Encryption leaves authorities 'not in a good place': Former US intelligence chief

Clapper already lied to Congress about the extent of the NSA spying, which was finally revealed to the public by Snowden. If one of us had done that, we'd be in jail this minute.

If we had a device that could read everyone's thoughts, he'd be swearing that everyone must be forced to wear one and monitored at all times. For our own good, of course.

He thinks we can have both privacy and secret government snooping at the same time, and those two concepts are not compatible, and never will be.

He's not even the acting director anymore, and lied under oath, yet we are still supposed to value his opinions and thoughts about anything involving our rights vs. the goverment's???

There is no such thing as a "secure" system that is open to one government agency but closed to all other actors. To think otherwise is wishful thinking.

There are two things that are certain in this world:

1. All hard drives will eventually fail

2. All "secret backdoors" will eventually be discovered

>To think otherwise is wishful thinking.

I disagree.

There are definitely ways to solve the problem presented by law enforcement. One is the use of digital signatures on keys... just like cross-signed x509 CAs...

Law enforcement could be distributed a key which is signed as valid. All actions done with the signed key are logged. Once the law enforcement court order has been satisfied, the signature on the key is expired, and the key is then useless.

Such a process as described briefly above could be executed easily and represent zero compromise risk beyond the court ordered data retrieval.

> Once the law enforcement court order has been satisfied, the signature on the key is expired, and the key is then useless.

Their true desires can be determined by the fact they would consider such a solution inadequate. They don't want limited access obtained via a court order. They want unlimited access, all the time.

Besides, if I'm the one who encrypts the data using my own generated keys, there's no third party to provide the desired key. And I can't be required to do so, as that would violate my right not to incriminate myself.

@jdixon:

All true... but that's a far different argument than what is typically made by the 'tech giants'. My point is simply that there is no virtue in the argument that strong encryption precludes law enforcement inspection of plain text data. The strong encryption can be maintained while also allowing inspection.

Besides... the corporations have the keys. They sell your data... and you have no control over your data in the first place. So, the entire argument is simply handwaving.

As you point out... the only way to satisfy the "my data is in my control" parameter is to encrypt it yourself with your own keys... and then keep those keys away from any on-line storage system.