This is why the FBI can compel Microsoft to provide the keys. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the suspect didn't even know they had an encrypted laptop. Journalists love the "Microsoft gave" framing because it makes Microsoft sound like they're handing these out because they like the cops, but that's not how it works. If your company has data that the police want and they can get a warrant, you have no choice but to give it to them.

This makes the privacy purists angry, but in my opinion it's the reasonable default for the average computer user. It protects their data in the event that someone steals the laptop, but still allows them to recover their own data later from the hard drive.

Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account.

Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance.

Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems. And lazy engineers build lazy key escrow the government can exploit.

What happens if I forget my keys? Same thing that happens if my computer gets struck by a meteor. New drive, new key, restore contents from backups.

It's simple, secure, set-and-forget, and absolutely nobody but me and your favored deity have any idea what's on my drives. Microsoft and the USGov don't have any business having access to my files, and it's completely theoretically impossible for them to gain access within the next few decades.

Don't use Windows. Use a secure operating system. Windows is not security for you, it's security for a hostile authoritarian government.

It's time - it's never been easier, and there's nothing you'll miss about Windows.

At least they are honest about it, but a good reason to switch over to linux. Particularly if you travel.

If microsoft is giving these keys out to the US government, they are almost certainly giving them to all other governments that request them.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/fbi-cant-be-blamed-for-wiping...

Perhaps next time, an agent will copy the data, wipe the drive, and say they couldn't decrypt it. 10 years ago agents were charged for diverting a suspect's Bitcoin, I feel like the current leadership will demand a cut.

I trust BitLocker and Apple’s encryption to protect my stuff against snooping thieves, but I have never, ever assumed for a moment that it’d protect me against a nation-state, and neither should you. All the back-and-forth you see in the media is just what’s public drama, and a thin veil of what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

If there’s stuff you don’t want a nation state to see, it better be offline, on a OSS OS, encrypted with thoroughly audited and properly configured security tooling. Even then, you’re more likely to end up in jail for refusing to decrypt it [1][2].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-refusing-to-hand-over-yo...

To everyone saying 'time to use Linux!'; recognize that if these people were using Linux, their laptops wouldn't be encrypted at all!

Don't think Apple wouldn't do the same.

If you don't want other people to have access to your keys, don't give your keys to other people.

Shufflecake ( https://shufflecake.net/ ) is a "spiritual successor" to TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt but vastly improved: works at the block device level, supports any filesystem of choice, can manage many nested layers of secrecy concurrently in read/write, comes with a formal proof of security, and is blazing fast (so much, in fact, that exceeds performances of LUKS/dm-crypt/VeraCrypt in many scenarios, including SSD use).

Disclaimer: it is still a proof of concept, only runs on Linux, has no security audit yet. But there is a prototype for the "Holy Grail" of plausible deniability on the near future roadmap: a fully hidden Linux OS (boots a different Linux distro or Qubes container set depending on the password inserted at boot). Stay tuned!

Or remote access to the computer. Or access to an encrypted backup drive. Or remote access to a cloud backup of the drive. So no, physical access to the original hard drive is not necessarily a requirement to use the stolen recovery keys.

This is incorrect. A full disk image can easily obtained remotely, then mounted wherever the hacking is located. The host machine will happily ask for the Bitlocker key and make the data available.

This is a standard process for remote forensic image collection and can be accomplished surreptitiously with COTS.

This is so much more reasonable than (for example) all the EU chat control efforts that would let law enforcement ctrl+f on any so-called private message in the EU.

But what about unsophisticated users? In aggregate it might be true data exfiltration is worse than data loss? I don't know if that's true.

But what is true is enabling encryption by default without automated backup and escrow will lead to some data loss.

It's difficult for me to separate the aggregate scenarios from individual scenarios. The individual penalty of data loss can be severe. Permanent.

As for it being user hostile. I am pretty certain that thousands of users a year are delighted when something has gone wrong and they can recover their keys and data from the MS Cloud.

There should perhaps be a screen in a wizard, Do you want your data encrypted? y,n

If (yes) Do you want to be able to recover your data if something bad happens? (else it will be gone for ever, you can never ever access it again) y/n

Some ways around this is to either not store sensitive user data on servers, or if that needs to happen then encrypt it with user supplied keys.

when it comes to giving out encryption keys, the answer should always be 'we don't have them.' 'you can't get them.'

Sad day for privacy at Microsoft.

Bitlocker isn't serious security. What is the easiest solution for non-technical users? Does FDE duplicate Bitlocker's funcationality?

Use LUKS instead.

(1) false advertisement

Companies like MS and Apple are telling their clients they offer a way to encrypt and secure their data but at best these claims are only half truths, mostly smoke and mirrors.

This is not OK. I don't want to get into legal parts of it, because I'm sure there's a fine print there that literally says it's smoke and mirrors, but it's despicable that these claims are made in the first place.

(2) the real need of ironclad encryption

I was born and raised in Eastern Europe. When I was a teenager it was common that police would stop me and ask me to show them contents of my backpack. Here you had two options - either (a) you'd show them the contents or (b) you would get beat up to a pulp and disclose the contents anyway.

It's at least 5h debate whether that's good or not, but in my mind, for 90% of cases if you're law abiding citizen you can simply unlock your phone and be done with that.

Sure, there are remaining 10% of use cases where you are a whistleblower, journalist or whatever and you want to retain whatever you have on your phone. But if you put yourself in that situation you'd better have a good understanding of the tech behind your wellbeing. Namely - use something else.

Today, 2 out of 3 of my machines are KDE fedora. The last one is TBD because my kids are using it.

I didn't have a choice for machine 1 because it wasn't eligible for windows 11 and windows 10 security updates were EOL. Machine 2 quickly followed.

At the time, there had been disappointing windows news every few months. Since there have continued to be disappointing windows news every few months.

I expect more disappointing windows news to follow.

Tell them you work in IT and that you'll make their computer faster and more secure. Don't mention Linux by name.

Yes, the American government retrieves these keys "legally". But so what? The American courts won't protect foreigners, even if they are heads of state or dictators. The American government routinely frees criminals (the ones that donate to Republicans) and persecutes lawful citizens (the ones that cause trouble to Republicans). The "rule of law" in the U.S. is a farce.

And this is not just about the U.S. Under the "five eyes" agreement, the governments of Canada, UK, Autralia and New Zealand could also grab your secrets.

Never trust the United States. We live in dangerous times. Ignore it at your own risk.

Have you heard of our lord and savior, Linux?

https://xkcd.com/538/

If it were preventing a mass murder I might feel differently...

But this is protecting the money supply (and indirectly the governments control).

Not a reason to violate privacy IMO, especially when at the time this was done these people were only suspected of fraud, not convicted.

Similarly, your TPM is protected by keys Intel or AMD can give anyone.

If you want to extrapolate, your Yubikey was supplied by an American company with big contracts to supply government with their products. Since it's closed source and you can't verify what it runs, a similar thing could possibly happen with your smartcard/GPG/pass keys.