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And how would author convince Russia or China not to spy? Or some people who are not government at all? (terrorists, scam...). Also NSA lied several times and said it would lie again.
Lets just treat it as any other security issue. Banning XSS in parliament is ridiculous.
This author reaches pretty far. The NSA paid Microsoft to acquire Skype? You can't just materialize multiple billions of dollars on a public company's income statement.
Because we are technical people, it's very tempting to think of a technical solution to the problem. This author is right on the money though. Against a state level actor there is little hope of securing your own person and effects, and thus, your technical solution.
I agree that a political solution is strongly preferable, but I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen. The only reason that the NSA can listen in on your Facebook, Google, Skype (etc) activity is because: 1. These communication tools are operated by a company under American jurisdiction, that can therefore be strong-armed into cooperation 2. These communication tools store your data unencrypted 3. The world outsi…
One of the author's points was that you can't even trust your hardware. To prevent this fundamental weakness, we would need a whole new infrastructure of open-source hardware designs along with manufacturers who could somehow be trusted not to insert backdoors.
Also, you can't live in modern society without doing communicating with entities who you don't necessarily trust with your privacy (i.e. businesses). If the other party is agnostic or malicious regarding your privacy then you need the state's help if you want protection.
This author reaches pretty far. The NSA paid Microsoft to acquire Skype? You can't just materialize multiple billions of dollars on a public company's income statement.
> POLITICS, NOT ENCRYPTION, IS THE ANSWER And how would author convince Russia or China not to spy? Or some people who are not government at all? (terrorists, scam...). Also NSA lied several times and said it would lie again. Lets just treat it as any other security issue. Banning XSS in parliament is ridiculous.
Because we are technical people, it's very tempting to think of a technical solution to the problem. This author is right on the money though. Against a state level actor there is little hope of securing your own person and effects, and thus, your technical solution.
But the real reason technologists focus on the tech is because it is their area of expertise.
Because we are technical people, it's very tempting to think of a technical solution to the problem. This author is right on the money though. Against a state level actor there is little hope of securing your own person and effects, and thus, your technical solution.
I agree that a political solution is strongly preferable, but I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen. The only reason that the NSA can listen in on your Facebook, Google, Skype (etc) activity is because: 1. These communication tools are operated by a company under American jurisdiction, that can therefore be strong-armed into cooperation 2. These communication tools store your data unencrypted 3. The world outsi…
And the fundamental problem is, out of those 500 or 600 "contacts" I've got on Twitter/Facebook, I've got maybe 2 dozen PGP keys matching them. By far the greatest portion of any email I send is going to have to arrive in friends/colleages/clients mailboxes as cleartext, and I strongly suspect there are people who's PGP keys I do have, who'll decrypt mail I send them and store the cleartext somewhere vulnerable to NSA snooping anyway. Same with just about every other "technical solution", until everybody has properly managed and secured keypairs - most communication is going to have weakest-link vulnerabilities that are trivially defeat-able to a "globally present network embedded adversary". Having said that, it's still worth doing, from the point of view of increasing the level of difficulty for a ubiquiously surveilling adversary. (with the probably downside of drawing attention to myself by asserting my ethical "right to privacy", which is no doubt interpreted as "doing something suspicious" by the opponent)
Big companies' ability to break the encryption between them an you is irrelevant: if they're the legitimate receiver of the communication, they can offer the plain text directly to governments.
The ability for a third party to break the secrecy between two individuals has a pretty good solution though, and that solution is local encryption + open source. It makes it very difficult for states to compromise the scheme, and every time they use this ability, they're at risk of having their exploit discovered, and going blind again. They'd only use information gathered that way for legitimate national security reasons, and will never show it in a court for instance. A discovered 0-day exploit in OpenSSL or GPG isn't as easily replaced as one in Flash player.
The biggest potential impact of Snowden's revelations is that now, any security scheme relying on trusting a third party companies has to be considered unacceptably weak, at least if you mind governments--or companies sponsoring politicians--reading everything you exchange.
TL;DR: encryption isn't the absolute weapon against illegal spying by governments, but it helps making it extremely difficult, expensive and unscalable. Which is good enough a reason to promote it in addition to political action.
The main issue is governments can't be trusted, a technical solution (which may not be encryption) is that only option we have.
Or if it couldn't be trusted by a part of the population (e.g blacks) you got civil rights activism.
Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse.