31–39 of 39 posts
Conspiracy theory: Whoever is behind this doesn't really want every company to rewrite all their software with back doors. Instead, a 'reasonable' request will be substituted after the initial uproar.
That's no conspiracy theory. A conspiracy involves secret collaboration. The well-known negotiation technique of anchoring is all that theory is. It seems plausible to me.
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Are you taking about Season 1, crossing the fives?
Season 5 how Marlo arranges meets and pickups was a good example of extra security. SPOILER ALERT Marlo (the drug lord) sent picture messages of a clock to arrange meetings. The hour and minute hands corresponded to the letter and number axes of a common Baltimore map and the second hand tells what page. The dealers would look up the coordinates on a map to find out where to meet. The cops broke it because they had (…
Putting backdoors into products is commercial suicide for any crypto company to publicly acknowledge. If this goes through, then the simple way to view it is that any product supported by the US for export cannot be assured against having a backdoor.
In the UK, for the advanced crypto stuff, a government agency gives you key material. They have the keys, that way if anything sensitive goes missing they have the ability to attribute while recovering, but the crypto isn't exposed. For everyone in the commercial world well, you're on your own. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
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But do we in the IT world really want to be providing an untraceable means of communication for the next 9/11 bombers? Or, for that matter, white collar criminals, bank robbers, etc.? Yes, we do. Sometimes it is an inevitable consequence of the march of technological progress that certain legal and civil artifacts of previous eras must fall away, and we need to let that run its natural course, instead of trying to pu…
well - it's also possible to scramble calls on the PSTN network, but criminals often don't avail themselves of this ability. Which is presumably also the case on the internet. Hence a 'basic' level of IP wiretapping would still be useful to crime investigators.
Also, scrambling calls on the PSTN requires somewhat non-ubiquitous - if not necessarily any longer prohibitively expensive - acoustic coupling equipment. By comparison, PGP, VPNs, and TLS are much easier for an average person to use. To some extent, everyone uses these things whether they consciously sought to or not, at least in the case of TLS certainly.
If product x has a backdoor, this backdoor will also be used by bad people. It can also be cracked and there will always be product y without a backdoor. Don't the legislators see this? Or are criminals statistically really that lazy that they will still use mobile phones even though they are compromised. According to "The Wire" they often even put extra layers of encryption security, anyway. Such behavior would make…
The back door isn't going to be built into super encrypted military stuff, but a lot of government traffic travels over commercial links, using commercial hardware and software.
Since this government backdoor is going to be leaked or hacked about 3.2 femtoseconds after it's introduced then every internal government memo, every cell phone/sms between a politician and their mistress or lobbyist and every conversation between lawyer and client is going to be on wikileaks.
We could finally have real democracy!
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Anchoring involves defining the value of something where it was previously undefined. What you describe is simply an extreme initial offer. You're right that it isn't necessarily sinister.
An extreme initial offer manipulates the "anchoring and adjustment heuristic" defined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
Conspiracy theory: Whoever is behind this doesn't really want every company to rewrite all their software with back doors. Instead, a 'reasonable' request will be substituted after the initial uproar.
The real scenario would be legislation justified with the argument "we want unlimited legal power but we promise to use it just a little" - and this kind of promise always turns out to be bogus.
All the government is asking for here is a continuation of the status quo. it's always had the ability to wiretap phones, but people don't use phones as much anymore - they use IM, Facebook, etc. to hatch their devious plots. Wiretapping - analog or digital - requires a judge's approval in this country. Sure, it can be abused. But do we in the IT world really want to be providing an untraceable means of communication…
It's a myth to think you can stop all criminal behaviour by eliminating all existing criminal methods. It's a myth to think that the citizenry can keep tabs on what the government is up to. It's all very well keeping tabs on elected officials, but half the time they're just as much in the dark as the general public about what is really going on.
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You like the analogy because a speed limit of 50 would result in a decrease of fatalities due to car accidents? I guess that's what he meant with "cost to society" since IIRC more fatalities result in a higher gross national product.
I think the "cost to society" would be more directly attributed to the increased time of travel for people and goods traveling on roadways. The only increase in GDP that can be attributed to roadway accidents is due to the spending of medical care, which often times is loaned or from insurance, which is not a stable and reliable way to increase GDP over the long term. Overall, fatalities decrease GDP.
That's probably what he meant but it's not necessarily how you have to read the quote in the parent comment. I'm still not convinced that a speed limit of 50 would by a bad thing but maybe that's a cultural thing. My memories of my economics class are fading so I cannot counter your argument about the stability of the increase.