WEBVTT 00:00.480 --> 00:07.280 One of the biggest threats to your security privacy and anonymity online is potentially Unfortunately 00:07.310 --> 00:07.970 your own. 00:07.970 --> 00:12.190 Go home and this threat is coming from a number of fronts. 00:12.200 --> 00:21.000 The two main fronts one is the push to weaken and regulate encryption and the other is to legalize it 00:21.000 --> 00:26.590 I guess legitimize mass surveillance and spying on its citizens. 00:26.640 --> 00:36.270 Many countries are talking about implementing policies that limits encryption and policies to legitimize 00:36.270 --> 00:37.950 and legalize spying. 00:37.980 --> 00:41.420 That has been going on anyway illegally for years. 00:41.550 --> 00:48.750 And in fact by the time you listen to this because it's moving so fast in your particular country things 00:48.750 --> 00:57.210 may have changed and it may now be more legal to spy on you and encryption may be regulated to a further 00:57.210 --> 01:07.140 extent this regulation and mandating of insecurity and legalised spying is going on in many places United 01:07.140 --> 01:13.450 States the U.K. China Russia Brazil India etc.. 01:13.620 --> 01:20.540 The UK has got the data communications bill which includes recording 12 months of Internet history and 01:20.610 --> 01:22.820 the Orwellian measures. 01:23.030 --> 01:27.600 Other examples that show the tide of change in other countries. 01:27.630 --> 01:33.980 You have whatsapp being banned for 48 hours in Brazil because of the encryption by the government. 01:33.990 --> 01:42.240 India India has some very strong ideas on limiting encryption Kazakstan legally requiring back doors 01:42.720 --> 01:45.420 encryption is fundamentally mathematics. 01:45.440 --> 01:47.550 It cannot be banned. 01:47.610 --> 01:51.470 The horse has already left the stable it's been created. 01:51.520 --> 02:00.770 It cannot be weakened just for a terrorist or a criminal or for someone who you want to have weak encryption. 02:00.930 --> 02:07.560 Those people will just use the strong encryption that's already out there and everyone else will be 02:07.560 --> 02:13.800 stuck with weakened security and weakened encryption because they're forced to use the weakened grips. 02:13.980 --> 02:21.840 If it is weakened or back doored is weakened for everyone including the hackers trying to compromise 02:21.840 --> 02:30.210 our systems something like this was actually tried already as the crypto wars in the 1990s something 02:30.210 --> 02:36.600 called the Clipper Chip was proposed by the U.S. government and the floor was found in it. 02:36.690 --> 02:42.180 And luckily there was no widespread adoption because this chip was going to be put into you know every 02:42.900 --> 02:45.660 electronic device that was going to do encryption. 02:45.660 --> 02:51.370 So the government could bypass encryption and look at what it is you were doing. 02:51.450 --> 02:56.700 So if that had happened that would have been a complete disaster because of the vulnerability that was 02:56.700 --> 02:57.230 found. 02:57.270 --> 02:58.320 This is the problem. 02:58.470 --> 03:02.440 If you weaken encryption you can weaken it for everybody. 03:02.460 --> 03:08.910 Terrorists and criminals will continue to use strong encryption even if normal citizens are banned. 03:08.910 --> 03:13.570 There is no evidence that weakening encryption will help at all. 03:13.650 --> 03:21.670 And to add to all that we have no feasible technical way of achieving this. 03:21.810 --> 03:28.670 Unfortunately all of this stuff is perhaps too complicated for people to really grasp. 03:28.680 --> 03:34.440 Those people that make decisions on these things or maybe they do understand it but because of political 03:34.480 --> 03:36.890 agendas they're still pushing forward. 03:37.020 --> 03:44.930 This is Matt Bley speaking to a U.S. congressional committee on the feasibility of these plans. 03:45.240 --> 03:48.510 And it's definitely worth a watch. 03:48.540 --> 03:50.590 So I'm going to play it now. 03:50.880 --> 03:52.860 It's only five minutes long. 03:52.950 --> 03:53.600 Dr. Blix. 03:53.620 --> 03:54.980 Five minutes. 03:55.500 --> 03:57.130 Thank you Mr. Chairman. 03:57.870 --> 04:06.180 As a technologist I'm finding myself in the very curious and participating in a debate over the desirability 04:06.180 --> 04:13.920 of something that sounds wonderful which is security systems that can be bypassed by the good guys but 04:13.920 --> 04:20.540 that also reliably the bad guys out and we could certainly discuss that. 04:20.540 --> 04:30.600 But as a technologist I can't ignore this stark reality which is simply that it can't be done safely. 04:30.810 --> 04:38.850 And if we make wishful policies that assume and pretend that we can there will be terrible consequences 04:38.850 --> 04:42.070 for our economy and for our national security. 04:43.490 --> 04:49.970 So it would be difficult to overstate today the importance of robust reliable computing and communications 04:49.970 --> 04:53.990 to our personal commercial and national security. 04:54.020 --> 05:00.980 Modern computing and network technologies are obviously yielding great benefits to our society and we 05:01.040 --> 05:07.340 are depending on them to be reliable and trustworthy in the same way that we depend on power and water 05:07.340 --> 05:10.170 and the rest of our critical infrastructure today. 05:10.610 --> 05:17.330 But unfortunately software based system is the foundation on which all of this modern communications 05:17.400 --> 05:26.120 technologies is based are also notoriously vulnerable to attack by criminals and by hostile nation states 05:26.780 --> 05:35.000 large scale data breaches of course are are literally a daily occurrence and this problem is getting 05:35.000 --> 05:41.750 worse rather than better as we build larger and more complex systems and it's really not an exaggeration 05:41.750 --> 05:49.560 to characterize the state of software security as an emerging national crisis. 05:49.910 --> 05:58.610 And the sad truth behind this is that computer science my field simply does not know how to build complex 05:58.610 --> 06:03.220 large scale software that has reliably correct behavior. 06:03.470 --> 06:08.930 And this is not a new problem it has nothing to do with encryption or modern technology. 06:08.930 --> 06:15.080 It's been the central focus of computing research since the dawn of the programmable computer. 06:15.320 --> 06:21.050 And as new technology allows us to build larger and more complex systems the problem of ensuring their 06:21.050 --> 06:26.660 reliability becomes actually exponentially harder with more and more components interacting with each 06:26.660 --> 06:27.470 other. 06:27.470 --> 06:34.370 So as we integrate in secure vulnerable systems into the fabric of our economy the consequences of those 06:34.370 --> 06:40.780 systems failing become both more likely and increasingly serious. 06:42.210 --> 06:47.910 Unfortunately there is no magic bullet for securing software based system. 06:47.910 --> 06:55.930 Large systems are fundamentally risky and this is something that we can at best manage rather than than 06:56.040 --> 06:58.170 fix outright. 06:58.350 --> 07:06.090 There are really only two known ways to manage the risk of unreliable and in secure software. 07:06.090 --> 07:15.300 One is the use of encryption which allows us to process sensitive data over in secure media and in secure 07:15.810 --> 07:18.740 software systems to the extent that we can. 07:18.750 --> 07:26.040 And the other is to design our software systems to be as small and as simple as we possibly can to minimize 07:26.040 --> 07:32.080 the number of features that a malicious attacker might be able to find flaws to exploit. 07:32.830 --> 07:39.700 And this is why proposals for law enforcement access features frighten me so much cryptographic systems 07:39.700 --> 07:44.930 are among the most fragile and subtle elements of modern software. 07:44.940 --> 07:51.270 We often discover devastating weaknesses in even very simple cryptographic systems years after they're 07:51.280 --> 07:57.910 designed and fielded with third party access requirements to do is take even very simple problems that 07:57.940 --> 08:03.940 we don't really know how to solve and turn them into far more complex problems that we really have no 08:03.940 --> 08:06.640 chance of reliably solving. 08:06.700 --> 08:14.530 So backdoor cryptography of the kind advocated by by the FBI you know might solve some problems if we 08:14.530 --> 08:15.010 could do it. 08:15.010 --> 08:21.820 But it's a notoriously and well-known difficult problem we've found subtle flaws even in systems designed 08:21.820 --> 08:25.320 by the National Security Agency such as the clipper chip. 08:25.420 --> 08:31.210 Two decades ago and even if we could get the cryptography right we'd be left with the problem of integrating 08:31.210 --> 08:37.840 access features into the software design and requiring designers to design around third party access 08:37.840 --> 08:44.740 requirements will basically undermine our already tenuous ability to defend against attack. 08:44.760 --> 08:48.670 It's tempting to frame this debate as being between personal privacy and law enforcement. 08:48.670 --> 08:51.180 But in fact the stakes are higher than that. 08:51.400 --> 08:58.370 We just can't do what the FBI is asking without seriously weakening our infrastructure. 08:58.540 --> 09:03.510 The ultimate beneficiaries will be criminals and rival nation states. 09:03.520 --> 09:12.010 Congress faces a crucial choice here to effectively legislate mandatory insecurity in our critical infrastructure 09:12.490 --> 09:19.720 or recognize the critical importance of robust security in preventing crime in our increasingly connected 09:19.720 --> 09:20.200 world. 09:20.350 --> 09:21.210 Thank you very much. 09:22.500 --> 09:24.650 This here is a good paper to read. 09:24.930 --> 09:30.900 And it's from a number of top crypto experts including some of the people that actually design the crypt 09:31.260 --> 09:37.500 that we're going to talk about on the course on why mandating insecurity is a bad idea. 09:37.590 --> 09:39.300 So if you want to dig deeper into that. 09:39.480 --> 09:45.030 Give the readers your homework and other quick Darkman that you can read is the case against regulating 09:45.120 --> 09:46.390 encryption technology. 09:46.410 --> 09:47.580 Only a couple of pages. 09:47.730 --> 09:49.640 And to give you more of a background. 09:49.870 --> 09:55.030 And this is a good read this is the nine epic failures of regulating encryption. 09:55.030 --> 10:01.480 It was a great report to give you an idea of the number of crypto products out there by Bruce Schneier. 10:01.620 --> 10:09.310 This is world wide survey of encryption products give the google the PTF version which is here. 10:09.370 --> 10:16.080 There's also an Excel version that excels pretty cool because you can sort by the type so you can look 10:16.080 --> 10:21.060 all the different of crypto products and maybe where we get to those sections and those products you 10:21.060 --> 10:29.430 can see all the ones that are out there it finds 865 hardware and software products and co-option encryption 10:29.760 --> 10:36.390 from 55 different countries so obviously if you have a law in one country something affects all the 10:36.390 --> 10:42.540 other countries and you know people who do use the crypto from whichever country they choose to use 10:42.540 --> 10:47.270 it for them let's move on to the legalization of spying and mass surveillance. 10:47.270 --> 10:55.010 Now I think we can start with some quotes from Edward Snowden So we have here arguing that you don't 10:55.010 --> 10:58.730 care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide. 10:58.940 --> 11:04.290 It's no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. 11:04.340 --> 11:08.700 He continues people who use the I have nothing to hide line. 11:08.750 --> 11:12.050 Don't understand the basic foundation of human rights. 11:12.050 --> 11:15.990 Nobody needs to justify why they need a right. 11:16.010 --> 11:21.890 The burden of justification falls on the ones seeking to infringe upon the right. 11:21.920 --> 11:27.980 If one person chooses to disregard his right to privacy that doesn't automatically mean everyone should 11:27.980 --> 11:28.810 follow suit. 11:28.850 --> 11:34.440 Either you can't give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. 11:34.460 --> 11:41.450 More simply the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the minority. 11:41.450 --> 11:42.320 My view is this. 11:42.320 --> 11:46.720 When people know they will be watch they are being spied on. 11:46.760 --> 11:48.740 They alter what they do. 11:48.740 --> 11:50.870 They are no longer free. 11:50.930 --> 11:58.120 Terrorists want us to lose our freedom by creating mass surveillance to prevent terrorism by creating 11:58.210 --> 11:59.990 mass surveillance infrastructure. 11:59.990 --> 12:03.830 We lose the very freedom we are trying to protect. 12:03.980 --> 12:10.100 But the counter-argument to this is that we will be more secure from mass surveillance will be more 12:10.100 --> 12:12.330 safe from mass surveillance. 12:12.390 --> 12:15.310 But the evidence is thin to support that. 12:15.500 --> 12:22.360 The former head of the NSA global intelligence gathering operations Garko old Bill Binney. 12:22.400 --> 12:28.430 He says that mass surveillance interferes with the government's ability to catch bad guys and that the 12:28.430 --> 12:31.400 government's failure in terms of 9/11. 12:31.400 --> 12:38.540 The Boston bombing the Texas shooting and other terrorist attacks because it was overwhelmed with data 12:38.630 --> 12:40.440 from mass surveillance. 12:40.460 --> 12:47.150 For me the issue of mass surveillance is about giving away too much power to a government. 12:47.150 --> 12:55.910 Key questions to consider and ask can you trust all the people government offices agencies companies 12:55.970 --> 13:02.800 and contractors with your personal and private data gathered through this mass surveillance. 13:02.810 --> 13:09.230 Can you trust that they will always have your best interests at heart and that they will act justly 13:09.320 --> 13:10.100 with this power. 13:10.100 --> 13:18.230 This new power that they will have and not just now but in the future and with your children because 13:18.230 --> 13:21.650 your children will inherit a watched world. 13:21.650 --> 13:29.570 This data will be kept and any slight deviation from what is considered acceptable could be used against 13:29.570 --> 13:33.380 you if you oppose those in power. 13:33.470 --> 13:35.700 Consider the civil rights movement. 13:35.810 --> 13:42.470 If mass surveillance is going on during that political movement how would it affect a political change 13:42.470 --> 13:45.560 for black people in the United States. 13:45.560 --> 13:51.530 Would civil rights have happened much slower more violently because of the mass surveillance. 13:51.530 --> 13:58.490 Or would it have been crushed completely so they wouldn't even exist now if we had mass surveillance. 13:58.760 --> 13:59.820 Things to consider. 14:01.100 --> 14:06.210 Also consider donating to some of these privacy causes. 14:06.230 --> 14:12.770 If privacy is something that you are particularly interested in and passionate about regulating encryption 14:13.190 --> 14:22.010 mandating insecurity and legalizing spying is unfortunately an active threat that's potentially on your 14:22.010 --> 14:24.590 threat landscape that you need to be aware of. 14:24.620 --> 14:33.620 If your ability to use encryption is reduced then your security will be reduced as well and you will 14:33.620 --> 14:36.500 need all the mitigating controls.