the power to conduct electronic mass surveillance with little oversight.
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  • More recently, as new technologies have offered more avenues to increase surveillance and data collection, the court has reiterated its position in a number of leading cases against several countries, including France, Romania, Russia and Britain, condemned for having infringed the right to private and family life that in the interpretation of the cour
  • unnecessary “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental right to respect for private life” and personal data, this court reaffirmed the outstanding place privacy holds in Europe
  • If European governments and parliaments do not respect fundamental principles and judicial obligations, our lives will become much less private. Our ability to participate effectively in public life is threatened, too, because these measures curtail our freedom of speech and our right to receive information — including that of public interest. Not all whistleblowers have the technical knowledge Mr. Snowden possessed. Many would fear discovery if they communicated with journalists, who in turn would lose valuable sources, jeopardizing their ability to reveal unlawful conduct in both the public and private spheres. Watergates can only happen when whistleblowers feel protected.
  • First, legislation should limit surveillance and the use of data in a way that strictly respects the right to privacy as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, European data protection standards, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and that of the European Court of Justice. These norms oblige states to respect human rights when they gather and store information relating to our private lives and to protect individuals from unlawful surveillance, including when carried out by foreign agencies.
  • Third, security agencies must operate under independent scrutiny and judicial review. This will require intrusive oversight powers for parliaments and a judiciary that is involved in the decision-making process to ensure accountability. Countries that have adopted controversial surveillance laws should reconsider or amend them. And those considering new surveillance legislation should do so with great caution.
fischerry

Milestones: 1914-1920 - Office of the Historian - 0 views

history.state.gov/...wwi

us entry into wwi

shared by fischerry on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.
  • Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as well as its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war.
  • While Wilson weighed his options regarding the submarine issue, he also had to address the question of Germany’s attempts to cement a secret alliance with Mexico. On January 19, 1917, British naval intelligence intercepted and decrypted a telegram sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Ambassador in Mexico City. The “Zimmermann Telegram” promised the Mexican Government that Germany would help Mexico recover the territory it had ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War. In return for this assistance, Germany asked for Mexican support in the war.
magnanma

BBC - History - World Wars: Breaking Germany's Enigma Code - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...enigma_01.shtml

shared by magnanma on 26 Oct 19 - Cached
  • Fewer people still knew that this piece of spook hardware was invented by a German (based on an idea by a Dutchman), that information about it was leaked to the French, and that it was first reconstructed by a Pole, before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two
  • the Zimmermann telegram - a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico City informing him of plans to invade the United States. On being notified of these plans, officials in Washington were understandably perturbed, and hastened to effect the entry of the US into the war.
  • Dr Arthur Scherbius had developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture this product, and within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed in 1928 by the army and in 1933 by the air force.
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  • Despite providing some otherwise inaccessible information, it was some time before Ultra made any significant contribution to the war effort. Although, thanks to the information from the Poles, the British had learned to read parts of the Wehrmacht's signals traffic, regular decrypts only became possible in the Norwegian campaign
  • The Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications - on the battlefield, at sea, in the sky and, significantly, within its secret services. The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as 'Ultra', and considered it top secret. Only a select few commanders were made aware of the full significance of Ultra, and it was mostly used only sparingly, to prevent the Germans thinking their ciphers had been broken.
  • Enigma allowed an operator to type in a message, then scramble it by means of three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text.
  • A break-through came in March 1941, however, when the German trawler Krebs was captured off Norway, complete with two Enigma machines and the Naval Enigma settings list for the previous month. This allowed German Naval Enigma to be read, albeit with some delay, in April, by codebreakers at Bletchley.
  • Although he was dissuaded by his experts, the Germans redoubled their efforts to tighten Enigma's security, and the Bletchley Park codebreakers, realising what they were up against, wrote to British Prime Minster Winston Churchill complaining that they were not being given enough resources. Churchill replied with a famous 'Action This Day' memorandum: 'Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done'.
  • In February 1942 the Germans hit back by introducing a new fourth wheel (multiplying the number of settings another 26 times) into their Naval Enigma machines. The resulting 'net' was known to the Germans as 'Triton' and to the British as 'Shark'. For almost a year Bletchley could make no inroads into Shark, and Allied losses in the Atlantic again increased alarmingly.
  • By D-Day in June 1944 Ultra was no longer so important. But still no one wanted the Germans to sense that Enigma was being read. When, a few days before the Normandy landings, an American task force captured a German U-boat with its Enigma keys
  • By how much did Ultra intelligence, gained from reading Enigma ciphers, shorten the war? Harry Hinsley, based at Bletchley during the war, suggests it was a significant asset.
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