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Poll Says Most Americans Favor Crypto Backdoors
Sideways The Dog writes: "According to this MSNBC article, "72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be 'somewhat' or 'very' helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C." I realize that I'm preaching to the choir here, but it is scary how many people do not realize that the bad guys are not going to play fair here. Even granted that people may not realize the tools are already out there for the bad guys to use, I wonder what the polls will say when the backdoor gets compromised and 72% of people get their bank accounts wiped." Update: 09/19 19:26 PM GMT by T : Declan McCullagh adds a link to "the actual text of the question asked by the
pollsters, which Princeton Survey Research Associates describes here." Note the numbers on this page as well.
I'd like to see a new survey:
Should you be allowed to have secrets?
I imagine that we'd see considerably different results.
-Waldo
From reading the article, it seems the questions asked weren't "Do you support anti-crypto?" but instead "Do you think anti-crypto would help catch terrorists?"
Of COURSE anti-crypto has a chance of helping catch terrorists.. if your doctor for example has encrypted files for one of them or something random like that. That doesn't mean I support it or think it's worth it! They're extrapolating people's opinions based upon the not-so-earthshattering observation that crackable crypto has a good shot of helping catch terrorists (and this, in itself, is debatable since they already have strong-crypto for their own internal communications)
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Anyway, it's MSNBC, which is crap. But it's an important wake-up call.
sulli
RTFJ.
the government has announced that it will soon be
mandatory to use state-approved envelopes to send
all mail.
these new envelopes will be entirely transparent
when viewed under a federally produced lightbulb,
but there is no need to worry about these lamps
getting out to bad people, since it is time-tested
proof that all government employees are completely
honest and lack all self-serving traits present
in every other human being.
besides, it's for your own good and protection!
and if you have something to write that you don't
want everyone to read, maybe it's time for that
all-important self-examination to reveal your
underlying paranoia complex...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be 'somewhat' or 'very' helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks
Read it over and over again. It is not stating that 72 percent of people want their rights taken away. It just states that they think anti-crypto might of helped.
Redo the poll to:
How many people think that the attack wouldn't happen if the US was a cruel military dictatorship?
I bet it would be like 90 percent. Its true. It doesn't mean we want to be a dictatorship, just that it might of prevented it.
Stop knee-jerking, people.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
However, if the question was asked as "Do you support the government having unlimited backdoors into all crypto tools, even if it meant your ecommerce transactions were more vulnerable to hacking as an unintentional result?" - I HIGHLY doubt we's see 72% saying yes!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
There is no explicit mention of the word "privacy" in the constituion. The closest thing is in the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.
With the current tapping abilities, both legal and illegal , it looks like soon, if not already, warrants will be unnecessary for law enforcement to peruse all of your communications. Also, remember that your cell phone has a GPS chip in it, so you are carrying a "leaky" communications device with a tracking chip built into it.
Unreasonable search is what we're talking about here. If the government decides to allow tapping into 100% of my communications, even though I'm not conversin with people about illegal activities, I want to make sure that I have the right to avoid plaintext and keep what I talk about unavailable if I so choose.
This is my right. It is being trampled.
Did you notice that the cell phone calls that have been reported throughout this whole ordeal were recorded and traced? Doesn't that frighten you in the least? Don't you feel you have the right as an American to some modicum of privacy?
It's not what they do with it now, when the only thing they care about is terrorism, but what they do 20 years from now or however long it is when all this terrorism stuff evaporates and the infrastructure is still in place that worries me. Then a bored intelligence infrastructure trying to justify its own existence will start abusing their resources and go after the trivial stuff that isn't worthy of such invasiveness. Many of the defenders of such a scheme that I've heard suggest that it'd have as stringent safeguards as wiretapping, and of course we all know how rluctant the courts are to give those sorts of warrants out.
In case anyone takes you seriously, I'll just point out that you first encrypt your message in you own 4096 bit MujaCrypt 3.0, then wrap that in the backdoored Fed-O-Crypt 1.0 and it all looks lovely and innocent.
(Or you use disposable phones, face to face meetings, mail drops and personals ads like they actually do...)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The media should quit talking about script kiddies and address the real threats: social engineering. I guarantee you that after working for a couple years in a financial, customer care workplace where we were making outbound calls to resolve financial matters for our customers, it wasn't the phone that was the limiting factor on obtaining information, it was the person on the other end of the line. Probably 1 time out of 15 I can get a customer service rep to give me more than enough info on someone given certain little bits of data. With smaller companies, sometimes just the name, and a well-meaning rep will be all I need to get more info than I could possibly even want (once in a great while I actually had to cut people off while they dropped all kinds of info because I was too busy to write it all down!). That's not to say that I would ever think of trying to breach security for my own personal illegal use, because I expect others not to misuse my personal data either, but let's quit cracking down on the technical factors, and crack down on the degenerate human factor instead...
I find myself overcome with heartfelt respect and admiration for this brave, principled person. Perhaps there is hope for us after all. Thank you for posting this.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Disclaimer: I am not denying that the WTC attack is a tragedy, I am not denying that something needs to be done. I am merely presenting some facts that may place things into a bit better perspective.
WTC death toll: ~5200
US weekly deaths attributable to smoking: ~9000
US weekly deaths attributable to traffic accidents: ~3400
US weekly deaths attributable to drinking: ~2300
Five thousand dead in a single accident is, indeed, highly tragic and morally outrageous: our anger is justified.
We have far, FAR more people dying of smoking, including a lot of deaths caused by second-hand smoke. Yet the government is doing nothing to protect the victims -- often children in a smoking household -- from this attack on their right to life.
We have far, far more people dying in traffic accidents, and it's very likely that nearly half those deaths are victims of another driver's idiocy. Yet the government is doing nothing to protect us from those drivers, even though the solution is as simple as instituting mandatory driver training and a higher quality of testing.
We also have too many people dying because of alcohol. Yet the government isn't serious about cracking down on, say, drinking drivers; nor does it get tough on violence that's been exacerbated by drinking.
My point? There are plenty of tragedies happening every day. But this time it's got people panicked, so it's far easier to get draconian laws in place.
Trust the government? No. It doesn't act rationally.
[Sources: US CDC, NHTSA]
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
What do you mean by saying that the government is doing nothing?
/. to assume.) What more do you want?
For traffic accidents:
There are seatbelt laws, vehicle safety standards, lighting standards, collision tests, traffic laws (that comprise whole chapters in most state legal codes), civil engineering to design highways that reduce accidents, and much more.
In fact, the red tape you need to go through to build a production motor vehicle is incredible... I would like to see you just try and get a few buddies to build a car, and try to give it away (with a helpful donation from somebody like Wm. Gates III or equivalent). Half of your development team would have to be doing nothing but dealing with government regulations and filling out paperwork.
Regarding drinking:
Ever heard of the 18th Ammendment to the US Constitution? Read it sometime. I would say that is a rather drastic approach to dealing with drinking, and there are substantial laws to deal with it, including one case where somebody who just killed somebody in an accident will now spend the rest of his life in jail because he was drunk while driving. What more do you want, the death peanalty for driving drunk? I'll admit though that I get surprised when I hear about people that have been arrested 30+ times for a DUI and somehow still keep their license (being a friend of the mayor, bribing judges, finding a loophole in the law, the arresting officer doesn't show up to the trial, etc.)
In some ways I regret that the 18th Ammendment was repealed, but even with that off the books now, there are still many regulatory laws controlling how alcoholic is produced and consumed... even if it is just going to be used in a fuel take on a car (complicating the issues I mentioned above).
Smoking:
Why do you think the tobacco companies setteled out of court with the law suits from most of the US states? Almost every state in the US now has some sort of "indoor clean air act" that prohibits smoking in public areas. Despite warnings from the US Surgeon General, countless piles of money spent on public service ads (including television, radio, newspaper, and magazine ads, not to mention billboards, posters, and anti-smoking programs for schools), a heavy public relations effort (including entire episodes of television news magazines like 60 Minutes or Dateline), millions of people still smoke.
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OK, I'll presume for a moment that you meant the United States Government. (I was presuming that you were an American... which isn't always good on
There is a difference between passing laws and actually getting them enforced. And in all of the cases I'll admit that we as citizens of this country can do more to help improve what we are doing in these areas.
But to say that the government is doing nothing is really stretching the imagination.