John McCain wants to outlaw encryption that the US government can't crack

Is it really worth leaving a thoughtful comment about such an ignorant statement?<p>It&#x27;s clear to me that these people have no idea what encryption actually is and only have a cursory understanding of what it does. They&#x27;re aware that criminals and terrorists can use encryption to communicate covertly. That&#x27;s why they want to ban it. Are they also aware that the exact same technology is used to protect their online banking? To protect against attacks like the Sony hack? Do they know that there is a huge segment of the economy that relies on strong encryption to do business?<p>It&#x27;s pretty clear at this point that they don&#x27;t care about privacy. Perhaps if the ramifications are explained to them in a different way they would be more open to dissenting points of view.<p>EDIT: The recent news stories have motivated me to renew my support for the EFF. I&#x27;d encourage anyone with disposable income to do the same.

I love how Republicans believe that outlawing guns won&#x27;t stop criminals from having guns while at the same time believing that outlawing encryption will keep criminals from using encryption.<p>Encryption methods are far easier to transport and spread illegally than gun are.

&gt; &quot;...News emerging from Paris — as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20151118&#x2F;08474732854&#x2F;after-endless-demonization-encryption-police-find-paris-attackers-coordinated-via-unencrypted-sms.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20151118&#x2F;08474732854&#x2F;after...</a>

This is Edward Snowden&#x27;s fault. Let&#x27;s look at the facts:<p>* Edward Snowden declared war against terrorists.<p>* Edward Snowden started indescriminently bombing villages in the middle east.<p>* Edward Snowden created massive ill will against America, then left a huge power vacuum in the region by pulling out after, dare I say it, conducting terrorism against the native inhabitants.<p>So, Ed, wherever you are, this is your fault.

This would be a suspension of the 4th and 5th amendment. Correct me if I am wrong.<p>&quot;...A valid search warrant must meet four requirements: (1) the warrant must be filed in good faith by a law enforcement officer; (2) the warrant must be based on reliable information showing probable cause to search; (3) the warrant must be issued by a neutral and detached magistrate; and (4) the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized...&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justia.com&#x2F;criminal&#x2F;docs&#x2F;search-seizure-faq.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justia.com&#x2F;criminal&#x2F;docs&#x2F;search-seizure-faq.html</a><p>This McCain B.S. implies that the defendant will never be served with a warrant. This secret warrant will be issued by eleven secret judges, serving a seven year term, picked by one man &quot;...without any supplemental confirmation from the other two branches of government.&quot;<p>This does not meet the standards of being neutral per point number 3 above. WOW!<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;politics&#x2F;surveillance-court&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;politics&#x2F;surveillance-court&#x2F;</a>

<p><pre><code> &quot;This move towards stronger encryption was largely brought about by the revelations of now-exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden...&quot; </code></pre> It&#x27;s encouraging to see publications referring to him as a whistleblower.

We really need to set an age limit on how old people can get while staying in office before being forced to retire. We already prevent people younger than 40 from running for President. Why should we let people older than 65 do it? What&#x27;s the difference?

How can you tell the difference between, say, an OTP encrypted message and a random number?<p>To outlaw encryption that &quot;the US govt can&#x27;t crack&quot; they have to outlaw random numbers hah, yeah.. I totally can imagine a future where PRNGs must be approved by the US government.

home encryption is killing government,<p>...and it&#x27;s illegal.<p>The US government is a monolithic institution that is governed by the mandate &quot;move slow and break things&quot;. They can only legislate what they can enforce. They can&#x27;t stop people sharing music, they can&#x27;t stop people sharing data, and they sure as fuck won&#x27;t be able to stop encryption.<p>They definitely will be able to drive it underground and limit the average American&#x27;s privacy though. It is just that, as far as anyone can be a typical America, they aren&#x27;t a hardened radicalized terrorist. Let&#x27;s take stock of the wars against nouns:<p>* War on Drugs, massive failure.<p>* War on Terror, not only failure, likely made problem worse.<p>* War on Math, if we measure this by people prevented from using encryption, then we are losing. However, if we measure this by student test scores relative to other nations, we are def. winning the war against math.

Can we have a new rule when laws are proposed? Whenever you see the headline &quot;(name of politician) wants to pass a law which will do ____&quot; it should be rewritten to &quot;Lobbyists have convinced (name of politician) that they need a law which will do _____&quot;.<p>From opensecrets.org:<p><i>Industry Favorite</i><p>John McCain is a top recipient from the following industries in 2015-2016:<p><pre><code> Cable &amp; satellite TV production (#1) Defense Aerospace (#1) Defense Electronics (#1) For-profit Education (#1) Misc Defense (#1) </code></pre> Total PAC Money for 2015-2016: $700,600<p><pre><code> Ideological&#x2F;Single-Issue $185,900 Defense $116,800 Communications&#x2F;Electronics $61,600 Energy &amp; Natural Resources $75,300 Finance, Insurance &amp; Real Estate $71,500 Lawyers &amp; Lobbyists $51,400</code></pre>

Let&#x27;s legislate Pi=3 while we&#x27;re at it.<p>I&#x27;d hate to live in a world where only criminals could be secure.

I swear the media has a bias too. So many articles are bashing encryption lately. I wish I could do more to fight misinformation and general ignorance than posting on my Facebook though. Ideas?

USA to ban too difficult math problems?<p>Doesn&#x27;t this mean their citizens would be less safe from foreign (and domestic) spies than foreigners are from their spies? Doesn&#x27;t this mean that foreign businesses who actually care about their security would abandon their software and IT services? If they can crack it, others can, or will learn soon to, crack it.

So basically he wants to ensure that black hatters will be able to crack all encryption in the United States? If the U.S. Government can crack something, than that means there is a human element that will always be exploitable. If a group of people can crack an encryption, than that group of people is the weakness. Someone will be social engineered, hacked, or compromised successfully eventually. They might even just make a stupid mistake. This basically ensures that whatever the United States is using to crack encryptions will leak eventually causing legal encryption to be completely insecure until the government releases its next update, until that leaks as well, and we end up with a cycle of fuckery on our hands. Yeah, let&#x27;s not do that.<p>&gt; Obama administration says it has no plans to legislate against strong encryption, and the UK government says it doesn&#x27;t either.<p>So It doesn&#x27;t look like we have to worry. The argument for legislation is idiotic. Terrorists won&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s legal or not to use strong encryption. You would only be forcing law abiding citizens to use weak encryption.

Evidently he doesn&#x27;t realize that this is like asking for addition or subtraction to be outlawed, which is nonsensical.<p>Like adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, encrypting is a mathematical operation that transforms numbers into other numbers.

does that mean we&#x27;ll find out what encyption the US gov can crack?

John McCain also selected Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. People understand that McCain&#x27;s heart is usually in the right place, his judgement isn&#x27;t exactly sound.

I just wrote to both Senators and my Representative telling them not to support this legislation. I linked to this discussion for them to learn more. Please contact your Congressional representatives today!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opencongress.org&#x2F;people&#x2F;zipcodelookup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opencongress.org&#x2F;people&#x2F;zipcodelookup</a>

Including the one-time pad? I suppose paper memo pads need to be outlawed as encryption technology then.

Earth to Republicans, if you want to alienate people under 30, please listen to John McCain.

I am not sure how this can be implemented effectively in a globalized world! Lets say we take John McCain&#x27;s advice and corporations give america a back door to read encrypted data, what would other countries do? Would they make laws forcing corporations to give back-doors on the encrypted data as well? Eventually, one of these countries could sell that information to unscrupulous hackers?<p>Also, such a mechanism will only catch unwitting gmail like app using terrorists (assuming google co-operates with USA). I would guess vast majority of terrorists will still encrypt the data themselves without relying on underlying app to do so?

Thought: s&#x2F;encryption&#x2F;guns&#x2F;<p>Why do politicians not have identical positions on both guns and privacy? The root argument is the same: that citizen can, or can&#x27;t, be trusted.<p>Yet almost all the pro guns are anti privacy and vice versa.

How about we (the USA) as a country re-adjust our attitude&#x2F;foreign policy? That goes light years further toward averting any future terrorist attacks. I don&#x27;t condone ISIS even one bit, but we would be fools to not admit our role in shaping their current behavior.<p>So either we give - by adjusting our attitude or if we choose to stay entrenched on our position, then go all the way and nuke the crap out of them.<p>I don&#x27;t like middle of the road solutions... maybe it&#x27;s just me.

Whoever tries to pass that law is going to realize the mistake they made when it comes time to enforce it and they have to delete code from nearly every computer in the country.<p>Other countries like Russia will be able to laughably crack US citizens bank accounts, email accounts etc if this was actually done.<p>It will be a massive public relations nightmare for anyone who actually tries to make this reality.

CLIPPER CHIP &amp; KEY ESCROW.<p>We had this argument in 1993. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clipper_chip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clipper_chip</a><p>There&#x27;s plenty of discussion from then around the problems caused by this arrangement, so it might be a good idea to find the best of it, and dust it off.

John McCain also wanted to be president. I wouldn&#x27;t worry too much about what John McCain wants.

I am picturing a scene in which few of our ancestors, out of fear for fire, and seeing someone hurt by fire, decided to ban making fire altogether. Since they don&#x27;t know about &quot;fire&quot;, we better educate them.

The Senior Senator from Arizona needs to just retire and enjoy his twilight years. There was a time where I found him interesting, engaging, and worth voting for. It&#x27;s been several years since that was the case.

Another idea: Outlaw terrorism

and people wonder why Republicans (Libertarians mostly) didn&#x27;t turn out to vote for him 2008, here is a hint - it wasn&#x27;t Palin that was the stain on that ticket. We remember McCain&#x2F;Feingold

Can we outlaw John McCain?<p>This is the guy who gave us Sarah Palin. He needs to go away.

If we outlaw such encryption only outlaws will have it.

Why not outlaw locks the government cannot pick and vaults the government cannot break into? They&#x27;re quite the same thing, just less digital.

John McCain has no idea what he&#x27;s talking about with regards to technology and should probably refrain from talking about it.

If our government can crack it, so can many other governments, hacker groups, corporations, and so on. Oh well, back to rot13.

This is a bit like a Republican version of gun control laws.<p>If real encryption is outlawed, only criminals will have real encryption.

I can summarize all the comments in one comment - Unfortunately the world(human society) is run by politicians.

it&#x27;s funny they are ok with everyone having guns but encryption that&#x27;s the worst kind of evil.

I refuse to give up my liberty and security over terrorism or some other infantile boogeyman.

So, privacy is like guns?<p>Nice to have, but something we need to give up in order to live in a safer society?

Sounds like a good pretext for putting anyone politically inexpedient into prison.

If there was ever a stupid and despicable human being who managed to become relatively powerful, it&#x27;s John McCain.

Let&#x27;s just outlaw math.

why we call a technology encryption if it can be cracked?

I want to outlaw sputtering old gov officials who won&#x27;t let go and gracefully head out to pasture.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nnwVNui.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nnwVNui.png</a>

John McCain is partly responsible for the rise of ISIS by having architected the funding of the Free Syrian Army whose members went off to form ISIS and who continues to be funded by us, with a great deal of the resources finding their way into ISIS hands.