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Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

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Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#191

Post by Egregore »

zobzu wrote: post #127
acabal wrote: post #18

I agree with the sentiment, but Assange's prose is a little dense. Maybe it's OK for his target audience, as I assume the layman won't be reading cryptome.org. What we really need is a champion to explain in relatable, plain English why encryption is essential even for mom and dad, and to explain it in a more mainstream venue. I think a big reason why people don't encrypt mail, etc., is because: 1) they don't know wh…

The main reason I think, is because its hard. Either you use a 3rd party service to encrypt, its easy and also extremely dumb (since its not end to end encryption). Either you use PGP or SMIME and guess what: it's too hard. Their design is fine. I especially like GnuPG (PGP), but the UI, even in CLI, is terrible, terrible! Most people don't even understand that a GnuPG keychain generally contains 2 private keys, not…

My idea was that public key cryptography should be done under the hood, so I created a easy to use ResoMail, but people still were not interested (or I was a bad marketer).

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#192

Post by lucian1900 »

chii wrote: post #150
yason wrote: post #144

In maybe five to ten years, the internet will effectively split in two. There will be major, commercial service providers such as Facebook-type social media hubs, major news sites but there will also be an invisible internet that is everything internet used to be, and in addition to that encrypted, anonymous, and untraceable. How it shows most prominently at the moment is file sharing. Setting the endless copyright d…

> When the masses go for it, the capacity and availability of invisible darknets will raise in orders of magnitude. this is predicated on the assumption that providers are not strangled by their balls by the authorities (who is in turn strangled by the balls by lobbiests/companies/vested interests). If you could run your own routes with private equipment (such as a mesh like wireless network?), instead of having to s…

Will ISPs be forced to disallow all encrypted traffic? That would be disastrous.

It's already possible to connect to a website over https (with a self-signed cert you've obtained through a second channel) and be pretty much certain no one is snooping. The target you're connecting to doesn't have to be obvious either.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#193

Post by rmc »

joonix wrote: post #135
cpeterso wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but courts are much more likely to enforce laws that are written down and (implicitly) agreed to by US agencies.

If you take a glance at the development of Constitutional law you realize the document itself is largely meaningless. What matters is the progression of SCOTUS cases that interpret a simple archaic document in order to apply it to a massive, complex government. It's quite easy for a Supreme Court to rationalize the disposal of civil liberties. Look at air travel. The argument is that people are consenting to the inva…

You don't even need to pick modern things like air travel.

The US consitution & bill of rights were fine with the slavery, racial segration, denying women the vote, denying men without property the right to vote, legal sexism, etc.

You're right that it's all about how it was interpreted.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#194

Post by mylittlepony »

andrewflnr wrote: post #100
javert wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The Constitution defines the proper form and responsibility of American government. If the Constitution falls, we no longer have legitimate government. That's historical fact. Other governments' law enforcement agencies follow the laws of their own countries (or don't). Are you saying they shouldn't do that?

Right. The point of a Constitution or whatever is to have some kind of law to follow. You don't need to worship it, it's just your axioms of government. That's your "rational way" of specifying priority #1.

oelewapperke 5 hours ago | link [dead]

Weird that nobody realizes that the constitution does say that the government not only has the right to violate any (other) law to violate the constitution, but actually has the duty to do so.

To protect the constitution (and it's application within it's jurisdiction), the president (ie. the government) has the right AND the duty to violate ANY American law except clause 1 and 2 of the constitution. To put it plainly : the ONLY thing the president cannot do to defend the constitution is to mess with elections. That's it. It also states that the president is the person making the assessment if an action is necessary (and thus, not the courts, though of course, the president can be removed from office for making a decision that either congress or the courts think was not reasonable. That does not change the fact that the president cannot be punished for implementing that action. The maximum penalty for any crime for the president is impeachment, unless this is specifically extended by congress).

This is because article 2 of the constitution overrides every other law in the US, except article 1, including all following articles and amendments.

If you think this sequence is by accident, you should talk to a lawyer about things like this. Sequence in laws, and the principle that earlier rules override later ones is extremely well established technique of law.

What everybody seems to think these laws state, that you have extensive rights without any qualifications whatsoever, is just plainly not true. If you are a danger to the application of the US constitution within US borders, the president is not bound to any standard, nor does he have to respect any form of human rights in his attempts to stop you from doing so.

If you think it is better in European states, think again. Specifically, read what the Dutch monarch is allowed to do (e.g. she can have someone killed - both her and the actual murderer go free, she can confiscate any amount of property - with no legal recourse for anyone, etc.). Similar things are true for other Euro countries.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#195

Post by rmc »

dguido wrote: post #170
mtgx wrote: post #13

I think this is very relevant here - interview with the NSA whistleblower, William Binney, on how NSA is storing every post people are making online, so they (and FBI) can use it later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuET0kpHoyM No wonder NSA and FBI want warrantless access to private companies by lobbying for new laws like CISPA, and trying to build backdoors in services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter etc. They want…

You know, people keep repeating this assumption that the NSA stores every post that people make online. Maybe someone should do a quick back of the envelope calculation to see how feasible that actually is? My guess is that it's nowhere near possible given the amount of network traffic coming into/out of the US and current hard drive storage technology. IMHO the extreme amount of volume and limitations of storage spa…

You know, people keep repeating this assumption that the NSA stores every post that people make online. Maybe someone should do a quick back of the envelope calculation to see how feasible that actually is?

Think of Google. The have downloaded and stored lots of the internet. How else can they search it?

So if we know at some level that it's possible, could the NSA do it?`

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#196

Post by guessWhy »

gbhn wrote: post #117
kragen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All kinds of organizations and people build infrastructure; churches and companies also promulgate laws and provide dispute-resolution forums. What distinguishes the state from other organizations that perform similar tasks is that the state holds a monopoly on (legitimate) violence. This is not a "narrow and immature" point of view; this is the normal definition. Quoting Wikipedia: The most commonly used definition…

Perhaps a good intuition pump is how we react when this breaks down. If some group within a state's borders is using violence (i.e. sending soldiers to attack skyscrapers in another country), the attacked country has a cassus belli against the harboring country. This feature is so critical to how the modern system treats territorial integrity that we sometimes refer to states which can't control violent groups within…

Was this example really necessary? You basically said: If terrorists (who, by the way, happened to travel to Afghanistan once) attacked the WTC, the US have a casus belli against Afghanistan.

See, the reason why the war in Afghanistan is controversial is precisely because it is not clear that a country has a casus belli against another country if there is a (remote) connection of offenders to that country. In fact, the pilots lived and planned most of the plot in Germany.

A better example of a failed state would be the results of the war on drugs in Mexico.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#197

Post by pemulis »

rmc wrote: post #185
pemulis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't promote or demote filesharing per se: it's just the cutting edge where the future trends will show years before they land elsewhere and that's what it makes it so interesting. One interesting thing I've noticed that the people behind the best filesharing networks tend to have tremendous success with their later projects. Napster is the obvious one. After Napster went down, Shawn Fanning co-founded Rupture a…

they created a political party that's won elections in multiple countries "won elections" is a bit of a stretch. In countries with multi-seat constituancies and proportional representation, there are often minority/niche candidates.

They haven't won many heads-up elections, but they have won a few.[1] They're also pulling significant percentages in Germany, and close to a full percent in a few other countries. They're active in 40 at the moment. They're hardly a major party, but doing pretty well for one that's only six years old.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party#National_Pirate_Pa...

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#198

Post by Egregore »

scarmig wrote: post #17

A sufficiently motivated government has a nearly infinite amount of tools available for breaking encryption. Ignoring the possibility that it might know proprietary weaknesses to various systems (a hypothesis that is unknowable), there's just so much you need to secure at each node in a computer system. Are you personally sure no backdoors exist in the physical hardware you use? In the operating system you use? In th…

My idea is that encryption must be so easy as to be used by all without configuration. It will make much harder mass surveillance, all other methods you cited are much more expensive methods, in most of them you must have physical contact or dedicate an attack against somebody, but to find that somebody you need to follow his correspondence.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#199

Post by narag »

b1daly wrote: post #183

It's funny, I've come to think of the HN community as being the most skeptical and contrarian of all internet forums. (Jokingly, to the point that if someone posted a blog about how Hitler was evil, there would be an a reliable proportion of posters here pointing out how the citation free post was rhetorically weak and that there were some little understood benefits to the Nazi regime). Now, this short excerpt of Ass…

1) It's a predictive argument

We might be there already.

2) Glorification of the past

I don't think so. More like a broken promise.

3) The increased transparency brought on by the internet is a good thing. ,I'm glad Petraeus got his ass busted

That's just disingenuous. The secrets that really matters about military operations are not public in any way, while you are happy because this guy gets caught cheating his wife. Meh.

4) There is no way the public at large is going to start encrypting their communication.

Oh, that's a predictive argument. Make something usable and we'll see.

5) The benefits created by network effects will be significantly diminished by introducing private encryption.

So that networks effects are more important that freedom, aren't they?

6) Efforts at resisting tyranny can be demonized, and crushed, more readily if conducted in secret.

Sorry, that's total nonsense.

Re: Julian Assange: Cryptographic Call to Arms

#200

Post by Egregore »

moe wrote: post #75
ef4 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

How on earth can you bring up diaspora in this context? Some kind of cruel joke? I'm downvoting parent and giving you the right link: https://freenetproject.org/

Do Freenet now have any social features in it? Last time I looked (few years ago) it didn't have any significant.
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