301–310 of 347 posts
Shouldn't the US government be pushing good encryption? I wonder what sort of world we would be living in if the NSA had spent 1/2 as much time over the last 10 years trying to protect Americans from hacking as they do trying to spy on Americans.
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Why would they try to stop you, when they could just order Apple or Google to push out a backdoored update to the OS?
Would Apple or Google be able to get a backdoor to Signal? Edit: nevermind, I think I understand what you're suggesting.
Why does this say that the DOJ has been pushing for this since 2016? They have been pushing for some variation on this since basically forever. I first became aware of it back under Clinton with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip . And the debate has been essentially the same since. Law enforcement wants to be able to break security, and promises that their super secret, super safe system will provide eve…
The government itself is likely to abuse such back doors. LOVEINT is a documented practice.
Meanwhile governments throughout the world are mandating the use of Signal for communication. Common folks are not special enough to justify strong encryption but it's totally valid for government use. Helps hide their corrupti-- I mean state secrets.
A small anecdote. A few years ago in an undergrad business class, we were having some discussion and the topic of encryption came up during one of my presentations. A student asked a question related to the ethics of encryption (I don't recall exactly what), and I was clearly confused by the question. To clear up confusion, the professor asked those who thought encryption was "bad" to raise their hand, and at least 6…
Should have followed up with: Do you think having a lock on your front door is bad?
I was talking to a layperson about encryption and privacy and they were very much against both interestingly. They compared encryption to wearing a mask in public and said if people don't want to be noticed (w.r.t privacy and encryption) they shouldn't be "participating" (it was unclear what they meant by this). Just goes to show you how the average person thinks about these things. I have to admit I wouldn't like it…
So terrorists will use one-time pads and other strong encryption and everyone else will have their information exposed on a massive scale when the backdoors inevitably are exploited.
I look forward to the day when one time pads are the norm for general encryption. A scifi novel I read, "A Deepness in the Sky" described how the pads themselves were a valuable item of trade. I don't think it's farfetched to imagine purchasing OTP data to use with internet browsing, the way we buy yubikeys to use with passwords. It would be a far simpler encryption scheme than those we currently use, and that simpli…
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Constructing a "lesser evil" choice is simply a way of justifying evil. On the scale of “lesser evil” the government being able to arrest, harass, violate civil liberties and lock someone up is off the charts compared to what big tech can do. Sure that may be prudent, but it is not morally right nor is it sustainable. And backfitting from "what is" to "what should be" is never a good idea. So I should be more worried…
Your comment comes from a perspective of having been abused. While I respect your struggle, stressed analysis is not good when trying to foresee where the next source of abuse will come from. The commercial surveillance industry is not currently engaging in abuse on the scale the government has previously committed, but the government is not presently doing so either! Yet we are rightly concerned with setups that mak…
As far as what the government is presently doing. The “war on drugs” is presently more focused on minorities while drugs are treated as a “disease” in rural America.
Presently, my son had four or five keys on his key ring that looked alike and he fumbled through them trying to get in our house. I made him a different color key so the overzealous neighbors who look at him strangely wouldn’t harass him (or call the police) for breaking into his own house.
So yeah, I have a good reason to be worried about the government wanting more power to surveil people and to have a back door for encryption.
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The part about tech geniuses being able to solve a problem that can't be solved without violating principles of mathematics. You probably don't think you said that though, because you missed the point yourself. It's a common mistake. You're in good company, plenty of smart politicians and national leaders have the same misconception. It's often stated in terms like "if we could put a man on the moon, all the smart pe…
I’m suggesting to rethink the problem fundamentally. Minimize abuses of an exceptional access system. The problem with purely technical folks is often an inability to socially transcend from their techno libertarian ideals And my statement wasn’t entirely wrong. You can legally prevent large entities from using strong E2EE thus “stopping” the math to some degree - or minimize/isolate the usage of those munitions. It…
A ringing defense.
>rethink the problem fundamentally.
Any (yes any) exceptional access aka backdoor scheme will be a magnet for bad actors. So here's a rethinking for you: rethink the notion that privacy needs to be subject to compromise.
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> Criminals being able to hide evidence is a serious concern for the average person. Suspects . Alleged criminals. Until convicted, they're not criminals. The government does not have an unlimited right to collect all information; they have a limited, judicially controlled right to try to collect information. One key detail: strong encryption does not prevent investigations from targeted collection of information, su…
>Suspects. Alleged criminals. Until convicted, they're not criminals. And even after they are convicted, they and their associates are still protected by encryption. Encryption protects everyone equally. That is viewed as a positive by pro-encryption people and a negative by anti-encryption people. >The government does not have an unlimited right to collect all information; they have a limited, judicially controlled…
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Freedom isn't free. I think people have just ought to realize that. People have this idea that free countries are more efficient, which is probably true in the long run, but it's a cop-out to just call it a day there. Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for…
> This was in the capital of one of the poorest countries in Europe, but it was still one of the safest places I've ever been. Obviously if you put all people in jail they will be very safe there. But then you have less people working and producing more useful stuff than rotting in jail. The best example I give of this trade off between freedom and safety is that of women in saudi arabia. They have the least amount o…