https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/attorney-general-william-barr-encrypted-data-backdoor/ Attorney general says the government should have access to your encrypted data U.S. Attorney General William Barr said on Tuesday that Americans should be okay with the government having backdoor access to your encrypted data. In a keynote speech at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University in New York on Tuesday, Barr said that in order for law enforcement to have access to encrypted communications, Americans need to accept the risks associated with backdoors. A backdoor essentially allows the government to bypass your security or encryption and gain easy access to your devices or data. In his speech, Barr called for tech companies to assist federal authorities in gaining access to people’s devices when necessary. “The rest of the world has woken up to this threat,” Barr said, according to Bloomberg. “It is time for the United States to stop debating whether to address it and start talking about how to address it.” The U.S. government and big tech companies have long been engaged in a standoff over encryption Proponents of encryption argue that’s it’s the only way to keep private data safe from prying eyes and that giving the government backdoor access is a dangerous threat to users. But Barr and other argue that it’s necessary for national security and federal investigations. Barr said Tuesday that tech companies should create backdoors voluntarily, but that time was running out on a “cooperative approach.” Tech companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and WhatsApp condemned the United Kingdom’s recent proposal, called the “ghost protocol” that suggests encrypted messages should be copied and sent to law enforcement agencies who would act as unseen “ghost users.” Apple CEO, Tim Cook, took a stand against the issue in 2016, saying that encryption and privacy on the internet is a fundamental right. Even Facebook, which has many issues with users’ privacy, said in March that they now want to focus on private interactions and encryption to focus on better security for its users. Still, Barr said a cooperative approach between tech companies and the government is needed. “Whether we end up with legislation or not, the best course for everyone involved is to work soberly and in good faith together to craft appropriate solutions, rather than have outcomes dictated during a crisis,” he said at the conference, which was hosted by the FBI and Fordham University in New York. Digital Trends reached out to the Department of Justice to see if they have made any progress in working with big tech companies to develop backdoors into people’s devices, but have yet to receive a response.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp-facebook-encryption.html Barr Pushes Facebook for Access to WhatsApp Messages The Justice Department has long sought access to encrypted messages, alarming privacy experts. WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has renewed its fight for access to encrypted communications, arguing that it is a vital crime-fighting tool even as technology companies and advocates have countered that it will threaten individual privacy. Attorney General William P. Barr took aim at Facebook’s plan to make WhatsApp and its other messaging services more secure, pressing its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to create a loophole to that goal of full encryption. The Justice Department said that investigators needed lawful access to encrypted communications to fight terrorism, organized crime and child pornography. “Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,” Mr. Barr, joined by his British and Australian counterparts, wrote in a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg that was reviewed by The New York Times and dated Friday. BuzzFeed News first reported on the letter. Mr. Barr’s request was the latest salvo in a yearslong fight by law enforcement officials for access to popular communications platforms that have become increasingly secure. The conflict last came to a head in 2016, when a federal judge ordered Apple to help the F.B.I. unlock an iPhone recovered after the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. The F.B.I. ultimately cracked it without Apple’s help, easing tensions for a time with the tech companies. The letter also showed that the Justice Department was trying a coordinated approach with close allies to prod technology companies to change their position. At issue are end-to-end encryption, which would ensure that only the sender and recipient can read messages sent using a particular messaging service, and so-called back doors, which would give the authorities access to such data. Tech company officials have said that strong encryption is necessary to protect legitimate users of their platforms all over the world, including journalists and government critics. Facebook respects the role of law enforcement but believes people have a right to communicate privately online, said Andy Stone, a company spokesman. “End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,” Mr. Stone said. “We strongly oppose government attempts to build back doors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.” With 1.5 billion users, Facebook’s WhatsApp is perhaps the world’s most commonly used encrypted communications platform. Privacy experts and tech company officials said that creating a back door would effectively destroy the secrecy of such platforms. “We are being spied upon by everybody and everywhere,” said Susan Landau, a Tufts University computer security professor. “It is very easy to listen in on communications. Securing data is a clear national security interest.” The Justice Department and its counterparts in Australia and Britain have long pushed for back doors to other tech platforms but are focusing on Facebook because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan to add end-to-end encryption to all of the company’s platforms, a government official said in a background briefing for reporters on Thursday. Mr. Barr and Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, signed a pact late Thursday that eases the legal barriers for American and British law enforcement agencies to request electronic data from tech companies in both countries for investigations into terrorism, child sexual abuse and other crimes. Under the current system, such requests can take up to two years to process. Facebook has also become a focus of law enforcement’s push against encryption because of the role it could play in the spread of online child sexual abuse images if it were extended to its Messenger platform, The Times reported on Wednesday. Facebook’s dominant position and huge user base across its platforms make it a tempting target for the Trump administration as it begins a renewed push against end-to-end encryption. In Washington and around the world, there has been an aggressive antitrust push against the big tech companies. President Trump has repeatedly railed against Facebook, Twitter and other companies, claiming that they have inhibited conservatives’ speech. In recent weeks, Facebook has taken steps to mend fences in Washington. Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, have made trips to Capitol Hill, and Mr. Zuckerberg met Mr. Trump for the first time last month, even pausing for a photograph in the Oval Office. Other tech executives, like Tim Cook of Apple, enjoy a more cordial relationship with Mr. Trump. The two meet regularly. Still, Trump administration officials have weighed whether to seek legislation that would effectively ban end-to-end and other forms of encryption. Mr. Barr, who took office in February, has embraced the push. In a speech in July, he called on tech companies to stop using advanced encryption that keeps out law enforcement officials. He was to deliver remarks on Friday at a Justice Department summit on how encryption has stymied the government’s ability to gain access to information, a problem that local and federal law enforcement agencies have coined “going dark.” The summit, which Facebook representatives will also attend, will focus on the effect of encryption on child exploitation cases. An explosion in reports of online photos and videos of children being sexually abused — a record 45 million were reported last year — can be traced to failings by technology companies, the Justice Department, Congress and others to give law enforcement agencies the tools and resources they need, The Times reported on Saturday. Mr. Barr’s letter highlighted an instance when a man was imprisoned on a conviction of sexually abusing a child starting at age 11 because prosecutors presented as evidence message logs between the man and the child that Facebook had provided. Facebook and others have devised methods to detect and remove child exploitative imagery, including one that relies on photo-matching technology. Facebook and WhatsApp are working with other major tech companies to share both information and photo-matching technology, relying on machine learning to ban groups suspected of trafficking in child pornography WhatsApp also regularly submits information to law enforcement officials when necessary and bans accounts suspected of or associated with illicit material. But even with such measures, Facebook can hardly monitor the billions of pieces of content flowing through its encrypted systems every day, which is by design. Mr. Zuckerberg has predicted that such systems will grow increasingly popular as the internet evolves. “The future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement this year announcing the changes. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.” Still, at a town hall-style meeting on Thursday with employees at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged some of the trade-offs the company must deal with regarding encryption. “These are some of the hardest decisions we have to make,” he said. In their letter, Mr. Barr and the British and Australian officials said law enforcement must be able to unlock encryption systems to retrieve information to “safeguard the public, investigate crimes and prevent future criminal activity.” The officials acknowledged that “law-abiding citizens have a legitimate expectation that their privacy will be protected.” But they argued that privacy needs to be balanced with law enforcement agencies’ “ability to stop criminals and abusers in their tracks” that Facebook should be able to provide access if a judge has issued a warrant. Facebook’s current encryption system, and its plans to expand those protections, impedes law enforcement’s ability to investigate, they wrote. The encryption on WhatsApp blocks Facebook from gaining access to the information its users send on the platform, similar to the system used by the Signal messaging service, considered to be one of the most thorough at protecting users’ privacy. “This puts our citizens and societies at risk by severely eroding a company’s ability to detect and respond to illegal content and activity, such as child sexual exploitation and abuse, terrorism, and foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine democratic values and institutions, preventing the prosecution of offenders and safeguarding of victims,” Mr. Barr and the other officials wrote. They pledged to seek access to Facebook and WhatsApp content only when public safety was at risk. The government official who briefed reporters also challenged the description of the Justice Department’s effort as a push for a “back door.” The term is inaccurate, the official said, because it implies a weakness in the encryption technology that hackers and others could also exploit. But only platforms that use an encryption system that the company itself cannot break can be protected from hackers. Facebook cannot comply with the government’s new demand without undermining the protections they are trying to provide their users, experts said. “There is simply no way today to create an encryption back door that doesn’t undermine encryption broadly,” said Jules Polonetsky, the chief executive of the Future of Privacy Forum. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that technology companies and the government should focus not on altering end-to-end encryption systems, but on finding ways for law enforcement to gain access to devices they have lawfully obtained. The joint letter comes at a somewhat awkward moment for Mr. Barr. His work with Australia and Britain has separately come under scrutiny as he has pressed for both countries’ cooperation with the Justice Department’s review of the origins of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
h4m, good call, h4m aint nobody got time for that! not a thing can be done about it at this juncture, imho. it is a feat accomplished, the whole camel is in the tent nose and all. unintended consequences could allow citizens to become aware of the types of communications that are generated and flow through the government bureaucracy and political spheres, the citizens could be covered under the same health care system enjoyed by congress and senate, and puppies may all get free ponys. stay tuned. cheers William Barr William Barr didn’t back Trump in 2016 but did endorse his view that the Justice Department should have investigated Hillary Clinton more. Trump Attorney General Nominee William Barr Thought Clinton ‘Should Be Investigated’ https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-attorney-general-favorite-william-barr-thought-clinton- should-be-investigated William Barr has been attorney general once before, under President George H.W. Bush. --- Whitewater Time Line - Washingtonpost.com 1978 Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton join with James B. and Susan McDougal to borrow $203,000 to buy 220 acres of land in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains. They soon form the Whitewater Development Corp., intending to build vacation homes. Clinton is elected governor. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/timeline.htm etc. ---
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf The EARN IT Bill Is the Government’s Plan to Scan Every Message Online Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they’d lose legal protections that allow them to operate. That’s what the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed and hopes to pass into law. The so-called EARN IT bill, sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), will strip Section 230 protections away from any website that doesn’t follow a list of “best practices,” meaning those sites can be sued into bankruptcy. The “best practices” list will be created by a government commission, headed by Attorney General Barr, who has made it very clear he would like to ban encryption, and guarantee law enforcement “legal access” to any digital message. The EARN IT bill had its first hearing today, and its supporters’ strategy is clear. Because they didn’t put the word “encryption” in the bill, they’re going to insist it doesn’t affect encryption. “This bill says nothing about encryption,” co-sponsor Sen. Blumenthal said at today’s hearing. “Have you found a word in this bill about encryption?” he asked one witness. It’s true that the bill’s authors avoided using that word. But they did propose legislation that enables an all-out assault on encryption. It would create a 19-person commission that’s completely controlled by the Attorney General and law enforcement agencies. And, at the hearing, a Vice-President at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) made it clear [PDF] what he wants the best practices to be. NCMEC believes online services should be made to screen their messages for material that NCMEC considers abusive; use screening technology approved by NCMEC and law enforcement; report what they find in the messages to NCMEC; and be held legally responsible for the content of messages sent by others. You can’t have an Internet where messagesa are screened en masse, and also have end-to-end encryption any more than you can create backdoors that can only be used by the good guys. The two are mutually exclusive. Concepts like “client-side scanning” aren’t a clever route around this; such scanning is just another way to break end-to-end encryption. Either the message remains private to everyone but its recipients, or it’s available to others. The 19-person draft commission isn’t any better than the 15-person commission envisioned in an early draft of the bill. It’s completely dominated by law enforcement and allied groups like NCMEC. Not only will those groups have a majority of votes on the commission, but the bill gives Attorney General Barr the power to veto or approve the list of best practices. Even if other commission members do disagree with law enforcement, Barr’s veto power will put him in a position to strongarm them. The Commission won’t be a body that seriously considers policy; it will be a vehicle for creating a law enforcement wish list. Barr has made clear, over and over again, that breaking encryption is at the top of that wish list. Once it’s broken, authoritarian regimes around the world will rejoice, as they have the ability to add their own types of mandatory scanning, not just for child sexual abuse material but for self-expression that those governments want to suppress. The privacy and security of all users will suffer if U.S. law enforcement is able to achieve its dream of breaking encryption. Senators should reject the EARN IT bill.
Bill Barr wants to take away your Constitutional Rights and Jem ? well he chooses to stays quiet!!!!!! DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency The Department of Justice has secretly asked Congress for the ability to detain arrested people “indefinitely” in addition to other powers that one expert called “terrifying” The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally-protected rights during coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan. While the asks from the Department of Justice will likely not come to fruition with a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, they demonstrate how much this White House has a frightening disregard for rights enumerated in the Constitution. The DOJ has requested Congress allow any chief judge of a district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation,” according to draft language obtained by Politico. This would be applicable to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil processes and proceedings.” They justify this by saying currently judges can pause judicial proceedings in an emergency but that new legislation would allow them to apply it “in a consistent manner.” But the Constitution grants citizens habeas corpus which gives arrestees the right to appear in front of a judge and ask to be released before trial. Enacting legislation like the DOJ wants would essentially suspend habeas corpus indefinitely until the emergency ended. Further, DOJ asked Congress to suspend the statute of limitations on criminal investigations and civil proceedings during the emergency until a year after it ended. Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico the measure was “terrifying,” saying, “Not only would it be a violation of [habeas corpus], but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.” “That is something that should not happen in a democracy,” he added. DOJ also asked Congress to amend the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to have defendants appear at a hearing via videoconference instead of in-person with the defendant’s consent, although in a draft obtained by Politico, the sections about requiring consent were crossed out. But it’s not just Americans’ rights the DOJ wants to violate. They also asked Congress to pass a law saying that immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 cannot qualify as asylum seekers. As coronavirus spreads through the country, activists are calling on politicians in office to release prisoners and immigrants held in detention centers, both of which can be a hotbed of virus activity with so many people in close quarters and limited or non-existent supplies of soap, sanitizer, and protective equipment. Some states have already begun to do so. But with this, the Trump administration is taking steps to hold more people in prisons for an undetermined amount of time — showing their priority is not saving lives but giving themselves more power.
fascists gonna fasci private prison system licking their chops Voter suppressionists licking their chops Putin licking his chops