Jon Camfield dot com

Goodbye, Drupal

Jon — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 13:22:20 +0000

Goodbye, Drupal Jon Tue, 03/08/2022 - 08:22

Goodbye, Drupal.md

This is (hopefully!) the last post on my joncamfield.com drupal instance and will be the first on my new jekyll-bases static site. JonCamfield.com started many years ago (almost exactly 16 to be precise -- 2006-03-30T16:30:22Z, according to whois), as I transitioned my online presence from my 90s-era handle to a more professional one.

JonCamfield.com got to start where my old blog let off, with a lot of hand-coded HTML, some server-side include magic, and MovableType to generate semi-static blog entries with some comment and trackback support. It's probably worth noting that my first blog was actually a collection of artisanal, hand-coded perl scripts maximized to a workflow that centered on limited access to the Internet via cybercafes, where I would carry a floppy with photos and text files composed offline, FTP them to my website, and have these perl scripts ready to detect and HTML-ify into a blog post automagically. Yes kids, I'm that old.

ANYHOW. I've been at this blogging thing for a while. At some point around 2009, when I was also doing a lot of drupal work professionally, I moved my entire joncamfield.com site to Drupal (version 6 at the time). I dragged my feet but eventually had to upgrade to Drupal 7, and lost a ton of my favorite plugins along the way (SIMILE blog / http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/ ), and rather soon thereafter also had to make the transition to Drupal 8.

I am no longer a "webmaster" in any real sense of the word anymore. I very much do not do websites professionally, and while I have been willing to manage my own Drupal site for 13 years (!!) now, I am facing having to do yet another substantive move to Drupal 9.

My webhost setup is not able to support D9, even though it is not adding any new functionality. The pace of these breaking changes, vast over-complication (for my use case) of features, and the substantively higher management needs are I hope balanced for professional use cases where there is a better scaled return.

But for this loyal Drupal sysadmin, I am tired, I have more important things in my world to focus my energy on, and I need something that just works, that is and stays secure, and that is simple.

I am a bit sad about this. I know Wordpress solves this niche that can stretch from hobbyist user to professional, but I am sad to see Drupal feeling more and more like a professional-only tool. Perhaps I'm sad that I am not prioritizing time (and additional hosting costs) to keep up with where Drupal is going, but I feel I stuck it out over 13 years of upgrades and have paid my dues there to have this opinion.

That said, I've been using static site generators for my professional sites for years now. I love the ... majority of their simplicity. Much of it feels like returning to my super weird server-side-html tricks from the 90s, but with better people than myself managing the codebase.

So, goodbye Drupal -- it's been good.

IMAGE: Drupal "droplet" mascot with a tear which is also the droplet, original icon by Steven Wittens aka UnConeD http://acko.net/ http://drupal.org/user/10

Web 2.0 and F/LOSS

Into the fediverse

Jon — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 01:22:05 +0000

Into the fediverse Jon Fri, 10/15/2021 - 21:22

Hey so. I have been increasingly struggling with existing on Facebook. I do not believe it is operating even remotely in the interests of human rights, democracy, or even global stability in mind. The recent whistleblowing reveals have underlined just exactly how profit-focused it is, at the expense of our future. I know many smart and kind people working inside FB to fix that, but I want to exist less inside of this until it gets fixed -- or maybe simply destroyed. We'll see.

I hope maybe some people will maybe at least partially follow me out. You don't have to leave -- I know I also have friends who I only keep up with in facebook -- but maybe we can also find other, truer parts of ourselves outside of the world of corporate surveillance?

Did we used to have out there conversations in LiveJournal threads? Get into philosophical arguments on a certain web forum/BBS system our friends held together? Did we walk around staring at the sky and caring for each other on 9/11? Have we traveled together, fallen down mountains together, had a good meal, a good drink, or even just a long email/DM/SMS/ytalk chat/IRC convo/USENET fight/ or whatever was the right communication channel of the day?

If so, I would /love/ to spend more real time sharing what's happening with my life and learning about yours. This is an experiment to be both more social, and less on "social media". I have created a personal and private account in what's called Mastodon. It's a federated, mostly-volunteer-led, decentralized social media/microblogging/twitter-ish thing. You can find me at https://social.joncamfield.com/@jon , but what you see there (unless you create an account and follow me, keep reading) will be only the public posts, visible to the world.

I am diving into deep water first and also hosting my own server, but please check out https://joinmastodon.org/ on how you can create an account on any of a number of community led and peer-managed sites, and use those to interact! It's magical that way, in that any server can interact with any other server (unless Bad Things happen, but that is a feature of a decentralized world!)

I truly hope to see you sending me a follow request soon, and would love to answer any questions on how to get set up on this "fediverse" of accounts -- or if this is too much, I'd also simply love to hear from you, see some photos, and hear how you're doing.

Censorship and Centralization

Jon — Thu, 06 May 2021 00:43:53 +0000

Censorship and Centralization Jon Wed, 05/05/2021 - 20:43

De-platforming gets thrown around as equivalent to censorship or getting kicked off of the Internet, but this is a dangerous and self-fulfilling lie. Beyond being demonstrably not true, we also cannot cede the digital public square to private corporations which do not, at their core, serve the public interest.

This is the "intro" post to a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet, specifically around communities, centralized platforms, and censorship -- and some paths forward.

In "I Believe in the Internet", I discuss what life was like in the pre-web days of the Internet, focusing on the volunteer efforts of building and maintaining of community. This is an era it's worth remembering, but also deserves a reflection on its failings as well.
I fast forward to current content moderation debates in "De-platforming is censure not censorship.", where we have traded the increasing pains of managing these small communities for massively centralized, profit-seeking social media platforms (in parallel with a general centralization of Internet infrastructure), and use the Parler "takedown" as an example of just how hard you have to try to actually get fully "de-platformed," and to start a discussion of why we need to flip this narrative to being one of why these powerful megaphone-giving tools are providing their platforms to violent hate speech, when there are - if you read beyond the headlines and hubris - so many functional options.
Finally, in "Centering Decentralization", I cover the real costs in untangling ourselves from centralized platforms. It's neither possible nor useful to recreate the community feeling of the proto-Internet days. There ism however, value in building towards a more deeply inclusive combination of systems and platforms that restores community ownership and protects free speech, but also doesn't hand out megaphones.

Centering Decentralization

Jon — Wed, 05 May 2021 23:22:05 +0000

Centering Decentralization Jon Wed, 05/05/2021 - 19:22

This is the final piece in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet; you can read Part 1: I Believe in the Internet and Part 2: De-platforming is censure not censorship.

"Oh great, another white dude from a western democracy going off about decentralization." I promise that I will not be hawking a crypto-currency or even talking about anything blockchain-related. Rather, I see the dramatic centralization of our online lives as a direct risk to an inclusive society, and want to talk about some of the real barriers we need to prioritize in untangling ourselves from this to anchor ourselves from drifting off into techno-solutionism.

Smaller, independent and even self-run platforms and communities don't magically solve all the problems, but I do believe that they can provide the best path forward. These decentralized and federated tools allow for (and actually require) community building, and in the (very) long run, they also have to align with human decency and empathy, if only because without that, they will slowly consume themselves. They allow for vibrant, localized community norms instead of overlaying "Silicon Values" (as Jillian again so eloquently puts it).

These communities will be inherently harder to find, harder to scale, and may even require some level of tradecraft to find and join. I'm … not sure that's not the solution? It's how a lot of us found our virtual communities on the Internet in the first place.

So let's work to build architectures that support smaller communities, and have some minimal faith in humanity that groups festering in hate may always be with us -- but we don't have to give them privileged status on major platforms, or provide support in building their own decentralized ones. Groups promoting equality and inclusion can become the norm and continue to help merge what may be marginalized communities today into a more equal future.

A more decentralized internet also enables different interactions; you don't have to be the same person everywhere, which is a pressure and at times and outright requirement via Real Name policies on major platforms. Meant to reduce fraud, it also undermines the ability for people to explore or present different aspects of themselves, maintain personal lives separate from their professional ones, use alternate personas to find safety or belonging in new communities while being otherwise constrained, or honestly even grow and change as humans. Maybe if we all got to explore different ways to present to the world more often, we'd have more empathy for different experiences.

What are the barriers?

cost -- by removing the surveillance / advertising subsidy, these require some financial engine to fund server bills, support software development, and deal with community infrastructure maintenance and security. Many of these costs thrive from centralization/agglomeration -- While inherently less viral, decentralized communities open up doors for ad revenue that can leverage the community's interests as opposed to increasingly invasive and malware-like tracking of individuals.
complexity -- centralized services just work (well, until they don't). Google or O365 outages are newsworthy because they are so exceedingly rare. Self-hosting similar services means both fewer people monitoring, providing preventative care and updates, and a significantly more threadbare safety net if something breaks (or perhaps no net at all). That said, from a user perspective we are at a breaking point of having too many walled gardens. Open standards and federated infrastructure could vastly reduce some complexity on both the system management side, and for the rest of us, remove the question of "did they send that to me over Signal? WhatsApp? Was it by email? A Slack DM? Or maybe Twitter?." We've had this before, but traded it for shinier tools - but we can have it again.
security -- this is another area where massively scaled, centralized infrastructures get huge benefits from their massive vantage points across their infrastructure. Security teams reviewing new attacks can respond better when they are larger, have more access to more information, and work directly with the platform provider and software development teams. This is relevant to managing everything from harassing spam to targeted attacks. Solving this is not easy or free, and most likely means setting up differently integrated systems.
usability -- Even in some hypothetical world where the "front end" of these alternative tools was competitive with massive multi-billion-dollar company offerings, the usability of maintaining the above points without multiple full time staff is critical. Are updates easy? A security updates automated? Backups? Is the app even translated into my language? Accessible in any meaningful way? How fragile are the systems, how easy to debug? How stable is the development of the software? Will it be abandoned? What's the cost to switch? Again, different slicing of the market where a smaller set of standards-driven clients where these efforts are focused can take the burden off of each community to build or manage their own.
time -- This is linked across most of the above, but worth noting separately. There is a lot of privilege built in to the presumption that anyone would have the time to manage self-hosting these tools, dealing with managing security updates which possibly break things and definitely don't coordinate schedules, and/or running the devices and having the bandwidth to do this. And that's not even touching on the much more full-contact-sport of community management.

For a good quick thread on how this all also relates to Section 230; check out this twitter thread

Where this is now

We should not expect to "fix" facebook. We're not going to convince google to constrain its ability to sell advertising (though its work to reduce individual tracking is promising!). With increasing public concern, EU regulation, and now anti-trust sabre rattling, we can hope for mega platforms to play a bit better, but maybe we'll see some divestment and splitting up of these giants, maybe we'll see them offering soft, unenforceable commitments to oversight or doing better, but the biggest hope I have is that we'll just move on.

But regardless, there's not a great alternative today. There are lots of explorations in this space, from swiss-army-knife meta tools like sandstorm and maadix; or specific, more specialized tools like rocket.chat or mattermost. There are federated platforms like matrix and mastodon, office suite tools from etherpad to sandstorm to cryptpad.

So, Let's build the tools for the world we want. Let's support these and many other tools to address accessibility, localization, usability, and sustainability, let's ensure they are listening to diverse voices with widely different threat models, and can work in a variety of bandwidth settings. Let's address the many barriers above with creative, open, resilient solutions.

De-platforming is censure not censorship.

Jon — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 23:16:11 +0000

De-platforming is censure not censorship. Jon Sat, 04/24/2021 - 19:16

This is part 2 in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet. Read Part 1: "I Believe in the Internet"

"De-platforming" is a bad framing of an important concept. Not being able to find a company to make your presence on the Internet easy is fundamentally different from having a government actively blocking access to you. We should be asking why these companies are choosing to allow the use of their platforms for hatespeech, violence, and undermining democracy instead of asking why specific people or companies doing this are being "de-platformed", as if a right to free speech somehow guarantees also a right to a soapbox and a megaphone.

Let's take Parler's journey, but you could sub in Gab, 8chan, or a host of other extremist sites.

But c'mon. Parler was going full-tilt at getting kicked off the "easy mode" of the major internet platforms from the start. Their incredibly lax content moderation combined with active courting of a violent extremist groups was going to end up in at best some drawn out legal wranglings and/or a perhaps slower and more planned bouncing from host to host until it found a site that would not kick it out. There is no reason not to cheer for its boot from easy and popular cloud hosting into … whatever collection of solutions it will manage to continue to cobble together.

How good things happen through a collection of bad things.

Let's talk about the various platforms which provided space for hatespeech.

First up, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and more. Imagine if any of these had followed their own content moderation principles ... well, at any point in history? How many horrible events could have simply not happened or have been not magnified. We should have community standards, and we should expect them to be applied fairly. At some level, these sites have grown too large and with specific business and design decisions which have undermined most reasonable attempts for communities to self-moderate, which is a separate and important issue. That said, sometimes people are shown the door. Getting kicked off of major social media platforms is often seen as an accomplishment, and honestly I wish it happened more and more reliably. Ongoing presence on major platforms is seen as a sign of broad societal acceptance, and that very specifically creates a dangerous echo chamber for extremist thought.
App Stores Both Google and Apple also kicked Parler out of their app stores. For Android, this is not impossible for users to get around; but on iOS it requires relatively difficult options. Anyone with the app still loaded will be theoretically able to use the resurrected app; but it will have a hard time getting new users, and they will be forced to use the mobile website version. App store censorship hits a bit different than platforms – it erodes user control over the devices they've paid for; and can put users at risk by blocking apps which could provide them safe, censorship-free paths onto the global Internet. Here though, Apple/iOS is actually a problem case, as there's simply not a responsible path to side-load apps. Apple made this decision for calculated gains on security, but it has serious costs in a world where Apple blocks human rights-protecting apps in certain locations as well as tightly control their own app store - but of course, Apple has backed off and is re-allowing the app.
And next; Amazon/AWS and Cloudflare "Censorship" at this more infrastructure-y level is not unheard of, but is much more rare (reminder, Amazon still hosts National Enquirer, which ... uh... well, I'll bet Jeff Bezos isn't a subscriber?) I am actually impressed Amazon acted here. Cloudflare, in their decision to stop providing services to The Daily Stormer, gave a good walk-through of potential places to regulate content online. Related to this decision, Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince is quoted from an internal memo as saying "No one should have that power." (to kick someone off the Internet). I… agree? But I disagree that Cloudflare (or AWS) has this unilateral power. Cloudflare refused to continue providing services to a site. Yes, this had substantial impact on the site, but there are other services which appear to not have such concerns, and they did come back online, but not without some challenges.
Even deeper: Infrastructure and Domain Name Registrars One group which has largely avoided this discussion thus far has been DNS registrars - the companies providing the key link between the domain names and the actual servers behind them. DNS providers have faced increasing pressure here as well, with sites bouncing around, adding new names, and eventually ending up at a registrar of last resort or using options that don't rely on the DNS system directly.

You can lose this all and still not be censored!

Yes, this has all been a protracted explanation of an xkcd comic

Even if you fall all the way down the entire stack, there are multiple options you can use to keep your content, no matter how vile it is, available -- but you suddenly have to do work.

Being booted from social media is hard, but you can continue to publish on your own site and on other platforms. If you get kicked off of hosting providers, it gets significantly more difficult. There are many good and detailed descriptions of why these not-quite-monopoly monopolies like AWS or Cloudflare are incredibly difficult to swap out for other vendors, but it is possible. Once we get to app stores and DNS, we are definitely in the "hard mode" of staying online. So sure, it's maybe a bit nervous making that these are increasingly centralized, and that these "lower level" core infrastructure businesses are wading in to content moderation, but … I'm just really struggling to give a flying fuck here.

The reality is that "de-platforming" works, and it limits the spread of dangerous disinformation and hatespeech, and de-platforming is not censorship. A right to express your opinion does not provide a right to a megaphone, and none of these companies are somehow morally or contractually bound to serve horrific content on anyone's behalf.

So yes, you should be pissed off about a centralized Internet infrastructure and quasi-monopoly companies controlling enormous power online; but focus this concern less on an edge case and more on the broader problem here. Let's be worried about which laws and governments and online pressure campaigns these systems respond to, let's consider different framings of what platforms and infrastructure really are but let's also accept that regardless, there is a path forward for whoever – "good" or "bad" – is kicked off of these to continue to speak their piece.

Free Speech actually is free (and open source) -- but not easy.

So you've been kicked off of the major platforms, and you no longer have their massive technology to use as a soapbox. Have fun setting up your 100% from scratch on self-hosted infrastructure. Welcome to your email and sites being outright blocked while also getting DDoS'ed into silence. Welcome to working to inform your community on how to connect over onion sites, and how to discuss safe side-loading of apps.

It turns out there is an incredibly resilient safety net for free speech – in an amazing set of decentralized, secure tools that were built to be the last line of defense for this universal human right. But free speech, when you don't get a global amplification platform for free, actually takes both a lot of work -- and an authentic and dedicated community.

If this sounds hard, it is. I have the amazing privilege to serve and work with communities around the world fighting for a chance at equality, at recognition, and simply for their own safety. Building community and exercising one's human right of free expression can be hard, and it can be dangerous.

Does this all mean these same tools that are the last and only vanguard for free speech also get used for hate speech? Yes, it does. This is the tip of the iceberg of a constant and raging debate. I choose to share the belief that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" (as quoted by MLK. Communities using on these tools to pursue equal rights will inevitably prevail, and those hiding behind them to spread hate speech and discord will wither.

Freedom of expression is a universal right, but not always an easy one.

Human Rights

I (Still) Believe in the Internet

Jon — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 17:48:16 +0000

I (Still) Believe in the Internet Jon Fri, 03/26/2021 - 13:48

This is the first in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet

I am a member of the forgotten gap-generation between Gen-X and the Millennials (Jillian York wrote eloquently on this almost a decade ago ). I didn't grow up "on" the Internet as a digital native -- I grew up alongside it.

My on-ramp started with dial-up access to local BBSes and eventually to the actual Internet at the time (USENET, Gopher, MUDs, and other now-mostly-dead systems), mostly accessed through a green-screen terminal via manually-typed in AT commands with a 2400 baud modem (or the 9600 baud one if you were first!). HTML itself, the base of the modern web, was just barely a project at the time, and the "World Wide Web" simply didn't exist. Being able to navigate via text screens the entire content of the local university's library (instead of getting a ride there and rummaging through a card catalog) was a game changer.

For the era, I had undeniably privileged access to the Internet -- which is to say that access to the Internet was itself inherently a privilege. This is a critical data point that gets lost in most rose-colored reflections of the Internet. That said, there was a strange undercurrent of makers, hackers, and this incredibly subversive belief in equality, collaboration, and sharing. With a huge caveat around its lack of diversity, the Internet did provide for a brief shining moment a safe space for people - awkward nerdy teenagers like me - who didn't really fit in but could find their way online. It was a ramshackle and weird community of MUDs and newsgroups and IRC chat channels and home-cooked bulletin boards. The Internet I knew was built and staffed by people who had previously run 3-line dial-up BBS systems and avid, if lost, volunteers who'd found a home and a family.

The modern Internet may seem like it still provides this, but instead of encouraging unity and positive support, it seems to excel instead at division and hate. What has happened, and how can we change course?

Diversity is the solution, not the problem.

There's a dangerously easy response and ease to blame the increased diversity of the Internet, but it also rings false. You can look at earlier "disruptions" of the norms of the Internet, all the way back to 1993's "Eternal September." September here references in its name the annual influx of first-time Internews users coming from universities every September. Eternal meant the event where AOL connected its dial-up services to the global Internet for the first time and unleashing its users, with dramatically different expectations of how to interact online, into a seasoned community which had deep rules of "netiquette." The older "netizens" of the Internet in the mid-90s complained endlessly about these newbies making a mess of things on the Internet, so it's important to remember that even "Eternal September" was still talking about a relatively still privileged, homogeneous group of college students and families able to pay for AOL at the time. This is not to say that diversity is not complicated, but that's it not to blame.

How things were – and could be again

My experiences finding multiple welcoming communities on this early Internet remain at the core of my belief that there is good in humanity, and that communication across borders and divorced from as many of the limitations or prejudices we may find in the real world is a key to empathy and solidarity. This in turn drives me to work towards rebuilding our modern Internet to resurface this community feeling - but with radical, actual inclusion - has deep value.

Story Time!

I want to just share one among many, many similar stories of my many bizarre stories from this proto-Internet era. I used to play on a MUD (look it up, kids) that was a text-based game loosely based on … ok, so the Highlander movies ... but with ... random sci-fi and fantasy elements thrown in by anyone who'd played long enough to get the power to build parts of the world themselves? I know. This sounds absolutely chaotic, and it was all of that and more. Like, someone built an extensive Star Wars part of the world off in one corner, where you had bards and barbarians trying to take down Jabba the Hutt. It's like fortnite, kinda, but if the global game allowed its own players to build core maps, change the rules, and it was all free?

But that's not even the story. One busy night on the MUD -- with lots of game chatter alongside people hacking away at text-based monsters, one of the players was in a really tough spot in their real life (they presented online as female, but who knew? There were no "real name" requirements). They started mentioning suicide. You have never seen more people, who were absolute strangers in real life, stumble over themselves to support this person, find out who was in the same town as they were, keep checking, and scheduling hand-offs through the night until they backed down from this path and were seeking help.

It's important to note that it wasn't all peer support groups and harmless pranks.

Even in the early days, true "griefers" - trolls intentionally looking to cause harm - did exist. Julian Dibble's seminal essay (from 1993) on one such case is an important piece of Internet history we would be wise to keep in mind. It encompasses a gender-fluid anarchist online community confronting a "virtual" rapist in their midst, and struggling to respond. It is absolutely worth a read, and any summary I could make would be an injustice to the richness of the essay. Even in this piece, the amazing sense of community resonates throughout. There is no call to authority, as the community is its own authority in a way that struggles to exist or scale outside of (increasingly historic) online interactions. The community rallied and responded to this attack, and rebuilt itself with tools and governance to prevent it from happening again.

Undermining Community Responsibility

By centralizing so much of the online discourse, while simultaneously undermining community ownership and management of public online spaces, we have seen the snowballing effect of under-moderated spaces for discourse falling prey to targeted attacks - not only intentional dis/mal -information style, but also simply trolling and hate groups able to weaponize platforms.

Cesspools of hateful groups can exist online, and will be challenging to ever eradicate without also undermining important freedom of speech protections, but these cesspools combined with monopolized "public" spaces online provide a toxic ecosystem forcing those who are being victimized into a small number of platforms where they are easily targeted with few tools or policies/processes to defend themselves short of silencing their own voices by leaving the privatized public square.

The public square cannot remain a privatized space online. We must reign in what Zuboff so eloquently frames as "surveillance capitalism", and the dangerous business model dynamics it produces. But in parallel, disinformation campaigns must also be unmasked, racists and fascists "de-platformed." All of this is to say that being allowed on these centralized social platforms holds outsized power, and either the platforms must be held to account to tend to their walled gardens, or we need new community-centered systems.

From Usability to Threat Modeling

Jon — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 18:39:58 +0000

From Usability to Threat Modeling Jon Tue, 08/11/2020 - 14:39

This is cross-posted from USABLE.tools

Across our portfolio of technology, training, and advocacy to support a free and open Internet that protects and advances human rights, we are assembling a wide array of foundational resources (all released under Creative Commons licenses!).

Threat Modeling in Internet Freedom Projects

It's important to underline that this is not a new concept -- certainly there are many security tools which already carefully consider threat models during development; there is much written on using use cases and "misuse cases" to expose the security and usability requirements for tools -- this paper provides a good overview, and EFF's Security Education Companion coverage of Threat Models introduces the concept for use in training.

These include user personas with community-built lists of needs, and information about the threats or adversaries they face. This collection of different resources is not coincidental – it builds a space in the middle to create detailed threat models around specific tools and practices and paves the way to more expansive and cohesive long term digital safety strategies for resilient communities.

What we have

At-Risk User Personas	Contextual Digital Risk Assessments
Our USABLE.tools project has a user persona library with 30+ user personas from around the world, representing LGBTQI activists, persons with disabilities, human rights defenders in closed states, and many more. These are not simply idealized stereotypes, however - they are created by the at-risk users themselves to provide authentic insight into the lived experiences, needs, and threats of these communities without putting any specific members of their community at risk. These personas provide critical insights into the needs and threats real people face in challenging environments. Tools for these communities need to be resilient against a wide variety of technical, physical, and legal attacks while also being easy to use, with little or no training.	Risk Assessments are a core of Internews' internal risk management process, and we also strongly encourage auditors using the SAFETAG framework to leverage a similar approach to research the technical and social context that they are working in when assessing an organization's security. The framework provides a guide to research the technical capacity of potential threat actors, including both historical attack data and any indicators of changes to their capacity. Auditors are encouraged to also look at focal areas and trends.

At-Risk User Personas

Contextual Digital Risk Assessments

Our USABLE.tools project has a user persona library with 30+ user personas from around the world, representing LGBTQI activists, persons with disabilities, human rights defenders in closed states, and many more. These are not simply idealized stereotypes, however - they are created by the at-risk users themselves to provide authentic insight into the lived experiences, needs, and threats of these communities without putting any specific members of their community at risk. These personas provide critical insights into the needs and threats real people face in challenging environments. Tools for these communities need to be resilient against a wide variety of technical, physical, and legal attacks while also being easy to use, with little or no training.

Risk Assessments are a core of Internews' internal risk management process, and we also strongly encourage auditors using the SAFETAG framework to leverage a similar approach to research the technical and social context that they are working in when assessing an organization's security. The framework provides a guide to research the technical capacity of potential threat actors, including both historical attack data and any indicators of changes to their capacity. Auditors are encouraged to also look at focal areas and trends.

What we're building

Under the next phase of USABLE's work, we will be building two new resources - "personas" which represent the needs of organizations and communities and “personas” which capture the capabilities and motivations of realistic but generalized adversaries.

Organizational Archetypes	Adversary Personas
Organizational Archetypes capture the complex needs of organizations and communities, spanning from grassroots communities all the way up to donors in the space facing state-level adversaries. What are the more complex needs and different threats faced when collaborating? Secure messaging, calls, and document collaboration are all significantly more complex when you have multiple people or organizations involved, and tools which are relatively easy to swap in and out at a personal level become incredibly more complex if an entire organization depends upon them as a core part of their workflow.	Adversary Personas will contain realistic details of generalized adversaries’ capacities and what issues these actors are willing to expend resources and build capacity to undermine. Organizations will be able to use these resources to anticipate potential threats and malicious actions and proactively develop practices and responses to realistic situations. This will enable developers, trainers, policymakers, funders, and others to contextualize their work against a wider variety of threat actors without having to rely on any one specific nation-state as a "bogeyman." I specifically hope this enables richer conversation around actual threats while removing cultural stereotypes and prejudices.

Organizational Archetypes

Adversary Personas

Organizational Archetypes capture the complex needs of organizations and communities, spanning from grassroots communities all the way up to donors in the space facing state-level adversaries.

What are the more complex needs and different threats faced when collaborating? Secure messaging, calls, and document collaboration are all significantly more complex when you have multiple people or organizations involved, and tools which are relatively easy to swap in and out at a personal level become incredibly more complex if an entire organization depends upon them as a core part of their workflow.

Adversary Personas will contain realistic details of generalized adversaries’ capacities and what issues these actors are willing to expend resources and build capacity to undermine.

Organizations will be able to use these resources to anticipate potential threats and malicious actions and proactively develop practices and responses to realistic situations. This will enable developers, trainers, policymakers, funders, and others to contextualize their work against a wider variety of threat actors without having to rely on any one specific nation-state as a "bogeyman." I specifically hope this enables richer conversation around actual threats while removing cultural stereotypes and prejudices.

From Resources to Practice

These are collectively designed to enable unbiased discussions and strategy development around the serious challenges and threats users, organizations, and entire communities face, the tools we use to help, and tools, practices, or policies we wish we had.

Responses focused on threats, not just threat actors Threat actors change and evolve, and often have more capacity than is publicly confirmed (but perhaps less than is presumed through rumor). By extracting and de-personalizing aspects of this, we can have clearer discussions. Further, specifying current existing actors, especially in open source tools, can overly complicate the public profile of the tool as well as those using it. If a tool is
clearly built to combat a specific actor, then users of that tool can be seen as inherently being aligned against that actor. This has resulted already in excessive targeting and jailing of activists based on their tool choice.
Identification of common, cross-regional threats What attacks, specific techniques, and even malicious tools are being used and re-used globally? Are there patterns we can detect and build proactive defenses against?
Gap identification What gaps remain when we look at this data mapped out? Is anyone working to address them? What solutions
(tools, training, policy changes) could be used? How do we sustainably build these resources?
More dynamic responses, more resilient communities By tackling the inputs into this process separately, we can update our models more agilely and plan against a wider variety of attacks to build tools and guidance that are more resilient to more types of threat actors as well as changes in any specific actor.
Future-looking strategies With these fictional personas and archetypes, we do not have to be as limited to current actors and their capacities. We can (within reason) consider possible future threats that activists may face by remixing and extrapolating from current threats. Anticipating these risks will allow us to build tools to mitigate sooner, rather than later. Dystopian cyberpunk scenarios welcome!
These resources can be used to develop tabletop scenarios to explore current and emerging threats and build creative responses to
them. These scenarios are useful in advanced trainings, tool development, and strategy building exercises. Fictional but realistic adversaries and personas can get into detail around specific threats and mitigations without being as personal, risking bias, and helping reduce potential of trauma involved in these discussions.

Re-factoring the Crypto Debate

Jon — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 22:36:21 +0000

Re-factoring the Crypto Debate Jon Mon, 12/16/2019 - 17:36

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is hosting a working group to move the crypto debate forward by adding two valuable dimensions to the conversation. The WG added use cases to more capture concerns of various stakeholders and defined its technical scope, selecting a specific point to engage in this debate (around the ability to break encryption on mobile devices under the physical control of national law enforcement, but not in-transit or, theoretically, remote device access).

That said, I find the report and its use cases dangerously US-centric; ignoring the role of authoritarian states and how even this tightly scoped debate would put human rights defenders, activists, and advocates for change in these places at risk. The use cases include a wide variety, but exclude the use cases of authoritarian, state-level actors and also exclude activists who will be targeted with technologies that break end to end encryption guarantees.

We need to look beyond markets to how crypto regulation advances or undermines long-term goals around democracy and human rights around the world. "Exceptional Access" or however we frame it will be used against human rights defenders - either directly, or through pressure on tech platforms to provide equivalent access to states we might consider authoritarian. It may be a bitter pill for the law enforcement groups who seem themselves as the good guys fighting human trafficking and other horrible crimes; but promoting e2ee to encourage and protect opening civil spaces, more safely confronting corruption, and sustaining democracy could be a bigger win on a long-term, global level.

Ending the Crypto War

After three decades of effectively no progress, and despite significant effort here to identify points of agreement, we need to call it done. The argument that end to end crypto can be responsibly backdoored or realistically controlled in a way that provides only "good guys" reliable access without opening risks to bad actors is a dead end.

There is simply not a technical solution that doesn't result in significant negative consequences for the majority of the global population while not actually solving the problems presented by the minority of high-tech criminals, who will simply adopt tools not limited by the domestic policies of any one country - which seems most likely to make the problem even worse for everyone involved, except the most tech-savvy criminals, who will maintain or even improve their opsec.

It's important to frame this death not as a technical "problem," but as a process one. We simply do not have institutions or transparency with the trust and accountability to wield the eternal responsibility these systems would require. Even if we did have this at a point in time, we demonstrably cannot guarantee it over time. We don't have this domestically in the US, and again, even if we did, we live in an international world where the concept of being able to control and limit the spread of end to end encryption is a pipe dream.

But this is the debate that we cannot seem to put a pin in after three decades, so perhaps this is the wrong argument to be having. We need to flip this debate.

We should frame any further "cryptowar" debate in much longer-term, internationally-informed impacts and strategic goals. The ability to have dissenting opinions, to resist authoritarianism, and simply to live as human beings with personal privacy requires moving offline concepts of privacy, norms, and expectations into our digital world. Among many things, this also means an ability to have private conversations, which in a digital world requires end to end encryption, full stop.

If we want more democratic societies with resilient civil societies providing debate, watchdog functions, advancing transparency, and protecting human rights, then we need to accept the risks and complications that that requires.

A Path Forward

This isn't to say that we throw our hands in the air and give up on limiting criminal behavior; but that we look at it from a different, and more strategic angle.

We can take a stronger stance overall; that we can and do accept this limitation, and that and we are strong enough and effective enough to fight crime that is organized and facilitated online as well as offline, and that we can do this in a rights-respecting manner in both cases. This isn't a simple path, and it requires resources and training; but protecting human rights while undermining human rights activism is an untenable path.

Photo Credit: "Broken Key" CC-BY-NC, unrequitedlife on flickr*

Human Rights

Cyberpunk Standards

Jon — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 02:49:13 +0000

Cyberpunk Standards Jon Thu, 02/14/2019 - 21:49

The future of technology requires a dramatic shift from the present to place ownership and control back in the hands of consumers.

We engage with technology in incredibly and increasingly intimate ways, both intentionally and not. Our actions online are scrutinized, our conversations listened in on, our behaviors predicted, and all of this is done cavalierly to market products towards us, with no safeguards or thought given to not only the risks and impact of having this data available about us.

The trend is for these devices to only become more and more integrated with our most personal lives, but no less cavalier about data collection. We have already seen eyeglasses that mediate our experience with the world. While those did not have success in their original incarnation, "smart" watches that are linked to our identities and track our blood pressure and other vital signs, tied to our location, have become a normal part of life. We intentionally set up devices to constantly listen to us and work with tools which also are trying to market to us and have us buy and use their services (hello, Amazon Echo, plus Amazon's new purchase history based ad network. We are addicted to social media sites which thrive on us fighting rather than sharing and cooperating. Facebook continues acting like a junkie seeking ever bigger hits of access to our personal data. We carry cell phones with us everywhere while they track our locations and sell them to the lowest bidder.

If huge, centralized, monopolistic, and hyper-profitable platforms are this irresponsible with our data, new entrants to the data-mining space are even scarier. The "surveillance capitalism" business model has escaped from the purely online realm into the "Internet of Things" and is embedding data gathering and monetization in some incredibly ... weird locations.

Sleep Number beds, for example, are bringing new meaning to the idea of "sleeping on a cloud," when that cloud is actually "The Cloud" and is recording how you move around your own bed. "Smart" sex toys are "a long way behind general IoT product security," which is one of the more scarier things one could write about product security. TV manufacturer Vizio has had to admit in court that their Smart TVs being sold at a discount to sell your usage data, and a gazillion of other poorly-thought-through, unmaintained, internet-connected devices which will all end up hacked and screaming at us about an imminent nuclear attack (or, if we're lucky and get a Canadian hacker, a kind person trying to tell us to update our passwords).

More seriously, it's deeply important to also note that this problem is still here in the world of medical implants, and the only reason you don't hear more about the risks is that good-intentioned researchers are legally barred from testing the devices ... by copyright laws.

Even our laptops, that last bastion of general-purpose computing and simple devices which you pay money for and then theoretically actually, really, "own", are increasingly full of software-as-a-service and content-as-a-service, with Microsoft moving even the operating system to a data-gathering service model.

Towards a Cyberpunk Future

So, things are... not great. We as consumers are losing our ability to have any sense of ownership over what we buy. This is slowly infecting other business models as well, to the extent that you can expect cars to be sold in the near future which can only be serviced by their own manufacturer, following John Deere's tractors-as-a-service model.

In most cyberpunk genre sci-fi, you get some form of direct brain-to-computer interface. Elon Musk has already come out stating that he wants to create a direct link between your brain and technology in the next decade, and concepts like Google Glass are clearly along the same trajectory.

Let's play back some of these problems with now having a device that requires deeply invasive and risky surgery to change (with a hat tip to the 465,000 people who needed to get their pacemaker software updated to prevent getting their hearts hacked).

Apple's version: Oh, I'm sorry, we don't use that connector any more - you'll have to upgrade.
Every single Internet of Things company: The company behind this implant has gone out of business/been acquired/pivoted to a new business model, so it's no longer being supported.
Microsoft: The software you're running is now obsolete and isn't getting security updates any more. You'll have to completely uninstall it and buy a new tool (which probably will have the same problem in a year or two) -- or risk your brain getting hacked.
Facebook: We apologize for the data breach/being caught selling all your data (again); all of your thoughts and a video of everything you saw for the 6 month period of the attack (and/or possibly your entire time using this platform) have now been released publicly on the internet with your name associated. We'll provide a year of free credit monitoring though!
Google: We have decided to end this much-loved product. All your memories will be deleted in 6 months.

This is an unacceptable future (not to mention the present) we are building. We need to start unraveling this now if we want to enjoy the actual and real potential benefits of this level of personal and assistive technology, of which there are many.

Clear Skies - towards a future with fewer clouds.

We need civil society, hackers, regulators - and most importantly, leading technology companies themselves to step forward. If you want there to be a market to tap into human conscienceness, you have to start now at re-building trust with consumers -- and bind yourself through transparent processes, legally, and technically -- to be responsible with what data is gathered, how it is gathered and used, and an aggressive embrace and support of open technologies to ensure long-term functionality, support, and unfettered access, ownership, and a real ability to transition to alternate, competitive platforms.

If this sounds scary, just reflect on the exact excitement which drove so many rounds of innovation and growth - embracing open standards, from email to the web to cross-platform chat enabled competing platforms to not be walled gardens, but compete on the strength of their communities and additional offerings.

There are bright lights. Mozilla is pushing for Minimum Security Guidelines for smart products. Open Privacy has launched an initial demo UI for a decentralized, tor-backed messaging and application platform.

Cyberpunk Standards

Below are some rough-hewn requirements to reset technology onto a path that can create an actually pretty amazing future - instead of a hellscape of insecure software tracking your life and advertising at you installed in your head while also requiring a bag of adapters and dongles to keep up with new "standards". Mozilla's Minimum Security Guidelines is a critical step that should be taken immediately.

OWNERSHIP

Restore and guarantee full ownership of purchased products to their purchasers - separate products from services, support and build open standards with limited licensing fees (only to ensure quality), and for hardware, enable 3rd party repairs and user-replaceable components
Support rollback of DMCA-like laws and aggressively support tinkering and reversing of owned products, leverage these as part of market research and ideation (e.g. iPhone rooting innovations brought app folders, new swipe-to-access control panels, and night-time modes)

SUSTAINABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY

Aim for long-term implementations and require backwards compatibility (e.g. don't be Apple)
Open APIs and Standards: Embrace and support independent developers and open source tools by adopting and sticking with standards, providing extensive documentation, and directly supporting adaptations and independent projects instead of exporting the labor cost to volunteer developers.
Open Source, code audits, and reproducible builds to prove the code audited is the code used, and improving the transparency and usability of this process all the way down -- including funding usability work to make this process clear and understandable.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Push data processing back to the edge - offline voice/image recognition and actions, focus on local-network applications which users can opt to bridge onto the Internet if they choose to
Guarantee data portability, remove walled gardens, support open and stable APIs for personal use
Minimization of data gathering; for debugging rely on user-initiated push and provide an understandable summary of what data is being submitted
de-personalization of tracking, with audited and provable processes
Evolving business models to support privacy and doubling down on the transparency aspects
Use true end-to-end encryption wherever possible, and build a user experience around supporting that.

Certainly there are more, and these could use edits. I've posted the above list as a small github repository at https://github.com/joncamfield/cyberpunkstandards/ and welcome issues and pull requests.

Photo by Alexander London

Hactivismo

We have always been at war with crypto

Jon — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:29:32 +0000

We have always been at war with crypto Jon Thu, 10/12/2017 - 20:29

This now exists (and will be updated) as a github repository!

As we debate "responsible encryption," here is a long scroll of pullquotes from the previous incarnations of CryptoWars. If you're concerned about this, donate to the EFF -- they've always been there, fighting this insanity back.

1995

"Opposing Clipper is an odd pairing of civil liberties activists and corporations. The activists worry that the government could have too much access to private exchanges. Companies have chafed at export restrictions that stop them from using the best encryption technologies in products they sell abroad. … Companies would rather include many different encryption technologies in the products they sell and don't want to be locked into government-approved hardware. They also point out that their customers overseas are unlikely to want to use the Clipper lock knowing that the U.S. government holds the keys." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/03/16/three-ways-to-catch-a-code/a40f4339-071b-4f53-9b31-f33892e0cbff/

"Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards?" … Keane would not comment directly on the Zimmermann case, but said, "Everybody who has looked at these issues would agree that, A, no court has decided these issues, and B, that these are very tough issues. Sooner or later some tough decisions are going to have to be made."
One way the government has tried to address the widespread use of encryption is through stringent export regulations to control dissemination of such technologies. Those rules even apply to such garden-variety software as Norton Utilities, which offers encryption as part of its popular package of tools to help computer users manage their machines. The company sells two versions of the software: one for domestic use and an encryption-free version for international markets. The government also has promoted the "Clipper Chip," a voluntary technology that would allow users to scramble their files and communications but still would be breakable by the government. Widespread opposition to the Clinton administration's initial proposal last year sent the government back to the drawing board to find a more workable solution.

-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/04/03/privacy-program-an-on-line-weapon/3d61a997-0b28-49e8-9ac3-47b541ef16b6/

1996

"The problem is this: Individuals and businesses have a legitimate need to protect information from interlopers through the use of cryptography. But law enforcement officials fear that drug dealers and terrorists using cryptography will be able to thwart legally authorized surveillance and search warrants. National security officials are concerned that encrypted communications may frustrate intelligence collection against parties that might be building nuclear or biological weapons for use against the United States." -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/encryption/stories/ocr072396.htm

1997

"Although the Government has a strong interest in preserving national security, its Export Administration Regulations on encryption ("EAR") do not further this interest, and, in fact, may undermine it. The EAR are designed to prevent the foreign availability and use of "strong" (i.e., greater than 40-bit key length) encryption. Notwithstanding the existence of the EAR, however, strong encryption products already are used and widely available outside the United States. Thus, the EAR do little, if anything, to prevent foreign intelligence and law enforcement targets from obtaining and using strong encryption capabilities in their efforts to deny U.S. access to their communications. On this basis alone, the Government's attempt to justify the EAR as a direct and material means of preventing a threat to national security must fail." "Moreover, even if strong encryption were not already available to foreign entities, the Government's effort to prevent such availability through the use of the EAR is significantly undermined by the print exception to the EAR.(1) Nothing in the EAR prohibits a printed version of the encryption source code from export and, once abroad, conversion into electronic source code either manually or by automated means. As the District Court opinion (ER 544-78) described it, the print exception "undermines the stated purpose of the regulations." Id. at 568." -- RSA Amicus Brief in the Berstein case, https://cr.yp.to/export/1997/1110-conboy.html#Security

1998

"Similarly, the fight over encryption on the Internet will continue. The government fears that allowing the unregulated use of message-scrambling technology would give criminals and terrorists a cloak to hide their digital activities. So FBI Director Louis Freeh has called for requirements that all encryption used in the United States have a back door so that law enforcement can unscramble the messages, and is pushing for telecommunications networks to be designed with built-in wiretapping capability. In recent congressional testimony, Freeh termed those who oppose encryption controls as representatives of "narrow interests."" -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/02/15/deja-vucom/064f1b5c-99d3-4d31-b1ac-a681305ed721/

1999

“Mossad. Bomb. Davidian. MI5. LCOS If the hunch of a loose-knit group of cyber-activists is correct, the above words will trip the keyword recognition filter on a global spy system partly managed by the US National Security Agency… Privacy activists have used the words in their signature files for years as a running schtick, but on 21 October, a group of activists orginating on the "hacktivist" mailing list hope to to trip up Echelon on a much wider scale. "What is [Echelon] good for?" asked Linda Thompson, a constitutional rights attorney and chairman of the American Justice Federation. "If you want to say we can catch criminals with it, it is insane that anyone should be able to snoop on anyone's conversations…Criminals ought to be caught after they commit a crime -- but police are not here to invade all our privacy to catch that two percent [of criminal communications]," she said.” -- https://www.wired.com/1999/10/hackers-ascend-upper-echelon/

2000

"It took four months, a grim debate, and thousands of mailing list messages, but the group that sets Internet standards has decided not to support wiretapping… "This is outrageous," wrote Ed Stone. "A third party taps a communication in secret, but the selection is NOT targeted to a SPECIFIC person, so it is not 'wiretapping.' This is simply incredible!" -- https://www.wired.com/2000/02/thumbs-down-on-net-wiretaps/

2014, note - 2 years before the San Bernadino case

"Comey also posed as a question “whether companies not subject currently to Calea should be required to build lawful intercept capabilities for law enforcement”, something he contended would not “expand” FBI authorities”. Calea is a 1994 surveillance law mandating that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have access to telecommunications data, which Comey described as archaic in the face of technological innovation. … Comey, frequently referring to “bad guys” using encryption, argued access to the cloud is insufficient. “Uploading to the cloud doesn’t include all the stored data on the bad guy’s phone,” he said. “It’s the people who are most worried what’s on the device who will be most likely to avoid the cloud.”" -- http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/16/fbi-director-attacks-tech-companies-encryption

2015

"Under questioning Comey admitted that even if the US did pass laws allowing law enforcement access to encrypted information, there were still plenty of tools produced outside of the US that would be untappable, saying "we'd have a heck of a time trying to do that." Comey declined to say if selling borked crypto would put American companies at a disadvantage when trying to sell overseas. " -- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/08/crap_crypto_enforcement_laws_coming_as_fbi_boss_testifies_to_congress/

2016

Oh you dear sweet summer child...

"If history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, what does the FBI have in store next for its encryption war with Apple? … Yet forgive us if this “conversation” now seems more like a Jim Comey monologue. The debate might start to be productive if the FBI Director would stop trying to use the courts as an ad hoc policy tool and promised not to bring any more cases like the one in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the White House has taken the profile-in-courage stand of refusing to endorse or oppose any encryption bill that Congress may propose. If the Obama team won’t start adjusting to the technological realities of strong and legal encryption, they could at least exercise some adult supervision at Main Justice. -- http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-encryption-farce-1461624399 / https://archive.is/CYpbc

2017

""Warrant-proof encryption defeats the constitutional balance by elevating privacy above public safety," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a speech at the US Naval Academy today (transcript). "Encrypted communications that cannot be intercepted and locked devices that cannot be opened are law-free zones that permit criminals and terrorists to operate without detection by police and without accountability by judges and juries." ... "We know from experience that the largest companies have the resources to do what is necessary to promote cybersecurity while protecting public safety. A major hardware provider, for example, reportedly maintains private keys that it can use to sign software updates for each of its devices. That would present a huge potential security problem, if those keys were to leak. But they do not leak, because the company knows how to protect what is important. Companies can protect their ability to respond to lawful court orders with equal diligence." " -- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/trumps-doj-tries-to-rebrand-weakened-encryption-as-responsible-encryption/

"The Justice Department signaled Tuesday it intends to take a more aggressive posture in seeking access to encrypted information from technology companies, setting the stage for another round of clashes in the tug of war between privacy and public safety. … “Warrant-proof encryption is not just a law enforcement problem,” Mr. Rosenstein said at a conference at the U.S. Naval Academy. “The public bears the cost. When our investigations of violent criminal organizations come to a halt because we cannot access a phone, even with a court order, lives may be lost. " “Technology companies almost certainly will not develop responsible encryption if left to their own devices,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “Competition will fuel a mind-set that leads them to produce products that are more and more impregnable. That will give criminals and terrorists more opportunities to cause harm with impunity.”” -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-be-more-aggressive-in-seeking-encrypted-data-1507651438 / http://archive.is/i1jNu

2018

"Warrant-proof encryption defeats the constitutional balance by elevating privacy above public safety. Encrypted communications that cannot be intercepted and locked devices that cannot be opened are law-free zones that permit criminals and terrorists to operate without detection by police and without accountability by judges and juries." "When encryption is designed with no means of lawful access, it allows terrorists, drug dealers, child molesters, fraudsters, and other criminals to hide incriminating evidence. Mass-market products and services incorporating warrant-proof encryption are now the norm. Many instant-messaging services employ default encryption designs that offer police no way to read them, even if an impartial judge issues a court order. The makers of smart phones previously kept the ability to access some data on phones, when ordered by a court to do so. Now they engineer away even that capability." "We refer to this problem as “Going Dark” – the threat to public safety that occurs when service providers, device manufacturers, and application developers deprive law enforcement and national security investigators of crucial investigative tools. " […] ". Responsible encryption can involve effective, secure encryption that allows access only with judicial authorization. Such encryption already exists. Examples include the central management of security keys and operating system updates; the scanning of content, like your e-mails, for advertising purposes; the simulcast of messages to multiple destinations at once; and key recovery when a user forgets the password to decrypt a laptop." […] "Responsible encryption can protect privacy and promote security without forfeiting access for legitimate law enforcement needs supported by judicial approval." -- https://www.lawfareblog.com/deputy-attorney-general-rod-rosenstein-remarks-encryption

"One of the most profoundly disruptive developments occurring in the cyber security arena today is the headlong rush by a set of parties to ubiquitously implement extreme End-to-End (e2e) encryption […] The generally understood objective by its zealous leaders is to cause everyone except the end parties of the communications services to "go dark"" "Responsible commercial and intergovernmental industry technical venues have for decades adopted appropriate forms of Transport, Network, and Application Layer Security — rejecting extreme e2e encryption capabilities" "There is flatly no "right" to unfettered personal encrypted communication on publicly available infrastructures and services." -- Future talking points to watch for, via http://www.circleid.com/posts/20171024_legal_controls_on_extreme_end_to_end_encryption_ee2ee/

“I think there should be [room for compromise],” Wray said Wednesday night at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado. “I don’t want to characterize private conversations we’re having with people in the industry. We’re not there yet for sure. And if we can’t get there, there may be other remedies, like legislation, that would have to come to bear.” -- https://www.cyberscoop.com/fbi-director-without-compromise-encryption-legislation-may-remedy/

"And if we can't get there, there may be other remedies, like legislation, that would have to come to bear. But I really do believe that if people come at it with a goal I think we all share of having both strong cybersecurity and protecting flesh-and-blood Americans -- Again, there's a way to do this. We're a country that has unbelievable innovation. We put a man on the moon. We have the power of flight. We have autonomous vehicles… [T]he idea that we can't solve this problem as a society -- I just don't buy it." -- https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180721/12074340282/fbi-boss-chris-wray-we-put-man-moon-so-why-not-encryption-backdoors.shtml

2019

"Senior officials debated whether to ask Congress to effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data so that only its sender and recipient can read it, these people told POLITICO. [...] “The two paths were to either put out a statement or a general position on encryption, and [say] that they would continue to work on a solution, or to ask Congress for legislation,” said one of the people. -- https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/27/trump-officials-weigh-encryption-crackdown-1385306

Additional historic quotes welcomed!