Last week I posted about the Congressional request that DNI Gabbard look into the UK government's demand that Apple put an encryption backdoor into their products. She has done so:
In a written response to members of Congress, Gabbard said this week that such a demand would violate Americans’ rights and raise concerns about a foreign government pressuring a U.S.-based technology company.
“This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” Gabbard told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who had written to express their worries.
...
Gabbard has asked the heads of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to study the U.K. demand and said she will discuss it with her British counterparts. She noted that existing agreements between the two nations prohibit either country from demanding cloud data about citizens or residents of the other.
This seems unprecedented to me - the relationship between the US and UK intelligence communities has been very close for literally decades - I have personal experience of this in the 1990s and it predates that by a lot.
Europe seems really intent on making all sorts of relationships worse.
And it seems that Gabbard is intent on not doing it, protecting our rights. While it was congress that asked her to look into it, she should be making her former Dems happy, especially the hard lefty that is Ron Wyden.
ReplyDeleteTuna, Wyden may be a hard leftie but he has a track record of standing up for online freedom. Credit where it's due.
ReplyDeleteExit Five Eyes now. UK is malicious and the others are useless.
ReplyDeleteFive Eyes became Nine Eyes and is now Fourteen Eyes.
DeleteYes, exterminate them!
So much for the Special Relationship.
ReplyDeleteWhich was always a scam.
DeleteYep, puts five eyes on 'tenuous' ground, but that crap needs to be stopped.
ReplyDeleteOceania has always been at war with Eastasia!!
ReplyDeleteStill no mention of Gabbard asking tech companies to stop putting backdoors in for U.S. intel agencies.
ReplyDelete[Yawn.] #sameoldBS
Aesop, the last I remember a US company doing a crypto backdoor was RSA changing the BSAFE cyphers. It pretty well ended that product line. IIRC, this was 2013 or so.
ReplyDeleteRight.
DeleteThat we know of.
I merely point to how much DotGov whinges about open-source encryption by entities like PGP, versus the deafening silence about BigTech-provided encryption, and note the vastly differing levels of cacophony.
QED