Category Archives: Privacy

Fatal Flaw

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The “problem” with encryption of private communications is becoming empirical rather than hypothetical. Hillar Moore, District Attorney for East Baton Rouge, LA, says he’s one of 16 prosecutors to write the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for back doors into encrypted devices for law enforcement.

He, and other state and local prosecutors and police have a mix of smart phones owned by deceased victims and suspects that those government representatives can’t get into for any evidence related to the crimes being investigated because the phones are locked and the passwords are unavailable or the suspects refuse to give them up.

While I’m sympathetic to the government’s problem in such cases, the fatal problem is those back doors into the encryption. Back doors destroy the encryption. Back doors are openings for nefarious individuals to steal from the phone’s owner. Back doors are openings for out of control governments to abuse the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

That there aren’t easy answers to the conundrum—yet—doesn’t alter that simple fact. Nor does it alter the fact that the convenience of government is not an excuse for circumscribing individual liberty.

In the meantime, if government wants to know something, get a warrant.

Power Grab

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Here’s one worthy even of President Barack Obama’s legendary reach.

France’s data-protection regulator on Monday rejected Google Inc’s appeal of its order to expand Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to Google’s websites world-wide….

The French presume to extend their legal reach beyond their legal reach—beyond their borders.

France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe’s right to be forgotten to “all domain names” of the search engine, including google.com—or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Here is France saying, “Do what we tell you to do anywhere you are in the world, or we will break you.”

Rank extortion.

It’ll be interesting—and instructive—to see whether Google management has the moral courage and the integrity to say, “Non.”

Another Fine VA Mess

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And another reason to disband the thing and send its budget as health care vouchers to our veterans.

A VA employee tossed files containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 1,100 patients of a South Dakota VA hospital into a dumpster, where they sat for two days before they were discovered and recovered. This happened last May, but the VA chose not to tell anyone, like those patients, about it until the end of July.

Mistakes happen, even egregious things like this. What’s unacceptable is the decision by this VA hospital, condoned by the VA itself (if only through its own inaction and silence) to withhold information about this breach from the breach’s victims for so long.

That decision is part of a too-long standing pattern of VA malfeasance and VA decisions to do nothing about themselves.

Another Reason We Need Regime Change in DC

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy sent their third letter since June calling on the DOJ to reveal its questionable cell phone surveillance policies, after yet another whistleblower allegation of abuse.

Keep doing this, absolutely. But don’t expect any answers for another several months.

We’ll need an administration from the other party before the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch DoJ can be expected to deliver. And with that change, extended to DoJ, the present DoJ incumbents need to be haled into court and sanctioned for their willful obstruction of these investigations.

We’re a Helpless Victim

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That’s OPM Director Katherine Archuleta’s claim regarding the hack of her agency’s computer systems that now appear to expose as many as 18 million…what shall we call these, since OPM has laid claim to the victimhood in this failure…Americans.

I don’t believe anyone is personally responsible[.]

Fox News cited her further:

Archuleta said only the perpetrators should be blamed—she said current failures result from decades of meager investment in security systems, but said changes are being made and in fact helped detect the latest breaches.

Then there are these, via The Wall Street Journal:

Way back in March 2014, OPM knew that Chinese hackers had accessed its system without having downloaded files.

And

While little noticed, the IRS admitted this spring it was also the subject of a Russian hack, in which thieves grabbed 100,000 tax returns and requested 15,000 fraudulent refunds. Officials have figured out that the hackers used names and Social Security data to pretend to be the taxpayers and break through weak IRS cyber-barriers. As Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has noted, the Health and Human Services Department and Social Security Administration use the same weak security wall to guard ObamaCare files and retirement information. Yet the Administration is hardly rushing to fix the problem.

There’s speculation elsewhere that Snowden’s thefts and travels have had a hand in these. Frankly, I think his hands are clean on this one, except perhaps as a sanity check for Russia and the PRC in the before and aftermath stages of these hacks. These hacks are the direct result of long-standing utter incompetence and of this administration’s disdain for anything having to do with security.

It’s long past time for folks to be fired for cause at the OPM and IRS—and elsewhere, if they show no concrete progress in a very short time—down to middle management level in the CIOs’ areas. Why so far down the food chain? If they haven’t been screaming bloody murder over these vulnerabilities, they’re either incompetent themselves, or they put their job security ahead of our nation’s security.

This incompetence also seems to necessitate a pretty thorough removal and replacement of Federal government officials and employees—through no fault of their own, but from OPM (et al.) incompetence. They’ve become vulnerable, and through them, our government has become vulnerable. The only way to reduce the threat to these people is to reduce their value to our enemies by removing them from government. That’s what Archuleta’s victimhood has wrought.