121–130 of 337 posts
Obama, our manipulating word artisan of a president yet again attempting to use strong language (i.e "fetishizing") to polarize our view.
It's also (and not only) in Marx's vocabulary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another. A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard sin…
> It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity. I always liked Václav Havel’s short speech from 1991 where he coined the phrase “power unto death”: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html
That speech I bookmarked. Despite the terrible formatting that speech is a work of art applicable to every human being who holds power, whether it's POTUS or the office manager.
A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the “most transparent” government- however the only person to really deliver on that promise was a whistleblower. Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since becoming POTUS. Maybe it's that he dec…
Policy wise Obama is close to a Rockefeller Republican. What people say during elections is entirely disposable.
This is my hope re Trump.
> So if your argument is strong encryption, no matter what, and we can and should, in fact, create black boxes, then that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years. Mr. Obama, you are the one who upset the balance with secret, dragnet surveillance of nearly all communications. That's not the bargain the public has had with law enforcement for the last 300 years. Widespread…
... the programs that all started long before he was in office? He's at fault for keeping them in place, but that's about it.
See: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/power-wars-how-ob...
We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing people on Twitter. Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM -…
I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example). The biggest holdout will be opera…
It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act.
I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.
I think a lot of libertarians miss the fact that many of the communications monitoring aspects that the administration is proposing includes authorization by court order. It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for personal privacy, and that's through a court order. If government is monitoring your communications, th…
Authorization by court order still works fine in physical space. We are talking about introducing back-doors to what essentially already is an extension to our brains . If you understand computers, you know that analogies between the "real world" and our abstract world of modern information systems usually don't hold well. Please try to think through all the subtleties, you clearly don't have to be labeled "libertari…
That's an interesting question to evaluate by analogy, though.
Suppose you could, relatively easily, build a safe that nobody can enter without the combination (including the safe manufacturer). The government could serve a warrant to the person who has the combination, and you might even have to choose between opening the safe or going to jail, but if they chose the latter, they still can't get into the safe. They could point a camera at the safe, or rig the dials, so that the next time you open it you get the combination and can open it themselves; however, if you know or suspect they've done so, you can avoid ever touching the safe again, and they still don't have access. And serving a warrant to the safe manufacturer does no good at all, because everyone already knows everything about the safe except the combination.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another. A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard sin…
If the president can't speak for online privacy because it's not a part of his world, poor people in the US are just fucked.
It'd still pose an issue for when people are accessing their data, however depending on your setup this will be very hard to prove from a third-parties perspective given ample security precautions taken (ie using an offshore VPN all the time, data never full accessed locally).
For larger tech companies, I'd assume setup of a new company structure offshore and sensitive data handling to be "outsourced" offshore too (ie parts of the EU, other OECD countries).
This is incredibly naive bordering on puerile. To suggest that POTUS' view on this is without nuance is to miss his point. POTUS went on to cite existing warrant mechanisms and their underlying principle: "And we agree on that, because we recognize that just like all of our other rights ... that there are going to be some constraints we impose so we are safe, secure and can live in a civilized society." I'm not sugge…
> We need people advocating for the right balance, not just getting each other frustrated. I don't understand this line of thinking regarding the big encryption debate. Yeah it sounds good if you don't know anything about encryption. "Look, he's being reasonable. Why is everyone saying he's wrong instead of striking a balance". The problem is it's a binary problem. There is zero way to strike any type of balance here…
There is a middle ground and where it lies is directly related to the assessed risk. To support a mechanism is a binary choice but its design is not.
In the San Bernardino example, an unexpected potential adversary (Apple) has emerged. An unexpected vector is being discussed which has nothing to do with the encryption mechanism itself. Perfect cryptography doesn't imply a perfect cryptosystem and it sure doesn't imply perfect privacy.
The balance that needs to be found is around the assistance which is rendered to warranted agencies to enable their access to data. IMO vendor supported key material attacks are not an unreasonable solution but obviously that mechanism can go horribly wrong if the software is leaked and it is not adequately designed. The same can be said for signed updates in general though. This is a hard technical problem but it's not a binary choice where the agency has some magic key they can use wherever they want or they have nothing. If they can be enabled on a case by case basis such that it is cost effective for them to do the rest, that might be enough.
Obviously this is all based on the assumption of a robust local judicial process. However, whatever decision making process occurs needs to take into account global implications. Other commenters here and elsewhere have mentioned what this could mean for agencies in other countries where judicial process may be less robust. Many have commented about a lack of transparency in our own. This is a separate but very closely related concern. There are also considerations for the open source community and how precedent like this might be applied to them. It's a hard problem but it's not binary.
In the end, they are going to introduce laws that make it illegal to implement end-to-end encryption. This sucks, but it's going to happen. France is already moving to do it [1], and in the US, John McCain and others are also calling for similar laws [2]. They will all start off saying that it will be controlled carefully etc., as Obama keeps saying, and then it will be used with reckless abandonment. What this essen…
Making broad swathes of widely used software into contraband will be a law enforcement nightmare.