Government Announces Steps to Restore Confidence on Encryption Standards

I find it peculiar to see someone call themselves an anarchist yet accept this - unless you're a Proudhonist or other particularly esoteric pre-Bakunin kind that have been out of fashion since the 1870's...

A key feature of anarchism all the way back to when Bakunin was expelled from the first International by Marx over the issue of state authority has explicitly been the rapid destruction of the state as a critical element exactly because of the opportunity for oppression that lies inherent in the state. This is pretty much the dividing line between anarchism and marxist socialism/communism (the marxist standpoint is that a large scale working class uprising would enable the transformation of the state from a tool of oppression by the upper classes against the working class to a temporary tool of oppression by the working class against the upper classes, becoming obsolete as the working class subsumes the previously privileged classes), and also one of the major distinguishing features between anarchism and the various form of liberalism (in the classical sense, not the modern US sense) and libertarianism

The point being that the government does not serve you. It may quite regularly do things that overlap with your interests, but your influence on your government is disproportionally small in any situation where economic power buys you more attention from legislators per head than a vote does.

In that kind of situation, something that makes the government afraid is not something we should forget, but something to embrace and expand to help redress the balance.

Yes, it also helps 'the bad guys'. So does envelopes on your mail, the ability to freely lock your door and expect the police not to wander it at their leisure, or the ability to walk down the street without an id number stamped to your forehead. It would make things a lot easier for law enforcement if we all lived in prison already. Obviously we do not accept these things - it is not enough for something to benefit law enforcement for us to accept it.

> But to expect government to accept a situation where there is zero way they can snoop or investigate is asking a lot.

I see noone expecting government to accept such a situation, and even flawless information security for your communications does not create such a situation. You are setting up a strawman with this sentence.

> What is needed is a rock solid frame work and set of rules that properly limit how the snooping is done.

Rules don't stop people from doing something when the ability to monitor that they are actually complying is nearly non-existent.

> I'd suggest it should be developed by an international group, UN backed, and made part of being a member.

This is a very naive view of how the UN works. The very point of the UN is that it is inclusive - you don't exclude even the worst dictators because then you shut down communication. The upside is that this means there is a forum to make agreements amongst pretty much all the governments of the world. The downside is that you have to deal with these governments even when drafting agreements where "the good guys", if you can even come up with a cohesive list of who they would be, all agree to principles that would substantially improve things. Yes, it is infuriating whenever some dictatorship effectively shuts down some initiative, but it is the reality we have to live in as long as these regimes exist.

In other words, the UN will not do something like this because it goes directly counter to the interests of the governments of a large number of UN countries. And without substantial political upheaval it also goes counter to the interests of the governments of many democratic countries whose populations might prefer much stricter rules.

> Or could it be something that has to be agreed to as part of acquiring IP addresses or domain names. Dunno, but tie it in some how.

The current system for allocation of IP addresses and domain names only works because everyone voluntarily defers to the respective authorities. Even then, nothing but technical skills stops you, your grandma, or your government from setting up its own DNS roots, and nothing stops your ISP or your government from changing routing tables and allocate its own addresses.

They don't because it would break a lot of things, and because the current processes are sufficiently apolitical to not give them a reason to. If that changed, the internet would break into islands where not all parts can talk to all other parts without intermediaries.

This is why nobody has force the issue of tieing non-technical requirements to allocations of IP addresses or domains any more than it is in anyones interest to, say, withhold a country code for phone numbers from a dictatorship.

That's the understatement of the century. NIST is pissed off. Many of these guys move fluidly back and forth from NSA, and clearly they were kept in the dark.

The way they accept every other fact of life that they cannot change.

The genie is out of the bottle now. Strong encryption exists; government cannot break it, and "bad actors" will use it. Law enforcement do need to investigate crime, but they need to do it in the real world not in the world of make believe. If that means they have to go back to older, harder investigative methods then life will go on.

The "alternative" that our governments seem to have chosen is unconscionable... They break their own laws, forsake their own principles and corral their own people into virtual concentration camps.

In their desperation they have seized total control, and then "restrained themselves" to simulate the capabilities they might have had in the good old days. Their self-restraint is admirable, but our societies are founded on law and democracy, not built on trust in the good natures of absolute rulers.

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