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As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

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Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#71

Post by Nursie »

throwit1979 wrote: post #60
pron wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point. You could probably say the same about your family. The fact that something is not working as well as it should does not mean it's not essential. I mean, would you prefer feudal lords? Because that's what we had before central government, and that's what many corporations would like. Do you want to be ruled by Google? By Walmart?

Do you want to be ruled by Google? By Walmart? Why is the default assumption by Statists that if the government won't rule us, corporations will? A novel concept that people may want to attempt to grasp is that there could be no rulers, and as such, there's no need to make up a fictitious "new ruler".

And this will last for approximately five minutes until a new ruler establishes themselves either through resource monopolisation or through pure threat of force. And they will never be short of toadies.

Why is the default assumption by libertarians that if the government is brought down, human nature will suddenly, completely change?

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#72

Post by wahsd »

Something that people have apparently not quite connected is that these developments are incremental steps towards and can already be considered within the spectrum of mind reading. The only reason that that a majority of today's people do not recognize the situation as squarely in mind reading territory based on examples from literature and popular culture is that the the technical limitations still retrain government, with great frustration.

Although the same heeds of danger did not suffice in the early 20th century, we are facing the same mechanics that led to the world war. We are at a nexus of an ugly transition into the consequences of the information age the same way that humanity would ultimately face demise at the nexus of the consequences of industrialization leading up to the World War, first and second part.

The problem is a generational one; the baby boomer generation, with it's industrial age mindset is incapable from internalizing the consequences of their unprincipled actions.

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#73

Post by macspoofing »

Does the Federal government not understand that this (idiotic) mass scale surveillance is bad for business? All the big American companies generate most of their revenue outside of the US. Majority of the user-bases of the big Silicon Valley tech companies are foreign. This only works if there is a level of trust in the American system and American government. What are they thinking?!?!

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#74

Post by workhere-io »

macspoofing wrote: post #73

Does the Federal government not understand that this (idiotic) mass scale surveillance is bad for business? All the big American companies generate most of their revenue outside of the US. Majority of the user-bases of the big Silicon Valley tech companies are foreign. This only works if there is a level of trust in the American system and American government. What are they thinking?!?!

What are they thinking?!?!

They clearly aren't.

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#75

Post by _b8r0 »

pron wrote: post #9
anovikov wrote: post #5

Broad solution to all this is building your lives in business in a way government can have a minimal control of. Just do what it requires and keep everything else encrypted and anonymized. And don't rely on government for anything, for we are heading for a world of global government failure: people and institutions are going to ignore and circumvent them all, and make them dysfunctional. In a way, that will be like c…

Don't rely on government for anything? What are you talking about? Almost 100% of scientific research and 100% of infrastructure around the world is funded by government. Almost all of education, health and welfare around the world (though less so in the US) is run by government. A lot of people are suspicious of government, but such fundamental disdain toward and alienation from government are peculiar American (and…

As someone who does research and builds infrastructure, it's not all government funded stuff. In fact, I'd say that governments indirectly fund a very small part of my research and none of my infrastructure.

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#76

Post by bobzibub »

macspoofing wrote: post #73

Does the Federal government not understand that this (idiotic) mass scale surveillance is bad for business? All the big American companies generate most of their revenue outside of the US. Majority of the user-bases of the big Silicon Valley tech companies are foreign. This only works if there is a level of trust in the American system and American government. What are they thinking?!?!

I would have thought that it would worsen big business yet be great for independent consultants setting up their clients' own private email and file sharing operations. A net positive for the economy, I'd guess.

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#77

Post by green7ea »

oleganza wrote: post #46
rlpb wrote: post #36

A logical conclusion to this is that if/when governments start forcing people to supply them with their private keys, they will also start forcing companies producing encryption software to include backdoors. At this point, I'm thankful that we have Free Software. With access to the source code, forcing the insertion of a backdoor is futile, since somebody else will fork and remove it. With Free Software, we'll still…

I agree with your sentiment, but want to provide a slight correction about "Free Software": MIT/BSD licensed software while not free in FSF/GPL sense, is still open and widely used and solves the problem we have right now. To avoid confusion with FSF ideals, I'd talk simply about Open Source software.

Sorry to nitpick but MIT/BSD licensed software is free in the FSF/GPL sense. To be free software, you have to respect freedoms 0-3 as defined here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . This is the case for MIT/BSD licensed software and both those licenses are considered acceptable free software licenses by the FSF.

The cheklist for Open Source software can be found here: http://opensource.org/docs/osd. They are slightly different but in practice, most (if not all) free software licenses are also open source licenses and vice versa.

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#78

Post by nhaehnle »

randallsquared wrote: post #45
santosha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'such fundamental disdain toward and alienation from government are peculiar American' This. If you're so unshakably convinced that a government full of people you vote for every four years is never going to work in your interests, you have serious problems.

I think it's rather the other way. The historical record shows that they hardly ever do what I would have preferred. One problem is that the referents for "you" and "your" don't always match during the sentence: "If you [1] are so unshakably convinced that a government full of people you [2] vote for every four years is never going to work in your [3] interests, you [4] have serious problems." 1. the person reading t…

The thing is, for all its supposed power, government is really bad at marketing. People tend to see only what they don't like about government while simultaneously enjoying the benefits from various services that are provided by the government.

As in those "get the government out of my medicare" signs that were seen in the US.

(Cue the "blah blah markets can do it blah blah" responses - no, I'm sorry, but even economists disagree with you.)

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#79

Post by thewarrior »

Have no doubt about it, this marks the beginning of the end of online privacy. Now that even the U.S. govt is asking for the TLS Certificates there is no country that has the moral high ground on this issue.

I'm from India and when I heard that the Indian government was asking Blackberry for its encryption keys I thought "Hah these people are so ignorant! They don't even know how public key encryption works!!". In hindsight it doesn't look very foolish. In fact they're openly building a surveillance system called CMS which has no checks and balances even on paper. Unfortunately in a country like ours with has so many other pressing issues it isn't a big deal yet.

Recently some governments tried to orchestrate a power grab of the internet via the ITU but it was vetoed by the US. "Its better to let the US govt. have a monopoly on the internet", or so I thought. What with all their constitutional protections and all. Recent developments have shattered my hopes.

The NSA's worst case scenario has already happened. Other than some modest outrage on the internet nothing much has changed. In a sense it shows a tacit acceptance of mass surveillance by most of the public. Hence my opinion that recent events mark a turning point.

With noone having the moral high ground its quite likely that all world governments and corporations are soon going to come to an agreement on permanent mass surveillance . What then ?

Re: As Feds Demand the Keys, Preparing for the Death of Public-Key Encryption

#80

Post by Canada »

cmircea wrote: post #62
evgen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that operating in any particular jurisdiction provides you with protection then you are sadly deluded. Your protection lasts just up until the point where protecting you becomes inconvenient. Oddly enough, using the resources of smaller companies provides less protection because they are easier to influence, and basing services outside of the US means that you are completely fair game for the NSA as you…

The NSA itself has exactly zero power outside the USA.

They have the active cooperation of many governments and they have a lot of 0 day.
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