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A bill authored by Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, that would require law enforcement agencies throughout California to find alternatives to encrypting their radio communications cleared its first hurdle Tuesday when the Senate Public Safety Committee voted to advance the legislation.

Becker's legislation, Senate Bill 1000, responds to a recent trend of police departments throughout the state moving to encrypted radio communications, a switch that makes it impossible for journalists and other residents to monitor police activities. Palo Alto, which switched to an encrypted channel in January 2021, was among the early adopters. Almost every other police department in Santa Clara County has since made the switch.

Becker's bill aims to reverse the trend and force law enforcement agencies to find alternatives to encrypted radios. If approved by the Legislature and signed into law, police departments would have to adopt policies that allow radio communications to be monitored while protecting personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and criminal records of individuals.

Like other departments, Palo Alto police said their switch to encryption was prompted by an October 2020 directive from the state Department of Justice requiring all police agencies that rely on the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), a database used by law enforcement agencies across the state, to protect personal information. Under the directive, agencies were allowed to do so either by encrypting their radio communications or by adopting policies that protect the personal information, which could mean relaying this information by cellphone, computer or other means.

At a hearing Monday, Becker said that his bill is consistent with that order because it will require law enforcement agencies to protect personally identifiable information, as required by the Department of Justice. He argued, however, that full encryption is both unnecessary and harmful when it comes to protecting the residents' right to know what is happening in their communities.

"For 70-plus years, news outlets, journalists and the public have had access to this information, and it's critically important for transparency and accountability and for reporting public safety activities to the public," Becker said.

The committee voted 4-1 to advance the bill, with only state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh, R-Yucaipa, dissenting. While she said she agreed with Becker that journalists play an important role in society, she argued that many police departments had already spent significant funds on encryption technology. Switching back would be "extremely costly and difficult for our police department to implement," she said.

She also argued that making police communication available to the public would allow "nefarious actors" to track police activities.

Other committee members Chair Steven Bradford and Sens. Sydney Kamlager, Nancy Skinner and Scott Wiener all supported the Becker bill, which will next go to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Jennifer Seelig, director of news and programming at KCBS and board member at the Radio Television Digital News Association, testified on Monday that having access to the police scanner is critical for news organizations.

"We need to know what first responders are doing in real time," Seelig said. "The decision by a number of law enforcement agencies to fully encrypt communication greatly limits the ability of journalists to serve the public."

Excerpt from:
Becker bill to remove police radio encryption picks up support - The Almanac Online

Congress wants the federal government to have a plan in place for protecting federal IT systems and assets from future hacks carried out by quantum computers.

To be clear, computer scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology believe the tangible threat of quantum codebreaking is still years away, but the widespread replacement of much of the older, classical encryption underpinning systems and data is likely to come during the next few years.

The Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Nancy Mace, R-S.C.; and Gerry Connolly, D-Va., would force the civilian federal government to develop a concerted strategy to tackle this replacement. The bill, which Khanna first referenced during a January House Oversight Committee hearing, would give the Office of Management and Budget a year from the time NIST finalizes its post-quantum encryption standards (expected later this year) to begin prioritizing the migration of devices and systems at civilian federal agencies. It also requires OMB to begin developing a list of high-risk systems and assets that will be prioritized for replacement.

The director of OMB would be responsible for delivering a report updating Congress on the governments progress, the potential cybersecurity risks posed by quantum computers, the amount of estimated funding needed to replace encryption for government systems and devices and U.S. coordination on post-quantum encryption with other international standards bodies.

Even though classical computers cant break encryption now, our adversaries can still steal our data in the hopes of decrypting it later," Khanna said in a statement. "Thats why I believe that the federal government must begin strategizing immediately about the best ways to move our encrypted data to algorithms that use post-quantum cryptography."

Mace said that while she was "optimistic" about the potential benefits of quantum computing "we must take preemptive steps to ensure bad actors aren't able to use this technology in more sinister ways."

Any such strategy, the bill posits in a sense of Congress, should involve the government and private sector coming together to develop software, hardware and applications that facilitate what is known as crypto agility" or the ability to easily switch out one post-quantum encryption algorithm for another with minimal loss to performance or interoperability. This capability is critical because so much of quantum computing and code breaking is still largely theoretical at this point.

Until a working quantum computer advanced enough to break classical encryption comes along, officials at NIST working on the next wave of encryption are basing their algorithmic choices, in part, on mathematical estimations of what those computers might do.

That means that the algorithms we think will protect us may actually fall short and, in fact, NIST official Dustin Moody told SC Media last year that each round of their post-quantum cryptography selection process has revealed a previously unknown or unforeseen weakness in one of the algorithms.

The work required to switch out such algorithms and implement crypto agility, where possible, is expected to be a long, grueling multi-year process. While the threat of quantum codebreaking mostly applies to public key encryption, most organizations dont have good visibility over the kinds of encryption they rely on.

A lot of people dont have any real sense of where [their public key encryption] are deployed in their systems, Bill Newhouse, a NIST cybersecurity engineer said last year to the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. The non-technical folks that rely on them probably just dont really recognize that it's all going to be rather complicated.

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Congress wants a plan for post-quantum hacking threats for federal IT systems - SC Media

Bluefin, DRB, Datacap Systems Partnership

ATLANTA, AKRON, Ohio and CHALFONT, Pa. (PRWEB) April 19, 2022

Integrated payments and security leader, Bluefin, announced today the rollout of its PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution across 458 U.S. car wash locations with partners DRB and Datacap Systems.

With the largest install base of any car wash technology provider, DRB specializes in advanced point-of-sale systems (POS) and next generation business management. The companys brands include DRB Tunnel Solutions, DRB In-Bay Solutions (formerly Unitec), Suds, Washifyand Driverse.

Datacap Systems builds innovative and customized payment solutions that route through dozens of pre-certified devices from leading OEMs all via a universal payments integration. Datacaps solutions empower merchants to create a unified payments experience across brick and mortar, online, mobile and unattended applications.

Bluefin specializes in PCI-validated P2PE solutions that secure credit and debit card transactions by encrypting all data within a PCI-approved point-of-entry device, preventing clear-text cardholder data from being available in the device or the merchants system where it could be exposed to malware.

The partnership between Bluefin, DRB and Datacap is part of a large, multi-location P2PE project with a major C-store brand which includes car wash installation in Phase I, followed by P2PE for the pump and in the omni-channel C-store environment.

This solution will provide our customers the benefit of up to 90% PCI scope reduction while providing the highest level of data protection for consumer credit card data, said Sean Gately, VP of Security Solutions, Bluefin. Once phase 2 deployment is complete for both indoor and the forecourt, it will be the first-ever market ready enterprise PCI-validated P2PE solution for the C-Store/Petro industry.

Bluefin provides P2PE through the companys Decryptx stand-alone P2PE solution, which is connected to Datacap Systems, who processes the payments via their NETePay Hosted omnichannel payments gateway. Through the installation, payments will be immediately encrypted upon swipe, dip, or tap in the ID Tech VP6800, an all-in-one PCI PTS 5.x SRED certified unattended payment device. The project is on track to have 1,000 installations by the end of April.

As unattended payments continue to grow in the U.S., securing cardholder data at these terminals has become more critical than ever, said Justin Zeigler, Director of Product at Datacap Systems. With the implementation of a security-centric and modern payments solution, both the merchant and their customer base benefit from a secure and frictionless payment experience.

"This was a great project that significantly enhanced the security of the car wash payment environment and consumer card data, said Richard Carpenter, Director of Product Development & Customer Programs for DRB. Our customers car wash terminals were upgraded to implement EMV processing along with Bluefins PCI-validated P2PE technology. These solutions work hand-in-hand to protect the retailer from fraud, while ensuring security of their customers credit card data.

This truly has been a team effort to not only develop the solution, but to integrate it as well as deploy it with full P2PE validation, added Sean Gately, VP of Security Solutions, Bluefin.

About Bluefin

Bluefin is the recognized integrated payments leader in encryption and tokenization technologies that protect payments and sensitive data. Our product suite includes solutions for contactless, face-to-face, call center, mobile, Ecommerce and unattended payments and data in the healthcare, higher education, government and nonprofit industries. The companys 200 global partners serve 20,000 enterprise and software clients operating in 47 countries. For more information, visit https://www.bluefin.com/.

About DRB

For over a third of a century, DRB supported and often drove an era of unprecedented growth in the car wash industry with point-of-sale and wash optimization software, hardware and services. Now as a masterbrand that includes DRB Tunnel Solutions, DRB In-Bay Solutions (formerly Unitec), Suds, Washify and Driverse, that tradition continues. The DRB team works together toward a singular goal: To help all car wash operators squeeze every ounce of profitability out of their investments. They do this with data and industry insights, a best-in-class team and reliable, intuitive innovations that delight consumers and are secure, simple to service and easy to use.

About Datacap Systems

Datacap builds industry-standard payment solutions for Point of Sale providers to meet the needs of merchants in any market. Security-centric solutions for virtually all processing platforms route through dozens of pre-certified devices from leading OEMs all via a universal payments integration, empowering merchants to create a unified payments experience across brick and mortar, online, mobile and unattended applications. As the only channel-centric and processor-agnostic payments provider in the industry, Datacap is the ideal partner for any POS provider thats serious about building a solution that will scale to address the needs of virtually any merchant, regardless of market or payment processing platform. https://datacapsystems.com/contact-us/

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Bluefin, DRB and Datacap Systems Announce the Rollout of PCI-Validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) Processing at C-Store Car Washes - PR Web