NSA Director Finally Admits Encryption Is Needed to Protect Public’s Privacy

By Carey Wedler
Encryption, a security measure that makes data impossible to read without a secure code or password, has become an increasingly contentious subject for government agencies and private companies. While the likes of Apple, Android, and other technology companies maintain it is vital, the federal government has forcefully resisted. On Thursday, however, NSA Director Mike Rogers expressed his support for the security feature, drawing a clear line in the sand between federal intelligence and law enforcement.

On Thursday, Rogers told the Atlantic Council think tank, “encryption is foundational to the future.” Though surveillance officials don’t often champion privacy, Rogers emphasized the importance of encryption and the need to incorporate it into security practices.

“Concerns about privacy have never been higher. Trying to get all those things right, to realize that — it isn’t about one or the other,” he said. Though he maintained that privacy should not be the dominant concern, he also rejected the belief that “security is the imperative and that ought to drive everything,” adding, “We’ve got to meet these two imperatives. We’ve got some challenging times ahead of us, folks.”

Rogers cited the recent Office of Personnel Management hack of over 20 million users as a reason to increase encryption rather than scale it back. “What you saw at OPM, you’re going to see a whole lot more of,” he said, referring to the massive hack that compromised the personal data about 20 million people who obtained background checks.

Rogers’ comments, while forward-thinking, signify an about face in his stance on encryption. In February 2015, he said he “shares [FBI] Director [James] Comey’s concern” about cell phone companies’ decision to add encryption features to their products. Comey has been one loudest critics of encryption.

However, Rogers’ comments on Thursday now directly conflict with Comey’s stated position. The FBI director has publicly chastised encryption, as well as the companies that provide it. In 2014, he claimed Apple’s then-new encryption feature could lead the world to “a very dark place.” At a Department of Justice hearing in November, Comey testified that “Increasingly, the shadow that is ‘going dark’ is falling across more and more of our work.” Though he claimed, “We support encryption,” he insisted “we have a problem that encryption is crashing into public safety and we have to figure out, as people who care about both, to resolve it. So, I think the conversation’s in a healthier place.”

At the same hearing, Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch declined to comment on whether they had proof the Paris attackers used encryption. Even so, Comey recently lobbied for tech companies to do away with end-to-end encryption.

However, his crusade has fallen on unsympathetic ears, both from the private companies he seeks to control — and from the NSA. Prior to Rogers’ statements in support of encryption Thursday, former NSA chief Michael Hayden said, “I disagree with Jim Comey. I actually think end-to-end encryption is good for America.”

Still another former NSA chair has criticized calls for backdoor access to information. In October, Mike McConnell told a panel at an encryption summit that the United States is “better served by stronger encryption, rather than baking in weaker encryption.” Former Department of Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, has also spoken out against government being able to bypass encryption.

Regardless of these individual defenses of encryption, the Intercept explained why these statements may be irrelevant:

“Left unsaid is the fact that the FBI and NSA have the ability to circumvent encryption and get to the content too — by hacking. Hacking allows law enforcement to plant malicious code on someone’s computer in order to gain access to the photos, messages, and text before they were ever encrypted in the first place, and after they’ve been decrypted. The NSA has an entire team of advanced hackers, possibly as many as 600, camped out at Fort Meade.”

Rogers statements, of course, are not a full-fledged endorsement of privacy, nor can the NSA be expected to make it a priority. Even so, his new stance denotes a growing awareness within the government that Americans are not comfortable with the State’s grip on their data.

“So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” Rogers said Thursday. “So what we’ve got to ask ourselves is, with that foundation, what’s the best way for us to deal with it? And how do we meet those very legitimate concerns from multiple perspectives?”

Reprinted with permission from Anti-Media

Local Police Forces Have Morphed Into the Natioan Security Agency: Police Agencies In Virginia Quietly Stockpiling Private Phone Records

All over the U.S., local police agencies are collecting vast stockpiles of private information from people – some of it from people who have not been convicted of crimes but were merely stopped by police.

From Electronic Frontier Foundation.

By G.W. Schulz
While revelations from Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s massive database of phone records have sparked a national debate about its constitutionality, another secretive database has gone largely unnoticed and without scrutiny.

The database, which affects unknown numbers of people, contains phone records that at least five police agencies in southeast Virginia have been collecting since 2012 and sharing with one another with little oversight. Some of the data appears to have been obtained by police from telecoms using only a subpoena, rather than a court order or probable-cause warrant. Other information in the database comes from mobile phones seized from suspects during an arrest.

The five cities participating in the program, known as the Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network, are Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Suffolk, according to the memorandum of understanding that established the database. The effort is being led in part by the Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, which is responsible for a “telephone analysis room” in the city of Hampton, where the database is maintained.

The unusual and secretive database contains telecom customer subscriber information; records about individual phone calls, such as the numbers dialed, the time the calls were made and their duration; as well as the contents of seized mobile devices. The information is collected and shared among police agencies to enhance analysis and law enforcement intelligence.

The legality of the database is in question, however, and at least one law enforcement agency has declined to participate in the program due to such concerns.

“My initial reaction is that it's very disturbing and illegal under Virginia law,” said Rob Poggenklass, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, which was previously unaware of the database.

The system was set up with virtually no public debate or concern expressed by elected officials, who approved resolutions authorizing the database. Hardly anyone outside of the five participating police agencies knows about the sharing network, though its creation was not kept secret.

All over the U.S., local police agencies are collecting vast stockpiles of private information from people – some of it from people who have not been convicted of crimes but were merely stopped by police.

As an example of the amount of data being collected, in the first-ever transparency reports released by major telecoms earlier this year, AT&T revealed that between January and June, it received nearly 80,000 criminal subpoenas for customer records from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, while Verizon disclosed that it had received over 72,000 subpoenas from law enforcement during the same period.

The Virginia system is yet another example of this creeping expansion of local law enforcement surveillance throughout the country.

Minimal public information about the sharing network exists, but it first made an appearance on the agendas of local government meetings, where it met no resistance. Elected city council members in Newport News and Chesapeake, for instance, passed resolutions approving the telephone data-sharing agreement without objection.

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FBI Threatens to Force Apple and Google to Decrypt Their Phones

"Congress might have to force this on companies," he said. "Maybe they'll take the hint and do it themselves."—FBI Director James Comey

FBI Director James Comey. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Jason Koebler
Everyone is stoked that the latest versions of iOS and Android will (finally) encrypt all the information on your smartphone by default. Except, of course, the FBI: Today, its director spent an hour attacking the companies and the very idea of encryption, even suggesting that Congress should pass a law banning the practice of default encryption.

It's of course no secret that James Comey and the FBI hate the prospect of "going dark," the idea that law enforcement simply doesn't have the technical capability to track criminals (and the average person) because of all those goddamn apps, encryption, wifi network switching, and different carriers.


It's a problem that the FBI has been dealing with for too long (in Comey’s eyes, at least). Today, Comey went ballistic on Apple and Google's recent decision to make everything just a little more private.

"Encryption isn’t just a technical feature; it’s a marketing pitch … it’s the equivalent of a closet that can’t be opened. A safe that can’t be cracked. And my question is, at what cost?" Comey said. "Both companies [Apple and Google] are run by good people, responding to what they perceive is a market demand. But the place they are leading us is one we shouldn’t go to without careful thought and debate."

In a tightly moderated speech and discussion at the Brookings Institution—not one technical expert or privacy expert was asked to participate; however, several questions from the audience came from privacy-minded individuals—Comey railed on the "post-Snowden" world that has arisen since people began caring about their privacy.

Comey's speech and thinking was out-of-touch and off on many levels: He continually referred to potential "bad guys" as the only ones using encryption, and suggested that, with default encryption, people who are wrongly arrested won't be able to unlock data within their phones that could exonerate them.

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Phone Booths In New York City Are Invading and Tracking Your Cell Phone When You Pass By — How To Stop It

Photo by Krystian Olszanski.

Update: New York’s City Hall has asked the ad company to get rid of the beacons.

By Kashmir Hill
Public phone booths have become an anachronistic feature of urban landscapes thanks to everyone carrying phones in their pockets, but they still have at least one important function: a display booth for advertising. And now, in New York City, that advertising has been equipped with a technology called beacons that use Bluetooth to emit signals that activate receptive apps on people’s phones to either show them ads or track their location. It’s a kind of beautiful technological poetry: New York’s phone booths now try to ‘call’ the smartphones of every person who walks by.

Buzzfeed, which discovered the deployment of “hundreds of [Bluetooth beacons] inside New York City phone booths” using a beacon-detecting Android app says the technology “could turn any city into a giant matrix of hidden commercialization — and vastly deepen the network of surveillance that has already grown out of technologies ranging from security cameras to cell phone towers.” It sounds ominous! It sounds a little less ominous if you include caveats about the limitation of this technology.

First off, beacons themselves don’t collect information about you or “track your every move.” They get your phone to do it. And they can only get your phone to do it if you have Bluetooth turned on and if you have an app on your phone that is receptive to the signals being broadcast by beacons. For example, if you have a Sephora app on your phone, and you have Bluetooth turned on, and you walk past a Sephora store that has beacons, they can activate the Sephora app to show you an ad (“Come in and get 10% off getting pretty!”) and the app can log that you walked by.

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