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The Crypto Project Revives Cypherpunk Ethic
Trailrunner7 writes "When a small group of activists announced the debut of The Crypto Project earlier this year, for many, ahem, mature, security and privacy advocates it brought to mind memories of the original cypherpunk movement that began in the 1990s and that group's seminal efforts to encourage the use of strong cryptography and anonymity online, as well as its successes and failures. The two groups are not allied by anything other than ideology, but The Crypto Project's leaders are aiming to follow in the footsteps of the cypherpunks, build on their accomplishments and make security and privacy tools freely available to the masses. The group is working on a number of projects right now, including setting up an anonymous remailer, putting up a Convergence notary and setting up a Tahoe-LAFS grid. Threatpost has an interview with Sir Valiance, one of the leaders of the project, who talks about the need for better privacy and anonymity online and why the cypherpunks are still important today."
That will never be possible when you're on their wire. never never never... The entire concept is absurd.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
to truly make encryption and Tor impossible would mean changing the way the net works so radically that it would become a lot less useful.
Ah, but to defeat Tor or encryption, it doesn't have to be made impossible - it just has to be made so as to be not trustworthy. So let's say a friendly agency captured a few (or more) Tor nodes, and co-opted a few root certificates (ahem, Iran). These tools don't have to be defeated 100% of the time, they just have to be defeated in principle for them to crumble.
It's sort of like privacy terrorism - the targets are largely symbolic rather than practical, and the goal is to instill fear rather than defeat in a straightforward manner.
And then people will come up with some way around that, like adhoc wifi networks or something of that sort.
Which, I fear, would allow even easier avenue of attack for certain organizations who like to do that. Anything ad-hoc has to be able to find a way to trust something it's never met before (by definition). That's prone to attack too. There are advantages and weaknesses to both centralization and decentralization.
Encryption isn't good enough to stop extraordinary rendition. The government essentially views anyone who uses encryption in an ubiquitous opportunistic way as a terrorist. Encryption didn't protect Bradley Manning from Adrian Lamo. Encryption will only force the governments to rely on informants, which means the government which can't break your code will focus instead on breaking you.
So if you don't give up your key prepare to be tortured until you do. That's how code breaking actually works. Also prepare to be burglarized, keylogged, surveillanced around the clock, dumpster dived, and generally treated as a member of a mafia or terrorist group.
If you want an idea of what it's like, here you go http://www.jbhfile.com/harm_gang.html
"... Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such services cannot be monitored by the government."
It is not only Pakistans government who has interests like this but also the US and the EU ( and every other government ) They justify spying, eavesdropping, wiretapping and backdoor-peeping with fighting criminal activities, move over to terrorism and end up with the dilemma that it gives them the power to extend these activity unnoticed to every citizen for their own benefit.
Then we have arrived at a totalitarian state of the type the West & NATO ( US and UK mostly ) critiziced and fought in the form of the Sovietunion and their Allies using the same oppressive methods improved by the digital technology!
With the Kindle the observation of the citizien in his very home like in 1984 has become a reality!
DNS hijacking (DHS doing MAFIAA a favor)
Unreliable CA (all over the world)
Online censorship (in China and Australia)
Spying on citizens to different degrees (from "surfing history only" - in EU and Australia - to "everything that goes online" in Iran)
With hundreds of millions not caring enough to protect whatever identifies them on Faecebook, G+ and others.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
France went through this phase themselves. You could use only trivially broken crypto. They got over it. It will be interesting to see what happens in Pakistan.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Except Amazon erased my copy of 1984, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
John
cpunks:cpunks has been working fine... CP's not dead ;)
So it does, thank you!
Better keep this a secret.
And have you actually seen anybody doing stenography the last decade or two? Those people have been pretty much invisible since the Cypherpunks movement started - they were part of one of our great successes, Silent Trystero's Typing Pool...
Stenography is different from what court reporters do, though both of them are trying to capture speech in real time. It's a shorthand version of writing that a well-trained secretary could use to capture notes that she'd then type up, and Dictaphones were a technical alternative. (I don't watch Mad Men, but they probably had somebody on there doing shorthand, as well as fetching coffee and smoking cigarettes in the office.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Since you missed it above, the word you're looking for is steganography.
The web of trust can also be attacked by terrorists. In order to expand beyond a single city, a dense web of trust requires air travel in order to get participants to and from key signing parties far from home. Over the past decade, terrorists have been successful in convincing national transportation regulators to adopt security-theater measures that end up reducing the likelihood that a given person will fly and thus reduce the appeal of extending your web of trust at foreign key signing parties. This creates bottlenecks in the trust flow at those people who regularly attend international conventions, such as leaders of prominent free software projects, and those bottlenecks can be attacked much like a CA can be attacked.
I2P provides the anonymity layer for the filesystem.
Usually results in PGP being cracked. So just telling everyone to use PGP will only make the government rely more on wiretaps, bugging, keyloggers, hacking into your computer and waiting for you to type your passwords, and only when all that fails, physically raiding you.
No, I actually was talking about stenography, as was CryptoJones, more or less (though we were also making fun of the people who'd used that term instead of steganography.) It's becoming a lost art, but some of the older folks here will remember those Gregg Shorthand books, and typing pools.
With Steganography, some of the interesting directions to look are how to hide stuff in various video formats, both from the standpoint of how much you can hide from programs and also how much you can hide from visual perception.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Also cypherpunk2:cypherpunk
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Thanks! Wish you were logged in so I could mod you up.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel