Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google

ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Comments

Google vs NSA

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

You know, the NSA is much more established the google. They knew about the insecurity of DES encryption for DECADES before anyone else did. They even convinced IBM to keep quiet about it when they found out. I'm quite sure anything Google could do they are already doing in some cases ( albeit to non US citizens, except when directed to by the executive branch).

Re:Google vs NSA

[hobo sapiens]

DES was 56 bit encryption, and it has been speculated by some that the NSA was capable of brute-forcing that back in the 70's. It's probably a safe bet that the NSA is ahead of the game. They are probably reading this right now, or at least, they would be if they gave a crap about me.

I think the one thing the NSA doesn't have is all of the data that Google has (or maybe they do? ok, the tinfoil hat is off now). If Google gave up their data, the NSA would have more than a bunch of search queries. Think of the queries themselves. Those might cough up a lot of insight into how people think.

Great commenter on TFA page!!!

[drx]

So, people don't value their privacy?

Look at the topmost comment on the first page of the story! Some dude called

Alberto S. Lopez
Lawndale, CA
Email: albertoslopez@gmail.com
Cell: 310.686.1259

explains how he read this story on his iPhone!!!

AhAh AHaAhHAh HAhaHAAHahAHaaa!!

cameras everywhere has hurt gov more than helped i

[hopeless case]

I think most of the scary ideas Cory wrote about (cameras everywhere, the ability to track enoumous volumes of information, ...) have been giving the upper hand to the citizenry against the government (in defense of liberty) more than the other way around.

The police are finding it harder, not easier, to abuse their vast powers when so many people have cameras and can upload the footage to youtube the same day.

Even in China, you could argue that the internet is working that way also. One person can send an email and inform millions of other people what is going on before the government can act to stop it.

What are you talking about?

[rjh]

I am a grad student in computer science. I have had to (try to) cryptanalyze DES before. It was the torment of the damned. My remarks here are based on that experience. I daresay it's a lot more than you've ever done with it.

DES is not now, nor has it ever been, a weak design except in the very narrow sense of it having only a 56-bit keyspace. During the time it was created, 56 bits of keyspace was really quite good. Nobody was expecting it to remain a government standard for the next 20+ years. When the only way to attack an encryption algorithm is to exhaust its keyspace, that encryption algorithm is generally considered to be pretty well-designed. Even the small keyspace can be fixed with 3DES, a trivial extension that gives somewhere between 112 and 168 bits of keyspace, depending on just how many trillions of dollars you're assuming the attacker is spending.

Insofar as its "weaknesses", all that I can think is that you're talking about how the S-boxes were hardened against differential cryptanalysis after the IBM design team independently discovered the attack. The NSA asked IBM to keep differential cryptanalysis quiet, and IBM did: but I don't see how you go from "it's specifically hardened against differential cryptanalysis" to "it has weaknesses the NSA knows about".

Please do not fearmonger with crypto when you don't even have the facts right.