"The only surefire way to gain back our privacy is also the least likely: the citizens of all nation- states must empower politicians who will defund and dismantle the espionage machinery and instead rely on international cooperation to expose and prevent terrorist activity."
More Encryption Is Not the Solution
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#52What a bunch of establishment hacks... technological workarounds to political problems is politics. The current regime put this here, they're not going to remove it because we ask politely. That's a childish hope.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#53"The only surefire way to gain back our privacy is also the least likely: the citizens of all nation- states must empower politicians who will defund and dismantle the espionage machinery and instead rely on international cooperation to expose and prevent terrorist activity."
The most surefire way isn't in trusting those who betrayed the trust. It's in making their efforts to spy on us futile.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#54"if a nation-state decides that somebody should not have privacy, then it will use whatever means available to prevent that privacy." One thing a lot of these discussions miss is that the entire point of doing privacy and anonymity correctly is that you are never on a list of people that any particular nation state wants to deny privacy to. That your True Name (to borrow the idea from Vinge’s story of the same name)…
It's like hygiene. A few hundred years back people weren't washing their hands and health was very bad. As soon as we understood the germ theory of disease, we learned hygiene and now we are much better. With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills. Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you…
And if there's a backdoor on your hardware then they have access to all your plaintext before encryption ...
I can imagine a day when face to face communication gets really popular, even critical for some people.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#55> 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.
People belive politics consists of picketing and elections. That's not it, as those don't deal with actual issues that effect society. Politics is about the organization of society and the systematic control over violence and power. No one wil put in the effort to protest a meaningful amount to change anything, as the cost/benefit isn't worth it for any one actor. But people who do wish to protect their privacy and find it worthwhile to circumvent the state will do so. Circumventing state power is an actual political solution.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half the article is talking about scalable attacks on encryption. For example: "To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'" I agree we should continue this arms race but…
"To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'" Suddenly, Dijkstra's insistence on developing the proof together with the program and providing it to any interested person d…
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-- Don Knuth
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Half the article is talking about scalable attacks on encryption. For example: "To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'" I agree we should continue this arms race but…
"To an intelligence agency, a well-thought-out weakness can easily be worth a cover identity and five years of salary to a top-notch programmer. Anybody who puts in five good years on an open source project can get away with inserting a patch that 'on further inspection might not be optimal.'" Suddenly, Dijkstra's insistence on developing the proof together with the program and providing it to any interested person d…
It's still completely infeasible without better tools for doing it automatically.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a government couldn't be trusted by the general population in the past, you got revolution. 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.
> * When a government couldn't be trusted by the general population in the past, you got revolution.* To get a revolution the government would have to start to starve people. I don't think there was any period in history of organized nation-states when people trusted those in power. > Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse. Technology is a force multiplier. Moreover, te…
>To get a revolution the government would have to start to starve people.
That's like the naive marxist notion that it's all about the economy. People have revolted without being starved and people have starved without revolting. Culture, patriotism, hummiliation, religion, and tons of other factors come into play.
>Technology is a force multiplier.
Yes, and if the government is allowed to have 10 times the force of regular citizens, then the government ends with 10multipler power using technology, where the people with just 1multiplier. That's why technology is not a solution.
>Moreover, technology shapes the environment we live in. We can all see that groups of people behave like water. They do what they have always done
The last 3000 years of history show great shifts of power, strikes, revolts, changes in government and culture etc. And the 2400 of them (e.g 1600 AD and before) are not even related with any great changes in technology.
Of course if people are convinced that they "behave like water", they will behave like water.
But that's not what history shows they did (and do).
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#59"The only surefire way to gain back our privacy is also the least likely: the citizens of all nation- states must empower politicians who will defund and dismantle the espionage machinery and instead rely on international cooperation to expose and prevent terrorist activity."
The most surefire way isn't in trusting those who betrayed the trust. It's in making their efforts to spy on us futile.
TFA just explained why this is not a "surefire" way.
Not to mention that the last 40 years not much progress has been made in this direction (if any).
Also: the other proposition also helps putting a better government in place. The "technological" solution, even if it worked, it would only solve the very specific problem of privacy. Not the much more important problem of a government that betrayed the trust of the people.
Re: More Encryption Is Not the Solution
#60This is an easy argument to reject. It is a false dichotomy.
The answer involves more encryption. We need it, anyway, to secure us against crooks.
But we also need to control governments. We need to do both.