Slashdot Mirror
Governments of the World Agree: Encryption Must Die!
Lauren Weinstein writes: Finally! There's something that apparently virtually all governments around the world can actually agree upon. Unfortunately, it's on par conceptually with handing out hydrogen bombs as lottery prizes. If the drumbeat isn't actually coordinated, it might as well be. Around the world, in testimony before national legislatures and in countless interviews with media, government officials and their surrogates are proclaiming the immediate need to "do something" about encryption that law enforcement and other government agencies can't read on demand.
Apropos: This IT World story (and the New York Times piece it draws from — also published today) about a newly disclosed NSA program through which the agency is "reportedly intercepting Internet communications from U.S. residents without getting court-ordered warrants."
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
Copy protection often uses a form of encryption. Do they want this to be banned as well?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I don't know why this is necessary. If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.
On a completely unrelated note, please enjoy this funny cat video, as well as this image macro, poorly composited with entirely random jpeg compression artifacts around the lettering.
how do you know that something is encrypted? I send send any number of things over the Internet that might appear to be encrypted objects. You going to bust everyone who sends data over the net in a format you aren't familiar with?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
No, only most of it is. The people who think they have some kind of right to read everything everybody writes without any kind of oversight and especially without the person knowing about it are bad and getting worse.
Most of us here know the rules. You manage your keys and let nobody else manage them for you. Keep your key backups offline. Don't reuse keys. If you must use cloud storage, encrypt your own stuff with keys they don't have before data leaves your network. Always have your providers in a position where they literally can't hand over your data. Saying they won't isn't enough, they must be unable to comply.
This is what all the demonization of encryption is all about. They don't want simple precautions becoming widespread among non tech types.
And yes, this stuff is planned and orchestrated. Soon we can expect a high profile terror attack that could allegedly have been stopped were it not for encryption, or perhaps a high profile kidnapping of a victim of the proper age, race, etc. calculated to generate maximum sympathy and if only law enforcement hadn't had their hands tied...
It's kind of like how the whole 'cloud computing' nonsense came about suddenly with all the high priced IT consultancy people telling CEOs that things that are in no way proper in their own organizations are somehow ok when you throw it on the Internet. You know, bad to non-existent security, no accountability for uptime, etc. It's the perfect way to do industrial espionage among other things, and too many companies fall for it. You'd almost think this was also an organized effort, wouldn't you?