Security quotes of the week

The key point -- and one that many of us have made for years is that the framing by [FBI Director Christopher] Wray/[US Attorney General William] Barr (and, for what it's worth, James Comey before them) is that there's some sort of conflict here between "security" and "privacy." But that's always been bullshit. The issue has always been between having both security and privacy vs. giving law enforcement easier access to data and information they can almost always get elsewhere with a little more effort. In short, it's a debate between having security and privacy widely available against a bit of convenience for law enforcement. As such, this should be no debate at all.

Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy bug in Apple's Safari web browser. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves allow user tracking. [...]

If there's any lesson here, it's that privacy is hard -- and that privacy engineering is even harder. It's not that we shouldn't try, but we should recognize that it's easy to get it wrong.