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Clay Shirky: RIAA Succeeds Where Cypherpunks Fail
scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption: 'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.'"
The reference to RIAA is not about their use of encryption in the form of DRM. It's about how conflict with the RIAA has resulted in many mainstream non-nerd people using privacy-enhancing tools (and more broadly: gaining a pro-privacy mentality).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Where does that claim come from? I'm pretty sure it's not true because more than 10% of encryption is PGP (not counting government crypto, anyway), and PGP isn't snake oil.
It's pretty easy to find snake oil, just read the Doghouse section of Bruce Schneier's monthly Crypto-Gram. But there are also a lot of good companies out there providing a lot of crypto solutions (although admittedly most of them actually license the technology from a small handful of good companies, like RSA and Certicom).
Encryption also does little when physical security can't be controlled
But the issue at hand, with regard to the RIAA and anonymity, is about network security. The RIAA finds it much easier to subpoena your ISP than to sneak into your house and steal your USB keys.
Good and ubiquitous crypto certainly isn't the end-all-and-be-all of security, as you point out, but it would indeed make for 'profound and irreversible' changes in the Internet, in the vulnerability landscape, and in the threat models of pretty much everyone on it.
That's why I'm hoping that private, encrypted p2p systems like WASTE or Foldershare take off! I don't think either of those systems are quite ready for mass acceptance, but they certainly point in the right direction -- private, encrypted file sharing networks that anybody can use.