New Software To Balance Privacy and Security?

An anonymous reader writes "Claiming to provide both security and privacy, researchers at UCLA say they have developed a system to monitor suspicious online communication that discards communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community." From the article: "The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding -- it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user."

Comments

Evil potential here

[ribuck]

That means lawful U.S. citizens who don't fit the parameters are automatically ruled out.

It also means that lawful citizens who do fit the parameters are reported on. The same as if the agencies are grepping.

a savvy person may be able to tell that the program is running in the background ... by distributing this software all over the Internet to providers and network administrators, you can easily monitor a huge data flow

How will this software be "distributed"? Virus? Payload in a Sony rootkit? Thousands of patriotic sysadmins? Plenty of potential for evil to be done here!

spin doctors

[Hakubi_Washu]

So, it collect all data fitting into the criteria set by the agency without any chance of anyone ever knowing what those criteria were? How is the "law-abiding" citizen to know he's not accidentaly fitted one? They say it improves privacy, but it actually removes it, since you can never know you've not been deemed a "terrorist".

Mathematical proof of code is a tough business

[javaDragon]

Their greping thing is not interesting per itself, but I'd like to see this:

[...]a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer[...]

I'd like to see the demonstration. Until such time, I call bollocks and I refuse to believe an "impossible to reverse-engineer" piece of code ever exists.