“This year’s $1 million A.M. Turing Award goes to a pair of cryptographers whose ideas helped make Internet commerce possible, and who now argue that giving governments a ‘back door’ into encrypted communications puts everyone at risk,” Bree Fowler reports for The Associated Press. “Whitfield Diffie, a former chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures back in 1976. The concepts are still used today to secure all kinds of communications and financial transactions.”
“Hellman told The Associated Press that he’s sympathetic to the plight of FBI Director James Comey and those investigating the December attack in San Bernardino, California, where an Islamic extremist couple killed 14 people before dying in a gun battle with police,” Fowler reports. “But Hellman said giving the FBI what it wants would unleash ‘huge’ consequences that could not be contained. ‘The problem isn’t so much with this first request, it’s the precedent that it would set and the avalanche of requests that would follow,’ Hellman says, adding that many would likely come from less democratic governments such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.”
“Hellman says he will sign onto one of the many ‘Friend of the Court’ briefs backing Apple in the case,” Fowler reports. “Diffie also has advocated against giving “back doors” to law enforcement, co-authoring a paper with other prominent cryptographers last year that urged the U.S. government to carefully consider the risks.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, Comey: You have access to the U.S. Constitution and you’ve got Messrs. Diffie and Hellman, now all you need to do is follow this sage advice:
A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people. — Will Rogers
If that’s too difficult for you:
I told you not to be stupid, you moron. — Ben Stern
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