Quotes & Sayings About Encryption

The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from cyber-snooping, but we're not. — Molly Ivins

I don't own encryption, Apple doesn't own encryption. Encryption, as you know, is everywhere. In fact some of encryption is funded by our government. — Tim Cook

As soon as we cracked their new encryption. — Andrew J. Rafkin

Detective Lincoln knocked, said, "McGrath had serious encryption on his computer. We're going to have to send it out." "Send it to Quantico," I said. "I'll try to get it moved to the front of the line." "Right away," Lincoln said, and he left. — James Patterson

I think the best life would be one that's lived off the grid. No bills, your name in no government databases. No real proof you're even who you say you are, aside from, you know, being who you say you are. I don't mean living in a mountain hut with solar power and drinking well water. I think nature's beautiful and all, but I don't have any desire to live in it. I need to live in a city. I need pay as you go cell phones in fake names, wireless access stolen or borrowed from coffee shops and people using old or no encryption on their home networks. Taking knife fighting classes on the weekend! Learning Cantonese and Hindi and how to pick locks. Getting all sorts of skills so that when your mind starts going, and you're a crazy raving bum, at least you're picking their pockets while raving in a foreign language at smug college kids on the street. At least you're always gonna be able to eat. — Joey Comeau

The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works — Edward Snowden

Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench. — Gene Spafford

Another feature differentiating this malware and making it more fun to work with is that it encrypts compressed files on the SD card. It also uses AES for the encryption. It is notable in that the attack itself is complex, yet the encryption is not. It would appear prudent to have a more robust encryption, — Anonymous

[Eric]Goldman [a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law] says back in the 1990s, courts began to confront the question of whether software code is a form of speech. Goldman says the answer to that question came in a case called Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice. Student Daniel Bernstein who created an encryption software called Snuffle. He wanted to put it on the Internet. The government tried to prevent him, using a law meant to stop the export of firearms and munitions. Goldman says the student argued his code was a form of speech. — Laura Sydell

On balance, the use of encryption, just like the use of good locks on doors, has the net effect of preventing a lot more crime than it might assist. — Matt Blaze

What encryption lets us do is say, "Yes, the Internet is insecure." Bad guys are able to compromise computers everywhere, but we're able to tolerate that because if they do intercept our messages, they can't do any harm with it. — Matt Blaze

If we try to prohibit encryption or discourage it or make it more difficult to use, we're going to suffer the consequences that will be far reaching and very difficult to reverse, and we seem to have realized that in the wake of the September 11th attacks. To the extent there is any reason to be hopeful, perhaps that's where we'll end up here. — Matt Blaze

Sure, end-to-end encryption means that whether it's a phone call we're on or an email message we're sending or any form of electronic communication, that the content of that communication is encrypted from your device, such as your phone or PC, unto the other person's device at the other side, wherever they might be on the planet Earth. — Rod Beckstrom

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it. — Edward Snowden

The medium is the message, the message is encrypted, and the encryption key is controlled by NSA. — The Covert Comic

I am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends. — Whitfield Diffie

There's been a certain amount of opportunism in the wake of the Paris attacks in 2015, when there was almost a reflexive assumption that, "Oh, if only we didn't have strong encryption out there, these attacks could have been prevented." But, as more evidence has come out - and we don't know all the facts yet - we're seeing very little to support the idea that the Paris attackers were making any kind of use of encryption. — Matt Blaze

Clipper took a relatively simple problem, encryption between two phones, and turned it into a much more complex problem, encryption between two phones but that can be decrypted by the government under certain conditions and, by making the problem that complicated, that made it very easy for subtle flaws to slip by unnoticed. I think it demonstrated that this problem is not just a tough public policy problem, but it's also a tough technical problem. — Matt Blaze

There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government. — Bruce Schneier

In this age of communications that span both distance and time, the only tool we have that approximates a 'whisper' is encryption. When I cannot whisper in my wife's ear or the ears of my business partners, and have to communicate electronically, then encryption is our tool to keep our secrets secret. — John McAfee

Strong privacy advocates - especially those promoting encryption and anonymity - may deny that this phenomenon is a direct physical corollary of their message, so I will let the reader decide whether a philosophy that relies on cybernetic gates, walls, and coded locks is any different in its underlying basis - fear. — David Brin

One of the things that I think is true is that encryption actually is able to secure our communications, that every individual can use encryption, and that it's accessible and in many cases free. — Laura Poitras

You don't need to be a spook to care about encryption. If you travel with your computer or keep it in a place where other people can put their hands on it, you're vulnerable. — Barton Gellman

It seems that 'national security' is the root password to the Constitution. As with any dishonest superuser, the best countermeasure is strong encryption. — Phil Karn

Without encryption, you and I wouldn't be able to do our banking online. We wouldn't be able to buy things online, because your credit cards - they've probably been ripped off anyway, but they would be ripped off left and right every day if there wasn't encryption. — Tim Cook

The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there's an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living. — Teju Cole

Each distinct cipher can be considered in terms of a general encrypting method, known as the algorithm, and a key, which specifies the exact details of a particular encryption. — Simon Singh

Do you have good encryption — David Baldacci

It's very hard to keep an uncrackable encryption if you share it with the government. — John McAfee

Those who are experts in the fields of surveillance, privacy, and technology say that there need to be two tracks: a policy track and a technology track. The technology track is encryption. It works and if you want privacy, then you should use it. — Laura Poitras

We have to solve the encryption problem. It is not easy. — John Kasich

Now, with a warrant, they can always go to the information service provider and attempt to get that information. But even then, they may not be able to because the party selling the encryption services may be a third party and may not even know who the parties are that are communicating. — Rod Beckstrom

Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information. — Kevin Mitnick

First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me. And by that time there was no one left to speak up. WIDELY COPIED INTERNET APHORISM, A PARAPHRASE OF PROTESTANT MINISTER MARTIN NIEMOLLER'S STATEMENT ABOUT LIFE IN NAZI GERMANY — David Brin

Let's put it this way. The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don't have, because encryption works. — Edward Snowden

If you go to a coffee shop or at the airport, and you're using open wireless, I would use a VPN service that you could subscribe for 10 bucks a month. Everything is encrypted in an encryption tunnel, so a hacker cannot tamper with your connection. — Kevin Mitnick

I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part. — Jon Johansen

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies, but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company, and that person complies, and if the attacker gets in, then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted. — Kevin Mitnick

We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art. It's a basic protection. — Edward Snowden

The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme. — Kevin Mitnick

There is a big problem. It's called encryption. And the people in San Bernardino were communicating with people who the FBI had been watching. But because their phone was encrypted, because the intelligence officials could not see who they were talking to, it was lost. — John Kasich

It may be true that encryption makes certain investigations of crime more difficult. It can close down certain investigative techniques or make it harder to get access to certain kinds of electronic evidence. But it also prevents crime by making our computers, our infrastructure, our medical records, our financial records, more robust against criminals. It prevents crime. — Matt Blaze

Zimmermann employed a neat trick that used asymmetric RSA encryption in tandem with old-fashioned symmetric encryption. — Simon Singh

I believes that economy is some kind of running war and the market is the battle field , So security is mandatory. — Mohamed Saadi

Privacy and encryption work, but it's too easy to make a mistake that exposes you. — Barton Gellman

local 111.111.111.111 dev tun proto udp port 1194 ca /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ca.crt cert /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.crt # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name key /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/SERVERNAME.key # TBD - Change SERVERNAME to your Server name dh /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/dh1024.pem # TBD - Change if not using 2048 bit encryption server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 ifconfig 10.8.0.1 10.8.0.2 push "route 10.8.0.1 255.255.255.255" push "route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0" push "route 111.111.111.111 255.255.255.0" push "dhcp-option DNS 222.222.222.222" push "redirect-gateway def1" client-to-client duplicate-cn keepalive 10 120 tls-auth /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/keys/ta.key 0 comp-lzo persist-key persist-tun user nobody group nogroup cipher AES-128-CBC log /var/log/openvpn.log status /var/log/openvpn-status.log 20 verb 1 Note: To paste in — Ira Finch

As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives - including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies - will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process. And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning. — James Comey

Today, using the distributed computing power of the cloud and tools such as CloudCracker, you can try 300 million variations of your potential password in about twenty minutes at a cost of about $17. This means that anyone could rent Amazon's cloud-computing services to crack the average encryption key protecting most Wi-Fi networks in just under six minutes, all for the paltry sum of $1.68 in rental time (sure to drop in the future thanks to Moore's law). — Marc Goodman

Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers. — Glenn Greenwald

I believe that if you took privacy and you said, I'm willing to give up all of my privacy to be secure. So you weighted it as a zero. My own view is that encryption is a much better, much better world. And I'm not the only person that thinks that. — Tim Cook

Encryption ... is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government ... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty. — Esther Dyson

Somebody will be able to overcome any encryption technique you use! — Noam Chomsky

In some ways, you can think of end-to-end encryption as honoring what the past looked like. — Jan Koum

All of this material on key length block size and the number of rounds of encryption may seem dreadfully boring; however, it's important material, so be sure to brush up on it while preparing for the exam. — James M. Stewart

I'm a strong believer in strong encryption. — Barack Obama

If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there's no key - there's no door at all - then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot? — Barack Obama

Zimmermann believed that everybody deserved the right to the privacy that was offered by RSA encryption, and he directed his political zeal toward developing an RSA encryption product for the masses. — Simon Singh

Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on, — Edward Snowden

There are programs such as the NSA paying RSA $10 million to use an insecure encryption standard by default in their products. That's making us more vulnerable not just to the snooping of our domestic agencies, but also foreign agencies. — Edward Snowden

I love strong encryption. It protects us in so many ways from bad people. But it takes us to a place - absolute privacy - that we have not been to before. — James Comey

The reality is that if you - let's say you just pulled encryption. Let's ban it. Let's you and I ban it tomorrow. And so we sit in Congress and we say, thou shalt not have encryption. What happens then? Well, I would argue that the bad guys will use encryption from non-American companies, because they're pretty smart. — Tim Cook

Companies made these decisions about encryption when they were finding it very difficult to sell their products overseas because the [Edward] Snowden disclosures created the impression that the U.S. government was inside this hardware and software produced by them. They needed to do something to deal with the perception. — Michael Morell

We've already seen shifts happening in some of the big companies - Google, Apple - that now understand how vulnerable their customer data is, and that if it's vulnerable, then their business is, too, and so you see a beefing up of encryption technologies. At the same time, no programs have been dismantled at the governmental level, despite international pressure. — Laura Poitras

So end-to-end encryption, keeps things encrypted and that means that law enforcement, without a warrant, cannot read that information. — Rod Beckstrom

I trust and use RakEM for my private messages and calls. Other messengers collected metadata about who I messaged, when and where - RakEM does not collect metadata, encrypts local files, and uses the strongest end-to-end encryption around. — John McAfee

I think it's interesting because the 1990s ended with the government pretty much giving up. There was a recognition that encryption was important. In 2000, the government considerably loosened the export controls on encryption technology and really went about actively encouraging the use of encryption rather than discouraging it. — Matt Blaze

The people working in my field also are quite skeptical of our ability to do this. It ultimately boils down to the problem of building complex systems that are reliable and that work, and that problem has long predated the problem of access to encryption keys. — Matt Blaze

Children don't expect words to be used to create false trails. Words to Esme are plain and simple with no hidden codes, no duplicitous underlife. He thinks of the conversations with his wife and how little of what they said was without encryption. — Glenn Haybittle

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people. — Whitfield Diffie

My favorite method of encryption is chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an "image" or a "song." But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Coalition [against ISIS] need the tools. And the tools involve encryption where we cannot hear what they're even planning. And when we see red flags, a father, a mother, a neighbor who says we have got a problem here, then we have to give law enforcement the ability to listen so they can disrupt these terrorist attacks before they occur. — John Kasich

Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts. — David Ignatius

The concern is over what will happen as strong encryption becomes commonplace with all digital communications and stored data. Right now the use of encryption isn't all that widespread, but that state of affairs is expected to change rapidly. — Dorothy Denning

When the September 11th attacks happened, only about a year later, the crypto community was holding its breath because here was a time when we just had an absolutely horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and if the NSA and the FBI were unhappy with anything, Congress was ready to pass any law they wanted. The PATRIOT Act got pushed through very, very quickly with bipartisan support and very, very little debate, yet it didn't include anything about encryption. — Matt Blaze

As far as Paris goes, we don't know for sure yet how these guys communicate among themselves and how they communicated back to the ISIS leadership in Iraq and Syria, but I'm fairly confident we're going to learn they used these encrypted communication applications that have commercial encryption and are extremely difficult for companies to break - and which the companies have made the decision not to produce a key for. — Michael Morell

Everyone is a proponent of strong encryption. — Dorothy Denning

So, in 1993, in what was probably the first salvo of the first Crypto War, there was concern coming from the National Security Agency and the FBI that encryption would soon be incorporated into lots of communications devices, and that that would cause wiretaps to go dark. There was not that much commercial use of encryption at that point. Encryption, particularly for communications traffic, was mostly something done by the government. — Matt Blaze

We basically have only two real tried and true techniques that can help counter this. One of them is to make systems as simple as we can, and there are limits to that because we can only simplify things so much. The other is the use of encryption. — Matt Blaze