Surveillance epiphany

Surveillance epiphany

by digby

You will never guess who said this in a million years:

"In a free society, we don't require people to organize their lives in a way that makes life easier for law enforcement"

Daniel Ellsberg? Glenn Greenwald? Nope:

After the Snowden leaks, [Michael Chertoff] continued to support NSA mass surveillance. But, on encryption, Chertoff, now a private practice lawyer and consultant, has changed his tune so drastically that he’s expressly at odds with the intelligence world. He says everyone should have a right to encryption—nearly everyone he’s worked for doesn’t.

In fact, earlier this week, NSA chief Mike Rogers ​came out against encryption, joining his ​colleagues at the FBI and ​Justice Department, and even ​President Obama, who have all said that law enforcement should have backdoors or a "golden key" to be able to break encrypted communications when necessary.

Intelligence agencies say that they think it's possible to create a system in which companies like Apple or Google—which are both moving toward using encrypted messaging as a standard for all users on iOS and Android—would have to decrypt text messages when served with a warrant. Cryptological experts say that’s impossible: Vulnerabilities can be exploited, either by the NSA or by hackers or foreign governments.

Chertoff told me he sides with the crypto world: Consumers should have access to strong, uncompromising encryption without backdoors.

"I'm sympathetic to law enforcement, but nevertheless I've come to the conclusion that requiring network managers or ISPs to retain a key that would allow them to decrypt data moving back and forth on a particular device is not something the government should require," he said. "If you require companies to manage a network to retain a key to decrypt, I guarantee you another provider will allow someone else in the world to have that key. What happens is, honest people will have a key to encrypted data that's held by a third party. As we've seen in the past, that can lead to problems."

Interestingly, he's siding with the traitor Edward Snowden on this one who believes that technology to allow encryption is one of the ways we can best protect our privacy.

We don't know why Chertoff is taking this position. The logical assumption is that he's representing clients who are on that side of the argument. Or maybe he's had an epiphany. It's interesting either way. This is yet another of the battles of the corporations, like net neutrality. These companies have a stake in being able to ensure their customers aren't being monitored against their will. It's kind of a shame that we can't win these issues on constitutional and democratic principle but I guess it's better than nothing ...