Topic: Encryption
Chinese Censors Now Block Images in Unencrypted Messaging Apps in Flight (Jul 18, 2017)
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After the London terror attack, a top U.K. official says Facebook needs to open up WhatsApp – Recode (Mar 27, 2017)
This is a worrying (though not altogether unexpected) resurfacing of the arguments from early 2016, when the FBI was trying to get into an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters. In this case, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd (whose role has no direct counterpart in the US, but is responsible for domestic law enforcement and counter-terrorism among many other things) has made calls for WhatsApp to “open up” and specifically referred to encryption. That’s because WhatsApp was allegedly one of the apps used by the terrorist behind last week’s attack in London, though there’s no evidence yet that he used it to plan the attack or coordinate with others. The bigger issue, as with last year’s Apple-FBI fight, is of course that once the government can get in, there’s no guarantee others won’t use the same methods, whether that’s because of hacks like the one that hit Cellebrite a few weeks ago, or exposures of government tools like the Wikileaks CIA hack. Encryption is a fact of life at this point, and essential for secure communication and protection of privacy for millions of law-abiding users, and no government back door can solve the law enforcement problem without also compromising that essential function. And the Rudd quote in the closing paragraph of this story suggests she doesn’t actually understand the FBI-Apple situation at all, which is not surprising from a government official but worrisome nonetheless.
via Recode
Hacker Steals 900 GB of Cellebrite Data – Motherboard (Jan 12, 2017)
Cellebrite was in the news about nine months ago because Bloomberg reported it was the security firm the FBI used to hack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone after Apple refused to help, though the Washington Post contradicted those reports. Whether or not its technology was used in that particular case, that’s exactly the sort of work Cellebrite regularly does for US and other government agencies, and it appears that it has itself now been hacked. It’s not clear that the hack goes beyond some user data, though there’s a vague reference to technical data in the article, but this sort of thing reinforces the sense that no hacks of encryption or other security technologies, even for apparently noble reasons, can ever be deemed 100% safe from being hacked themselves. That, of course, was one of several arguments Apple made in the FBI case.
via Hacker Steals 900 GB of Cellebrite Data | Motherboard