Easy. Outlaw flash drives.
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ââMy 4th is protected by my 2nd.ââ
Then where have you been over the past 30 years?
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Donât worry, the government (and a lot of the folks here on BB as well) are working on that for you.
just stirring the pot a bitâŚ
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Lotus had quite a good solution for this in the 90âs - take the AES session key and encrypt all but 40 bits using the NSAâs public key. If the NSA wants to read your communication, they can decrypt most of the session key using their private key, and have to enumerate the remaining 240 combinations using hardware. The rest of the world, who donât have the NSA private key have to enumerate all 2256 possible session keys, keeping the original algorithm strength. Then, the NSA can still go after interesting / relevant communications, but they wonât have the processing power to decrypt literally everything. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
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I quite like such approach. You can swap the data sent to NSA with fakes, and nobody will be any wiser about your noncompliance until they will decide to actually take a look - which is usually exactly when you want them to fail.
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Obama: âI lean probably further in the direction of strong encryption than some do inside of law enforcement. But I am sympathetic to law enforcement, because I know the kind of pressure theyâre under to keep us safe.â
What pressure? The only consequence to law enforcement for failure appears to be increased funding.
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But that would be a super-secure encryption system! You just give your keys to random megacorps and government agencies. Everyone knows that no government or corporate employee has ever made a mistake or done anything wrong, so you can rest easy knowing that youâre safe!
Seriously, to prevent encryption, theyâd have to make it impossible to manipulate binary data or text strings in any way. Eliminate all current methods of computation and all existing programming languages and programs. Even going back to punchcards and machine code wouldnât be Luddite enough. They would basically have to uninvent the alphabet and communication in general, and eliminate all knowledge of mathematics, setting humanity back at least 40,000 to 200,000 years. How would an apocalypse like that be preferable to whatever theyâre trying to prevent?
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âMy voice is my password. My passphrase is an enigmatic chain of nonsensical words, strung together in such a way as to be comprehensible, yet uncomprehended. The full range of tools at my disposal have been used, sparing no expense, for the treasure they keep is beyond compare.â
Thatâs how long my new password will have to be.
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I think the appropriate response is to string him up from a lamp post. âNo fucking wayâ seems like a pretty fucking tame response to these shitstains.
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You all were for the govenment takeover of the internet but not this?
You where duped.
Maybe they were duped. Make a new secure network, let them have the old compromised one, then everybodyâs happy.
Makes it easier to get more funding.
I love me some good paranoia, tinfoil hats are dashing.
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Too bad dmt scares the crap out of me.
The âgovernment takeover of the internetâ? I suspect that Iâm wasting my time here; but that is just too silly to not respond to.
As you apparently didnât notice, this ânet neutralityâ stuff has boiled to to a bunch of disputes over pricing in a limited-competition partially regulated market. The owners of the infrastructure(particularly the last-mile monopoly and oligopoly positions, less so the backbone links) vs. those who operate on top of the infrastructure.
Notably, there have been no changes whatsoever in operational control over the various systems that make up âthe internetâ (or the major entities that do a lot of the talking and data storage), or in their willingness to cooperate with the feds. Same owners, same willingness or unwillingness to cooperate, same mostly inadequate legal standards for compelling cooperation.
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This may be nerd pedantry and/or paranoia; but Iâve heard Obama talk about how he is in favor of strong encryption; but never about strong key managementâŚ
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This is not technically difficult at all, just a bit tedious. I appreciate that US CompSci degrees are pitched at a simpler level than UK ones, but I did two key encryption as an undergrad, actually I did N key, which is a bit tougher. 2 is just not that hard.
However it means opening up the rickety shit that many vendors call security which in many cases achieves dodgy âsecurity by obscurityâ and so the NSA âworking withâ the vendors will now be able to make more sense of the rats nest of layers of security, authentication, encryption and âthat bodge we did to get it to work with Windows NT4 that we dare not removeâ.
But (as anyone who has done a decent CS degree knows) the problem in all this is key distribution.
Firstly, there are now N keys in the hands of âgood peopleâ.
1: Good people go bad, as tom Clancy says, you can only be betrayed by those you turst, everything else is just business.
2: The NSA will steal other peopleâs keys. Itâs their job to do this, they see it as their duty and will do so.
So will the Chinese, Russians and for all I know the Belgians.
3: The keys will be used, else what is the point ?
That means there is a path for bad people (who ever you think bad people are this week) to intercept them.
Once the front doors are there, then everyone will want them âŚ
How about friendly governments like the UK, Japan ?
What if the French government orders Apple to hand over their key ?
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So just a mad theoryâŚHow likely is it that the NSA knows full well that this wonât stop criminals and that the real reason for wanting this is so they can track everyday normal Americans?
Please donât stir that particular pot. Itâs full of faeces and ventilation parts.
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unbreakable encryption just isnât that hard
Even if thatâs true, âunbreakable encryptionâ is a dangerously distracting phrase. Your privacy is just as vulnerable to implementation flaws, faulty keys, social engineering, betrayal, subpoenas, and all the other, less glamorous tools the government uses with equal enthusiasm.
Plus, just from a crypto point of view, thereâs no known system that is provably unbreakable, other than one-time pads (and there are some serious caveats even there). The NSA could have an algorithm for factoring prime numbers in log(N) time, and already be able to read everything thatâs sent through PGP or SSL. If they did, theyâd still be complaining about the need for a back door into PGP email-- itâs no use compromising a system unless your opponents are sure you havenât compromised it.
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My broader concern is that in conversations like this, we jump straight to the issues at hand but donât stop and question the appropriateness of civil servants weighing in on political debates. Of course the NSAâs job would be easier if everyone CCâd them on every email. We knew that already. The NSAâs opinion is irrelevant, but because politicians donât want to venture their own opinions, they just let the NSA lead the debate as if they were, you know, elected officials with a right to speak on these things.
This happened a lot with the Blair government in the UK, leading to its nightmarish record on civil liberties. E.g., they asked police how long theyâd like to be able to detain âterrorâ suspects without charge, so the police opened with a tactical bid of three months-- and instead of negotiating on that, Blair is in a press conference the next day telling us that hero cops must be allowed to detain people for three months or weâll all be dead by Tuesday, and if that sounds extreme, hey, he hears you, but this is what the experts say.
So, in this one particular case, it really is Obama people should be looking at. He shouldnât be letting his subordinates do political campaigning on the clock, and he should be taking direct responsibility for the toxic policy ideas sharting out of his administration.
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