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You are here: Home / I’ve Got a Golden Twinkle in My Eye

I’ve Got a Golden Twinkle in My Eye

by | 57 Comments

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This video portrays Fred Hiatt explaining his clever plan to give law enforcement access to Apple and Google’s encrypted data:

How to resolve this? A police “back door” for all smartphones is undesirable — a back door can and will be exploited by bad guys, too. However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant. […]

I believe we’ve been here before. Not gonna happen, but it’s nice to see that the Post’s Editorial Board has broadened their focus from neocon warmongering to ahistorical and technically illiterate commentary on encryption. The conversation leading up to this editorial must have sounded like outtakes from Harry Potter: “Why, we know that a back door could be opened by criminals, but if Albus Dumbledore conjured a secure golden key, then of course no criminal could open that black box! 5 points to Gryffindor!”

(via Kevin Drum)

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    And they should make the password for said golden key “password,” so it’s easy for law enforcement to remember.

  3. 3.

    Amir Khalid

    I’d join in the pointing and laughing, but I used to write shit like that too, during my own journo days. Still, if all of a sudden Apple did turn around and produce the magic decryption key Hiatt seems to believe they’re really hiding, everyone would point at them: “YOU LIED!!” I doubt they fancy kissing their credibility goodbye.

  5. 5.

    MattF

    This is in line with the suggestion that there should be a ‘spam’ bit in email IP packets. Would solve a lot of problems, no?

  6. 6.

    Scott S.

    There’s a certain kind of non-technical person who really do believe technology is just another form of magic. How do you make a backdoor that won’t be accessible to criminals? Well, you use Apple’s Golden Key!

    Fred Hiatt probably wonders what would happen if he opened up his computer. Would it let all the magical fairy dust fall out? Would it allow Intel the Mystical Gnome to flee? Would vampire bats fly out?

  9. 9.

    Hunter Gathers

    Do our elites know anything? I’m going to try to get into Hiatt’s e-mail. I’m fairly certain that the password to every WaPo e-mail is embedded in the HTML code somewhere. Because the WaPo is obviously run by morons.

  11. 11.

    cmorenc

    Most journalists, including the editors in charge of most news publications, didn’t get there by way of taking any more math courses in college than the bare minimum required to get their bachelor’s degree in something other than math, science, or engineering. Their understanding is limited to the level of shallow metaphorical analogy, and even more shallow understanding of the flaws and limitations to those metaphors, which are often metaphorically explainable only by addition of further mixed metaphors which add to the confusion.

  12. 12.

    Scott S.

    @Amir Khalid: I am now unable to stop imagining Fred Hiatt trying to figure out how Bill O’Reilly got inside his TV, and why he won’t speak to him when he waves.

    The longer I live, the more I suspect that most of our pundits are not only dumber than we thought, but dumber than we thought was possible.

  13. 13.

    OldDave

    I was about to post a link to RFC 3514, but I see I’ve been beaten to the punch, twice. You have to love the April 1st RFC tradition. RFC 1149 is a favorite of mine.

  14. 14.

    Schlemazel

    @Scott S.:
    If Haitte opened his head THEN bats would fly out.

    What stuns me is that he admits that any backdoor could be broken into then says the solution is to create a backdoor that nobody would be able to break into. D’Oh!

  16. 16.

    Ruckus

    @Scott S.:

    The longer I live, the more I suspect that most of our pundits are not only dumber than we thought, but dumber than we thought was possible.

    Man speak truth.

  17. 17.

    geg6

    @cmorenc:

    Sorry, but that does not explain it. I was a polisci major and took as little math and science as possible and still get my degree. I did the same with my graduate degree. You don’t need to be a physicist, engineer or computer scientist to understand the basics of why Hiatt’s latest idiocy is so idiotic.

  18. 18.

    Randy P

    I think we’re making progress on technical literacy, now that so many people work with computers on a daily basis and realize how dumb they are. I was reading a 1990s-era novel by one of my favorite authors, Donald Westlake, and it featured the “computer programmed to think and talk like a person” that was so popular in fiction, TV and movies of that era. “Oh, it has a personality because I programmed that into it”.

    While pulling up all my old annoyances at this meme, I also reflected that I hadn’t seen it in awhile. Even journalists are aware that the 14-year-olds are using computers to post selfies to Facebook, not to take over the world or ask the computer to instantly produce 3-D wireframe models of any city or object in the world “because I programmed it to do that”.

    Hiatt is in an older generation, and still believes the 90s memes. Oh and probably also that Scotty could get a 1986-era PC to produce Star Trek technology by typing really fast on it (See Star Trek 4: Save the Whales).

  24. 24.

    Bill Arnold

    @Howard Beale IV:
    For email, rfc 3514 defines a new MIME type:

    An application/evil MIME type is defined for Web- or email-carried
    mischief. Other MIME types can be embedded inside of evil sections;
    this permit easy encoding of word processing documents with macro
    viruses, etc.

  25. 25.

    drkrick

    @Scott S.:

    Fred Hiatt probably wonders what would happen if he opened up his computer. Would it let all the magical fairy dust fall out? Would it allow Intel the Mystical Gnome to flee? Would vampire bats fly out?

    Everybody knows that you’ll lose all the bits if you don’t have an approved bit bucket handy when the back comes off.

    I had to pretend to discipline someone after he got a customer to waste about an hour trying to find a bit bucket vendor once upon a time. And we didn’t even work for Fred Hiatt.

  27. 27.

    Joey Maloney

    @Scott S.:

    Fred Hiatt probably wonders what would happen if he opened up his computer. Would it let all the magical fairy dust fall out? Would it allow Intel the Mystical Gnome to flee? Would vampire bats fly out?

    C’mon, don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows that computers (and lots of other electric and electronic devices) run by magic smoke. As evidenced by the fact that if all the magic smoke ever leaks out, the device no longer works.

  29. 29.

    Keith P

    But a “golden ticket” can be exploited by bad guys, too. What I would suggest is that Apple/Google invent a “magic bean” that would allow law enforcement to access the data with a search warrant.

  31. 31.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Dear Creator of the Universe:

    It is clear that it was a mistake for Fred Hiatt to be conceived.

    We implore you to correct this mistake by the smiting mechanism of your choice.

    Sincerely,

    The non-fucktards of Planet Earth.

  32. 32.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Randy P: Hey, it was Scotty doing it! Now, if it were Geordi LaForge or B’Ellana Torres doing it, it would be kinda out there.

  36. 36.

    RepubAnon

    Here’s one that even Fred Hiatt might understand: Sometimes, the police need to enter a house when they’re chasing a bad guy. Rather than give them a set of master keys which opened up all doors to everyone’s house, why not have each lock manufacturer create a master key, which they only turn over to the police under a court’s order.

    Answer: Because what happens when:
    a) The police keep a copy of the master key?
    b) The bad guys get a copy of the master key?
    c) Somebody buys a few locks and reverse-engineers the master key?
    d) A member of ISIS with Ebola gets a copy of the key?
    e) Etc., etc., and so forth.

  37. 37.

    AWJ

    “Obviously a back door for all smartphones is bad… but what if it was a magic back door that only the good guys can open?”

    Any civilization capable of producing both a writer capable of writing something this stupid and an editor capable of publishing it is doomed. It’s been a fun ride, guys.

  38. 38.

    Howard Beale IV

    Now if we can amend RFC 1149’s transport layer from using a avain transport to an chelonii transport, then we may get somewhere.

    Then again, Fred Hiatt still hasn’t been able to successfully resolve his cranial-rectal insertion anyway.

  39. 39.

    Howard Beale IV

    @OldDave: Back in the pre-minicomputer days of CompSci, there was an old saying: “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tape.”

    In today’s technology, its now: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of an Antonov An-225/Airbus A380F filled with 128 GB microSD cards.”

  41. 41.

    Gex

    So Fred Hiatt is dumber than a box of rocks and is incompetent to speak on issues of security. I remember a few years back when DVD decryption was a huge issue for the movie industry and they tried to change the key to decrypt DVDs. The problem is that every single legal DVD player needs to have the key to be able to decrypt a DVD, so every single legal device that played DVDs is a source for black hats to get the key. Which they did within a day of the new key going out. After which the Fark/Reddit/Digg/4Chan communities were posting that key EVERYWHERE.

    One single key to get at everyone’s data will mean that absolutely no one will have security. I mean, one disgruntled law enforcement officer with a gambling problem and debts is but one of literally millions of scenarios by which this plan would be thwarted.

    What an effing idiot.

  42. 42.

    ? Martin

    You’ve missed the real lesson:

    SecurID adds an extra layer of protection to a login process by requiring users to enter a secret code number displayed on a key fob, or in software, in addition to their password when they log into their networks. The number is cryptographically generated and changes every 30 seconds.

    RSA and its parent company EMC announced last March that hackers had succeeded in stealing information related to its SecurID system. EMC maintained publicly, however, that data stolen in the hack could not be used to directly hack customers and therefore they didn’t need to replace their tokens. Instead, EMC advised customers to increase the length of employee PINs or passwords that are used in conjunction with the SecurID system.

    But in its letter to customers Monday, the security giant acknowledged that data stolen from it had been used to hack Lockheed Martin and also revealed that since SecurID was breached last March, RSA had been working quietly behind the scenes with government and military contractor customers to replace their SecurID tokens. The company said it did so after forensic analysis of the RSA hack showed that the attackers were looking to obtain information they could specifically use to breach defense contractors.

    RSA SecureID was effectively the same security setup as what Apple and Google have – with a private key stored inside the device (it’s actually encoded in the CPU when it’s fabricated), and RSA supposedly had such fantastic security that nobody could retrieve their local copy of the private key, but that’s pretty much just what happened. Because nearly every defense contractor was using SecureID that key became a massive target. Given the efforts that went into hacking celebrity accounts, I don’t think we need to assume that some foreign government would be after that key.

  43. 43.

    OldDave

    @Howard Beale IV: I seem to remember Henry Spencer quoting that one (throughout of a stationwagon / mag tape). The latency was high, but so was the bandwidth. :-)

    I’ve been in the business so long I have a 300MB disk pack in my office.

  44. 44.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    And which government does Mr Hiatt expect to have access to those golden keys? The PRC? Russian Federation?

  46. 46.

    RSA

    Perhaps Apple and Google could invent an app that solves crimes by itself. I think that would be very useful!

  47. 47.

    M.C. Simon Milligan

    EMC advised customers to increase the length of employee PINs or passwords that are used in conjunction with the SecurID system.

    Yes, increase them to a length that almost inevitably requires the user to write them down somewhere.

  53. 53.

    sm*t cl*de

    but what if it was a magic back door that only the good guys can open?

    Hiatt is clearly thinking of unhackable Arisian lens-based technology for identifying law enforcement.

  54. 54.

    henqiguai

    @sm*t cl*de (#53):

    Hiatt is clearly thinking of unhackable Arisian lens-based technology for identifying law enforcement.

    Darn, dude! Just got a copy of the series for my Nook, for the long ride on the commuter rail every day. Didn’t think many people were around thinking about ‘doc’ smith’s works.

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