81–90 of 494 posts
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I'd add * and it's been 20 yrs since the 9/11 attacks which predicated a lot of the more recent dragnets
The dragnets existed before 9/11. That just gave justification for even more funding.
We know the nature of the mass surveillance changed and expanded immensely after 9/11 in a major way, especially domestically.
Tangential to the tangent: is there any reason to believe FOIA won't be on the chopping block in a future Congress? Do the majority of voters even know (let alone care enough) about it to hold their representatives accountable if they try to repeal it?
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You are not accurately reflecting the history that is presented in the very blog post we are discussing. NSA made DES weaker for everyone by reducing the key size. IBM happily went along. The history of IBM is dark. NSA credited tweaks to DES can be understood as ensuring that a weakened DES stayed deployed longer which was to their advantage. They clearly explain this in the history quoted by the author: “Narrowing…
>IBM happily went along. The history of IBM is dark. Then, as of now, I'm confused why people expect these kinds of problems to be solved by corporations "doing the right thing" rather than demanding some kind of real legislative reform.
Perhaps the old advice (“never roll your own crypto”) should be reevaluated? If you’re creative enough, you could combine and apply existing algorithms in such ways that it would be very difficult to decrypt? Think 500 programmatic combinations (steps) of encryption applying different algorithms. Content encrypted in this way would require knowledge of the encryption sequence in order to execute the required steps in…
This is security by obscurity. Reputable encryptions work under the assumption that you have full knowledge about the encryption/decryption process.
You could however argue that the sequence then becomes part of the key. However, this key [ie. the sequence of encryptions] would then be at most as strong as the strongest encryption in this sequence, which kindof defeats the purpose.
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Many government or government affiliated organizations are required to comply with NIST approved algorithms by regulation or for interoperability. If NIST cannot be trusted as a reputable source it leaves those organizations in limbo. They are not equipped to roll their own crypto and even if they did, it would be a disaster.
"Other people have no choice but to trust NIST" is not a good argument for trusting NIST. Somehow I don't imagine the NSA is concerned about -- and is probably actively in favor of -- those organizations having backdoors.
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The dragnets existed before 9/11. That just gave justification for even more funding.
Which programs do you mean specifically? We know the nature of the mass surveillance changed and expanded immensely after 9/11 in a major way, especially domestically.
Those images very often show the contents of the envelope clearly enough to recognize and even read the contents, which I'm quite positive isn't an accident.
The USPS is literally reading and storing at least part of nearly every letter mailed in the United States.
The USPS inspectors have a long history of being used as a morality enforcement agency, so yes, this should be of concern.
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> I remember that some of the suggested changes from NSA shared with IBM were actually stronger against a cryptanalysis attack on DES that was not yet publicly known So we have that and other examples of NSA apparently strengthening crypto, then we have the dual-EC debacle and some of the info in the Snowden leaks showing that they've tried to weaken it. I feel like any talk about NSA influence on NIST PQ or other cu…
I think it's just both. It's a giant organization of people arguing in favor of different things at different times over its history, I'd guess there's disagreement internally. Some arguing it's critical to secure encryption (I agree with this camp), others wanting to be able to break it for offense reasons despite the problems that causes. Since we only see the occasional stuff that's unclassified we don't really kn…
Here is one example with documents: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-powe...
Here is another: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-...
Please read each and every classified document published alongside those two stories. I think you may revise your comments afterwards.
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Which programs do you mean specifically? We know the nature of the mass surveillance changed and expanded immensely after 9/11 in a major way, especially domestically.
Every piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine is scanned, front and back, OCR'd, and stored - as far as we know, indefinitely. That's how they deliver the "what's coming in your mailbox" images you can sign up to receive via email. Those images very often show the contents of the envelope clearly enough to recognize and even read the contents, which I'm quite positive isn't an accident. The USP…
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I'll also add Which have not prevented anything and instead are used in parallel construction to go after Americans
I don’t like the collateral damages of many policies. But it’s not fair to say that the policies “have not prevented anything” because we simply don’t know. The policies could have stopped in-progress evil acts (but they were never revealed to the public for intel reasons) or prevented attempts of an evil acts (well, nothing happened, nothing to report).