Wired: The Senate’s Draft Encryption Bill Is Ludicrous, Dangerous And Technically Illiterate.
As Apple battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency’s demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement hoped that Congress would weigh in with some sort of compromise solution. Now Congress has spoken on crypto, and privacy advocates say its “solution” is the most extreme stance on encryption yet.
On Thursday evening, the draft text of a bill called the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr, was published online by the Hill.1 It’s a nine-page piece of legislation that would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” In other words, the bill would make illegal the sort of user-controlled encryption that’s in every modern iPhone, in all billion devices that run Whatsapp’s messaging service, and in dozens of other tech products. “This basically outlaws end-to-end encryption,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.”
I just have a few comments. First of all, it should be telling to you that a republican U.S. senator, Richard Burr, is aligned with a totalitarian like Feinstein. That’s how desperate he is for a signature piece of legislation to go with his name. He would sooner pick an awful piece of shit like this than simply turn government control on its head and give control back to the people in every way, something that would win him immediate loyalty by the voters. Instead, he listens to his colleagues, that collection of gargoyles, demons, pit vipers and carnival barkers in Washington.
Second, remember what I said about the government’s desire for all of your information?
Soccer moms will do anything, give over any amount of privacy, give up virtually anything, in order to maintain a level of safety and security. ISIS and nuclear power plants is the latest incarnation of the whole ISIS thing generically. The government gets a chance to say, “Hey, listen to us, we’ll protect you if you’ll only give us access to your iPhone, all of your records, bank accounts, medical data, tell us whether you have any guns in the home, let us listen to and record your phone calls and all of your text messages, and in short be your protector. We’ll take care of you, we promise! We won’t let the mean bad men make the big bad thingy go BOOM and hurt your precious little babies! Let me have the keys to your life, sweetie!”
Burr is taking advantage of ignorant soccer moms who believe that American national security will be better off if they give over their lives to the federal government and give up their constitutionally protected right to privacy. Because Burr is just that kind of man. Remember that he is the worm who said he would vote for Bernie Sanders before he would vote for Ted Cruz. He is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad U.S. senator.
