@Lefty665: Encryption is the bread-and-butter of everyone at Black Hat. These are the security industry folks, who spend large amounts of time and money developing better and better encryption and security measures, to protect corporate secrets and protect the products and services these folks deliver.

From an NPR piece reported before Alexander’s speech:

Alexander is going to have to deliver [his speech] to a skeptical, possibly hostile and technically sophisticated audience.

Barnaby Jack

Barnaby Jack was one of the good guys. He spent his professional life hacking products, not for personal gain but instead to pressure companies to make them safer.

He became famous for hacking into ATMs and getting these machines to spew out piles of cash. The hack became known as jackpotting.

Jack was reportedly found dead in his apartment, and although foul play isn’t suspected the cause of death is being investigated by the San Francisco medical examiner.

The hacking community is tightknit, and the announcement has been difficult for many of Jack’s friends and colleagues. He was well-liked and widely considered to be a brilliant researcher.

Jack had been scheduled to deliver a talk on Aug. 1 at Black Hat on newly discovered vulnerabilities in pacemakers. He had discovered a mobile attack that allowed him to alter their function from 30 yards away, in what he described as a potentially lethal attack. Last year, Jack demonstrated it was possible to remotely attack a insulin pump manufactured by Medtronic. That research led Medtronic to make changes in the product that made it more secure.

Hacking The ‘Internet Of Things’

As more and more devices are connected to the Interne, more and more things can be hacked. This year at Def Con and Black Hat researchers will be showing off attacks that let them take over everything from cars to toys to smart TVs to embedded control devices used on oil platforms.

Researchers and hackers say they worry that as nontech industries start building embedded computers and Internet-connected technologies into their products, they are overlooking security. Hopefully, they say, some of the hacks unveiled this year will be a wake-up call.

And the solutions — which will center around better encryption — will be evidence of terrorist intent?

*facepalm*

I’d love to hear Alexander make his next speech on this topic to the Chamber of Commerce types, who spend non-trivial amounts on money on encryption to prevent corporate espionage.

Interesting that “use of encryption” would be designated indicative of Terrorism. Certainly not inconsistent with the philosophy of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong you have nothing to fear,” I guess, but it’s certainly a stretch to suggest that if you are encrypting you’re likely doing something wrong and that this justifies law enforcement singling you out for capture and review of your communications.

Any empirical Terra-finding confirmations? How about the series of numbnuts the FBI and CIA have been ferreting out, inducing and then arresting as “would be Terraists”– have any of those people “with Terra inclinations” been identified and targeted because they were encrypting communications? Even one? Sure, once you have a haystack it cries out to be searched for needles — but it’s more than a little bit unsettling to argue that there’s a basis for targeting people for criminal investigation because they might be utilizing available technology for the same reason the government or industry uses it: to be secure in communications. Who is the “enemy”, again?

@Peterr: NSA’s involvement in private (corporate as opposed to USG) encryption goes back at least to the Data Encryption Standard (DES) proposed by the National Bureau of Standards in the mid 70’s. Despite their assertions that DES was secure, NSA was able to read it. How hard they have to work to break commercial encryption has been an issue ever since.

If the standard now is that anything NSA cannot access is a selector for terrorism, it is profound.

@Lefty665:
When I took a cryptography class in college, around 1983, the assumption was that if NSA liked a standard, they had a way to defeat it, possibly back-door. (We weren’t nearly so paranoid, 30 years ago, as we are now.)

As the NSA/GCHQ revelations reveal, the US wants access to every phone/internet user, anywhere, all the time. Encryption, especially if the boys can’t easily break it, signals that someone is not with the program, ought to be hired, or ought to be dealt with with prejudice.

@P J Evans:

Indeed. And the unspoken implication in that slide (“Someone who uses encryption”)is not only that they will focus on that person, but can break the encryption.

The classic example is the Swiss company Crypto AG:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/nsa_backdoors_i.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

Its not a mistake. They really do consider everyone at BlackHat a terrorist. As Greenwald and others have noted, “terrorist” has taken on new meaning. To the NSA, a terrorist is anyone they don’t have absolute control over. It doesn’t matter if they are blowing stuff up or “spreading subversive ideas.” That’s why Alexander blew it off as a joke. The truth is terrifying. They aren’t really looking for people who’re search for pressure cookers. That’s just the excuse they give. They are building a profile of everyone who is or might ever be resistant to control and a stack of material to keep them in line. Hackers, academics, socialists. Every totalitarian regime goes after the same groups of people first.

Notice how the DOJ now says it must notify defendants if evidence against them came from the NSA. This is just to get more stories out about how this is all for our own good and minimize all the abuse. They pretend its for transparency, but its really information control.

Alexander and the NSA are terrorists