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Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a story at Ars Technica, citing a Yahoo News interview, that National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers has explicitly blamed the terrorist attacks which struck Paris last November on communications backed by strong crypto. From the article:
Because of encrypted communications, he said, "we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened."
Rogers did not explicitly re-launch the campaign waged by FBI director James Comey to force technology companies to provide a "golden key" to encrypted communications. Rogers called encryption "foundational to our future" and added that arguing over encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult.
The interview comes shortly after the FBI won an order requiring Apple to provide technical means to bypass the security measures preventing them from unlocking the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, along with his wife, are responsible for the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California."
They keep trying, however the true fact remains no encryption was used by these terrorists.
I thought the reason the French police were able to find the attacker's apartments, accomplices, and so on very quickly was because the attackers used regular unencrypted methods of communication, such as SMS?
#DeleteChrome
Mohammed Atta et al weren't using encrypted communications, just AOL and flip phones. Yet the TLA's totally screwed the pooch on 9/11.
A .125 batter can't keep blaming the bat forever.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The Paris attacks wouldn't have happened without crypto? That's a funny way to spell "Islam."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Bullshit. The Paris attackers did not use encrypted communications.
Was this an intelligence failure? Possibly. Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.
Thomas Galvin
because how else could the attackers have been in so many places at once. Magic? Jet Packs?!?!? Why it's the Car's that they drove to those locations that enabled them to murderate all those people. If we would just get rid of all cars in Paris this would never happen again.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Even if that were true (and I'd argue it isn't), the attacks also wouldn't have happened without long distance communications. So lets just get rid of them as well in the name of security, up to and including postal mail.
What? You say that long distance communications have an intrinsic utility that vastly dwarfs their occasional role in illegal behavior? You don't say.
Maybe if you had, you know, invested in more HUMINT the Paris attacks wouldn't have happened.
FTA: Rogers' claims about Paris contradict the information that came out of France following the attacks. There were claims by former US intelligence officials that encrypted communications had been used by the Islamic State affiliated terrorists in the immediate wake of the attacks. But those claims were largely dismissed by French authorities when they looked at the actual communications on devices recovered from the group. According to statements from French law enforcement, the attackers had used standard SMS messages to communicate—not encrypted messaging apps on smartphones. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Syed Rizwan Farook: political power grab to set a precedent for forcing manufacturers to decrypt the private data of their customers. both shooters are dead. their motive and operation are both known. we're chasing ghosts to advance an agenda.
attacks which struck Paris last November: are the result of a determined minority of disenfranchised extremists with nothing left to lose. a 65 year policy of proxy wars and foreign backed government coups to install lifelong dictators has left them jaded and dead inside. these are truly desperate people, clinging to $diety for some hope of retribution and justice against a system of international dominionist and interventionalist policy that has ultimately led them to perpetual misery. the solution is not to backdoor every crypto, but make structural and systemic changes in a concerted multinational fashion to help reduce and eliminate the instances of and impact from blind foreign intervention to advance imperialistic goals championed by 18th century conquistadors and feudal lords.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This same argument was debunked right after the attacks. Repeating it again and again doesn't make it true. Here's a link to a post that lays out several of the totally incorrect conclusions that they've been pushing: http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
(It also includes debunking some points unrelated to encryption and mass surveillance that can be ignored in respect to this specific article.)
Slashdot is usually more skeptical than this, especially considering this was already very thoroughly debunked. Are the new editors trying to make a political statement? I don't like where this is going.
So I am onboard with people wanting encryption. But I am also a believer that unless we find acceptable ways to allow some access to encrypted information in times of security or when crimes are committed and a court order which generally allows access to all other private property and information is obtainable. We should not simply define private information encrypted as being totally inaccessible. This is a serious limitation for law enforcement and begs the question. How much are we willing to risk for privacy in this matter?
The hyperbole is strong with this one.
Let's use crypto as the scape goat for all of today's ills, truth be damned.
Classic FUD campaign... does anyone get taken by this anymore?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto
or guns or bombs or radical islam or wars on terror or guantanamo or paris or cars or men or cities or jihads or phones or electricity or the internet or the sun or darkness or mortality or attackers or american exceptionalism or bullets or chemical reactions or ...
It also would not have happened without cars and guns. Or, most importantly, it would have never happened without terrorists or mass gatherings.
So, please ban all mass gatherings of people, quick!
They're going to combine this "finding" with Apple refusing to hack an iPhone to justify passing legislation against crypto.
They're setting up criminal wind-up-toy patsies to make it sound justified so the rest of us get behind it.
My hopes of a less globalist propaganda pushing Slashdot are gone.
I've seen evidence of shadow-banning - or at least "shadow hiding" on this site too.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Paris Attacks Would Not Have Happened Without Crypto
That should really have been put in quotes to make it clear that this is what some guy is saying, and not anything remotely approaching a fact.
And even if technically true, the implications behind the making of the statement should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Bullshit.. I claim BS..
that seems to be the de-facto std. response to any blunder-fu** of this scale..
Take responsibility, your org. failed to identify the situation, Plain and clear..
It's obvious that the methods used are inadequate, thats on you not "encryption"
take responsibility for your own mis-hap..
Let's re-frame the argument that he is making: He is basically saying the NSA needs to be able to read all your mail. So lets make it so that the USPS does not allow people to send mail in any language other than English.
Crooks and terrorists won't care about a ban, and the "law abiding" people will be left entirely vulnerable to those crooks and criminals.
I doubt anyone can tell if any given post is using a strong or weakened cipher, at least not without some deep analysis of the data, effectively ruling out internet traffic, meaning their only "effective" ban would be to ban anything not sent in clear text.
I'm no psychic, but I can easily see how well that'll play out.
Wait, you mean those speeches at the debates were *encrypted*? Well, that makes sense now; what they were saying made no logical sense in English.
The one-time pad is 1000 times simpler than public-key encryption and trivial to put in an app.
Bruce Perens.
They couldn't have fired those bullets without Zinc. Clearly the only answer is to gather up all of the Zinc and transmute it into a safer element.
Repeating it again and again doesn't make it true, but it does make it "true". Which is close enough for government work.
Nope, no sig
the president explains the nation that the water is wet, and that fire is hot
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
Paris attacks would not have happened without roads, without phones, without the electricity. Lets ban them all just too be safe?
I couldn't see his nose grow at all.
1. The Paris terrorists didn't use crypto.
2. Nothing is stopping terrorists from developing their own crypto and keeping their keys private.
Paris wouldn't have happened without cars. We should ban them. Paris wouldn't have happened without food. We should ban that. Paris wouldn't have happened without people. Ban them. If the speed limit were reduced to 10mph, forget a few hundred people in Parise. We could save hundreds of thousand PER YEAR all around the world. Every good thing has bad things about it. We do not restrict good things because they can be used for ill. A cost-benefit analysis looks as benefits as well as costs. Even if the premise of the article is true, that's the start of a conversation, not the end.
So they are admitting that they are so fucking stupid that they don't even bother to monitor ISIS's own public magazine where the mastermind of the Paris attacks was basically terrorist of the month? I think Admiral Michael Rogers is becoming a bit too much like General Buck Turgidson
Time to offend someone
We must take their word
It is a very well known fact that spies always tell the truth
The terrorists who attacked used GSM telephones and unencrypted SMS.
May I be the first one ot call bullsh*t on that evil crypto shtick? Me an the rest of /. of course...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Online commerce, purchasing, banking, and the global economy couldn't have happened without crypto.
Let's dispel the paranoid illusions of an overzealous cop and come to reality.
I guess the crypto was hanging out on the couch and thought this would be a good time to kill some folks. So he got up and went downstairs and grabbed his guns and headed out. I guess the little crypto will think twice about thinking.
I don't see what is so hard about creating an unbreakable encryption code. You have a random number generator. Give it a start value. Produce a string of random letters as long as your message, and do an XOR with the text to be encrypted. The receiving people can only decode the message if they know the start value for the random number generator. Am I missing something?
The Paris attacks also wouldn't have happened with access to military grade firearms and explosives. Those are already quite restricted in most sane countries and it didn't seem to prevent anything.
So stop telling people you want to crack down on encryption to defeat the terrorists. We both know that's bullshit and wouldn't work even if you could manage it.
Log in or piss off.
Maybe crypto needs it's own frpbaq amendment in the US constitution.
I have a feeling that if the phone of the directory of nuclear power plant is easily hackable, that might enable previously impossible terrorist attacks. Just think about it. Some of our government officials use private phones and emails... how much more information do you want to give to the terrorists?
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
They don't need to "hide" anything. You're failing to acknowledge the scale of the problem. You simply can't watch everyone. Trying to do so is a fool's errand.
Ultimately the only thing you will do is compromise everyone else's security.
The idea that they could have stopped it if only they could have spied on more people is a moronic, innumerate, fantasy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We need to be careful here:. The argument should be that it doesn't matter whether or not they used encryption. We should not destroy our ability to communicate privately since this is fundamental to a free society and worse, it would give the terrorists a government mandated backdoor they might get hold of. While it is tempting to just point out that this call is based on a lie (and if I were more cynical I might suspect that this is the reason for making such an obvious lie) one day it probably won't be so we need to make sure the real argument against mandated back doors is out there too.
Trump and Cruz have both said Apple should help the FBI.
I remember back in the mid 90s the Republicans were for smaller govt. Now they just want to double down on Authoritarianism/Statism. They want a huge govt, just don't want to pay the taxes it.
About the only Republicans that support encryption are the libertarian wing of the Republicans.
This guy is either a complete and utter moron or is trying like hell tp push a personal agenda.
If he really thinks the attacks would not have happened without crypto then he really is a complete moron. A complete and utter moron.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, I guess since they want to ruin encryption for everyone, then we should just ban all encryption for everyone, right? Then we'll know who the criminals and terrorists are right away, because they'll be the only ones using encryption! Genius, right?
While we're at it, let's ban clothing, too. After all, criminals and terrorists conceal weapons in their clothing, so if no one is wearing any clothes, then you can't conceal anything, can you? Likewise let's all live in glass houses, so you can't hide anything in your house, either. Sure, everyone will see you having sex, but there's an added benefit to that, too: we'll see who is having deviant, unnatural sex, so we can send them for 're-education' immediately. Also we'll all see what you eat and drink, so government officials can 'correct' your eating habits if you're not eating a properly government-approved diet. It's for you own good! The government wants you to be healthy! Also, think of the children! You may not be raising your children in a government expert-approved manner, which naturally isn't what's best for them, so we can 'correct' your parenting techniques, too! Everyone will be so much happier then! You want to be happy, right?
Everyone will be so much happier in this New World full of such lovely Order! Everyone likes to share, and we'll all be sharing everything with everyone, all the time, especially with our wonderful, wise government, who after all only wants what's best for us! Won't that be lovely?
..or maybe how about this: We tell the government to go fuck themselves sideways with a rusty chainsaw and the throttle stuck wide open when they want to fuck up encyption making it worse than useless. MEMO TO U.S. GOVERNMENT DICKHEADS: GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY DATA!
I am neither a Republican nor Democrat, and I approve this message.
P.S. Please be sure to read the sigline before commenting, otherwise I may have to melt your face off.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You simply can't watch everyone.
They don't care about effectively watching everyone. They want to have the option to dip in to any information about anyone they like, when they like. It's about power. People having secrets diminishes government power. They don't want people to have secrets that they don't at least have the option to learn about if the whim takes them.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Html5 player is already used by default. What do you need flash for again?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
It will happen someday, though.
A terrorist will buy a set of Star Trek steak knives over eBay and they'll use HTTPS to transmit their eBay password. A future terrorist will lock the door of their house (why are these people even allowed to have locks, anyway?) and his wife will plaintext email him, "Did you lock the house? Remember, we're going to that party right after work tonight," and he'll say "quit telling all the snoops on the Internet which days our house has no one home," and they'll start encrypting their personal conversations. And that'll be that: they'll be encryption users too, just like the rest of us.
Some day, a terrorist is going to use a motor vehicle to travel from their home to the site of their terror.
Some day, a terrorist will use an alarm clock, instead of the sun, to get up at the correct time.
We need to face the facts: technology is bad. Anything that empowers humanity, can be used by humanity in the service of bad things. Power is bad. Capability is bad. Failing to starve when the gods wants you to starve is bad, and being immune to smallpox is bad and is why the gods have to invent new ones, like AIDS. It's time to end this nonsense of technology, and go back up into the trees. Because the apes in the trees never do anything bad to one another.
The reason I know that apes never try to harm one another, is because I carefully cultivate shocking ignorance about anthro-- er I mean -- zoology -- no, wait -- I mean biology since plants also do ev-- no wait: game theory. Well, I mean, statistics. I try to remain ignorance of mathematics and everything which stands upon or can be modelled by mathematics.
And you can too. Join me in giving a fuck about whether or not bad people use the same technology as good people.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If encryption technology is to blame to hide the planning of such an attack, then the other technologies used to execute the attack deserves a similar blame.
So we're blaming Paris on crypto?
Are we still blaming Katrina on the gays? Is 9/11 still illuminati and/or lizard people.
If nothing else, I applaud the FUD spreaders for picking a vector that sounds somewhat within the realm of possibility. It's wrong, of course, but they are getting better.
This signature is false.
We hear that metadata (not encrypted at all) is critical to discerning the intentions of terrorists and such worldwide. So we excuse the NSA and others for a 'gather all' system, despite knowing that people like me who rarely travel more than 60 miles from home are no threat. None. My yearly pilgrimage back 'home' is so predictable it is either innocuous or an 'Americkans' level implant, and we have no defense against decade-level strategies. None.
I assume France also collects this metadata. Seems like it isn't being credited with much usefulness in this case.
So the metadata isn't, after all, very useful.
Now we are told that encryption needs to be broken so that they can collect the massively more data that gives conversations to them, so they can search keywords and link individuals based not on association, but intent. Which is entirely understandable, and could indeed alert them to plots.
And breaking encryption would also risk my personal financial data, expose entirely unrelated data, and leave me at risk of criminal use and government abuse, which are both the same thing. Government abuse must be recognized as criminal activity.
Assange and Manning must be seen as heroes for exposing the breadth and depth of surveillance, worldwide, and alerting us to the loss of freedoms and privacy that could leave us totally at the mercy of state and global actors.
BUT - we need to be able to make our best efforts, such as they are, in anti-terrorism. How, if encryption is truly unbreakable?
- Focus on real, known, provable threats. Profiling of likely suspects are just plainly necessary. If the common factors are religion and national origin, then we must use these factors, not because we are racist or bigoted, but because we are realists and honest.
- Focus surveillance on those real threats. Domestic phone calls are not the most important data. International calls are critical. Look at those groups that can be shown to be supportive of terrorism. Monitor them first.
- Prevention. In the U.S., visa overstays are inexcusable. This is a simple problem with a simple solution - save that it must become a priority, and our current Administration is not merely uninterested, it is antithetical to controlling immigration and alien visitations. The no-fly list is a failure because it is poor quality data poorly maintained, resulting in diffusing our efforts and failing to prevent a single terrorist thereat, not one, that we can know about, and somehow missing several successful attempts. Even the simplistic exercise of searching carry-on baggage in U.S. airports fails spectacularly. Incompetence that cannot be left unchecked if we intend to actually prevent attacks. We are lucky, not good.
But I rant. Without real change, we will suffer.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Dark skinned guy crossing borders and using encryption, what could be more suspicious?
What could be more suspicious ?
Adi Shamir trying to attend the Cryptology conference he did start him-self in the 80s ?
According to the US that's even worse.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe he is just posturing as a public figure has a need to do, but those statements are ridiculous.
The correct statement is "if they had been silly enough to use unencrypted methods to communicate, we might have found out the plot beforehand and stopped it."
It is a ridiculous thing to imply that "if they had not had access to encrypted methods to communicate, we would have figured out the any number of other ways they would have communicated it, and stopped it."
... or the Internet... or people congregating at public places... I mean, where does it stop? #sarcasm
The Paris attacks would not have happened if....
US hadn't been drone attacking the middle east for years
Immigration laws and procedures where improved and followed
the world addressed the rising conflict between major religious beliefs
or one of a million other things that could have more significantly impacted the risk of a terror attack in Paris!
Crypto is a protocol, nothing more. It can be used in so many ways. Its like water can be used for a hydrogen bomb
We need to stop demonizing it, embrace it, and understand it.
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
This seems to be an attempt to sway an American public who generally only read headliners but not the full story. Encryption was not from what I read even used in coordinating the Paris events. Of course the best people in espionage do not rely exclusively on high tech methods. I think the FBI forgot there are other means to do things in secret and are using headlines to get public support and put pressure on politicians to give the FBI unfetted access to all transmitted data. in which case people may well go to variations of the "Book Code". Given the state of literacy in the USA, that could work even better than high power encryption algorithms. :-)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Seriously, this is just getting stupid. What's next? "If only we had cameras and microphones in everyone's living rooms and bedrooms and did away with curtains and all privacy, we could stop all crime" First off, no, no you couldn't. You would however be engaging in a huge crime against humanity, which you are already engaged in by constant assaults on human rights...
Blame the Fox network. The pilot of the X-Files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" gave OBL the plan to fly planes into the WTC....
The French are so incompetent that five or six people just talking in public at a cafe could have planned these attacks.
Parisians more-so. They're too busy with their day-to-day lives to give two fucks about anything else. Been there, seen it, could've killed the entire population thanks to how unconcerned they are about anything other than themselves.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Who said *roughly* "if you repeat it often enough the populace will believe it" and "give me control of the media and I will control the populace".. Dang it... if I could only put my finger on who that was...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
100% agree, This statement appears to be based on the assumption that criminals are too stupid to implement their own one-time pad encryption system. 100% secure encryption has been possible for hundreds of years... criminals only use commercially available solutions because they are easily available, cheap, and easy. I also get a "methinks the maiden doth protest too much" feeling regarding all the whining about Apple not unlocking a phone for the FBI. If the NSA already had a way of unlocking iPhones, wouldn't they being doing everything in their power to convince criminals it was 100% secure? Lure them into a false sense of security then monitor all their data via a remote hack would be the fed's wet dream.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Double-plus ungood thought crime! Report immediately to your nearest reeducation center! Big Brother is watching you!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Apparently Sarah Palin has access to the most secure form of encryption known to mankind; I can't understand a thing she says!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Aside of it being a blatant lie that cryptography had anything to do with the Paris attacks. There is no such thing as a US-government-only backdoor.
Such a backdoor would be valuable, to say the least. VERY valuable. Valuable enough that we're not talking about hacker groups wanting it, we're talking about nation states wanting it. And nation states have LOTS of money available to bribe the average official having control over said key.
In other words: Any OS, any encryption, any digital lock you have the "master key" to, Iran and North Korea does too. Think about it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What I think is "How convenient" that the Paris attacks were just brought to the limelight again, especially after all that was in the media about how the terrorists involved in those attacks were using plain text messages and not encryption.
Onda Technology Institute
This is spin from the government, looks a bit coordinated. Here is more "news" note the author interviews a DOJ contractor as an expert. It attacks Apple's undo burden argument. http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
Oops, you spilled your gamergate all over your Shakespeare quote, I hope that washes out.
To my understanding at least, they used unsecured SMS
It's easy to spot a bigot or a racist, all one has to do is see that there is a large community of people posting anonymously, that has gone unchecked, and when anonymous posters reach large numbers they ALWAYS resort to spewing bullshit.
For secure deletion I set apg to create a 10,000 character password and feed it into ccrypt. The results could easily be added to emails, the first 10,000 as the text, the second as the password to encrypt it, causing spies to spend huge effort decrypting to only to get gibberish.
I smell the presence of a paid fake article here. Who is paying these people to have these absurd opinions? The statements made are clearly and obviously false. Oh yes, that's right, these guys (NSA) are the world experts in lying. Please don't put me in 'fooled again' category. I have a new detector that helps me know when the NSA is lying about cryptography. Just look at their lips. If they move, they lie.
All coordinated acts of terror happens because we allow private communication to happen. If we simply made it impossible for anyone to have any type of private communication, we could intercept Paris, 9/11... you name it. Don't blame crypto. Blame private communication.
Replying to you to correct wrongful modding.
Dark Reflection
The terrorists in Paris used assault rifles for their attack. They are already banned in the whole of Europe. I think there is a lesson in this.
With freedom comes risk.
Awesome!
The Soviet Union had a significant percent of the population spying on family members, and when it collapsed there was still substantial (former) contraband that came out of the shadows.
People forget to ask, "Who watches the watcher-watcher-watcher-watchers?"
I call BullSh*t. For this to be true, then the people involved would have to already been suspects to be monitored. For this to be true, then the authorities would have known an attack was coming, just not when -- why didn't they warn anybody? For this to be true, then they failed with the boots on the ground that infiltrate these groups.
I have no doubt that the encryption can make things more difficult, but to say it would have been prevented without encryption is just false. It's as if nobody prior to the modern day ever used code words for any activity? This is a just a propaganda piece to try and convince the public that encryption is bad. The piece they fail to mention, is your data is your personal IP. If it is okay for Sony to protect their IP, if it is okay for Microsoft to protect their IP, why does the government have a problem with individuals interested in protecting their IP?
Like some other European countries, France allows anyone from its former colonies to swarm in without going through regular immigration channels. Terrorists don't need to use crypto to game a system like that.
I have an idea! Let's have a contest to see how many ways one can say "No". Maybe it's the tone? Or the Inflection? Maybe if it's set to the right music?
The one who finds the method of saying "no" that finally convinces world governments that putting in backdoors, or a way to use a "golden key", or whatever euphemism they want that gives them a way into our devices and networks without our permission is a spectacularly bad idea and not going to happen, wins a prize. It can be sponsored by device makers, security companies, operating system developers, etc.
Crypto
Guns
Groups of people
Religion
Zealot willing to die
Unscrupulous despots who wish to enforce their will over as much of the planet as they can get away with.
The various powers sticking their nose into the business of other countries
Economics
Oil
Greed
Hate
Physics
This shit can go on, and on, and on, and on.
Trying to tell me that one TEENY little cog in the vast Rube Goldberg machine of terrorism and crime would have prevented the entire thing?
Disingenuous at best.
A bold-faced fucking lie in reality.
Straight up idiocy at its worst.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
After all, society as we know it would most likely been collapsed before the attack happened, either due malicious hackers abusing the unencrypted system to a halt or some sort of orwellian nightmare system in place.
Without encryption, none of us would have any money in our bank accounts. How's that for a headline?
Security through word salad!
You get a pass for not knowing enough electronics to have the answer to this, it's not required of you. But yes, we have really random number sources.
Electronic components make noise. Several different forms of electronic noise are rooted in quantum-mechanical phenomena. It turns out that you can get really random noise from a 5 cent diode. One must design it so that it doesn't start receiving the local radio station or otherwise producing non-random information, and run software to check it before generating critical keys, but the ways to assure its quality are well-known.
Bruce Perens.
You know, I'm getting pretty fucking fed up with this modern day witch hunt for "criminals".
Someone who commits ONE criminal act, or who was falsely convicted of a criminal act, or who was accidentally involved in a criminal act, is NOT AN EVIL PERSON (TM). They maybe made a mistake. One. They were caught, punished, and then allowed to go on with their lives.
But no, that's far from reality.
Today, we wish to brand them as EVIL FOR ALL ETERNITY.
Many of my friends and colleagues have committed "crimes" - drink driving, excess speed, consuming and possessing recreational drugs, minor fraud and theft (stealing from employers, friends, merchants, tax authority). I, myself, have been convicted of possession of an implement used in the consumption of a controlled substance (an empty beer can used to smoke weed by a visitor many moons ago and forgotten). I paid my dues. I learnt my lesson, although I was only accidentally in possession of someone else's beer can and I had no desire to drop my friend in the shit when I could easily have been in his shoes a year before.
I pay my taxes. I never hurt anyone in my life. I work hard. I give to charity. I'm not racist, sexist nor homophobic. I have no agenda on other people's personal lives.
And ALL THE WORLD wants to find me, hunt me down, shame me, punish me AGAIN, evict me, shun me, reject me, cancel my working visa, demonise me as the scum they are taught to believe that I am.
I'm just like everyone else, your neighbour, your boss, your bus driver, your barista, your school teacher, the local cop, the judge's son, the shopkeeper's uncle.
We are SURROUNDED by "criminals" every day, every hour, and they do us no harm.
Have we all got so comfortable in our lives that we have this desperate NEED to invoke double punishments ?
Does anyone understand the consequence of demonising me?
Do you think this attitude my engender radicalism ?
Sun Tzu said that you should never back your enemy into a corner that they can not escape from. If they can not escape, they will be forced to fight you, and this will strengthen their resolve. Best to let them retreat in honour.
I just don't understand this lack of shared humanity.
Did you ever lie to the tax man?
Did you ever shoplift?
Did you ever change lanes without signalling?
Drive 5 km over the motorway speed limit?
Do you surf the web during paid work hours? (theft)
Do you know someone close to you that did any of these things? Should they be lettered and shamed, tarred and feathered, stripped of all dignity?
Calm the fuck down, people. There, but for the grace of your God, go you, down the anti-social gurgler because you fucked up once.
Even Billy Joel said: You're only human, you're supposed to make mistakes.
I'm not advocating that all crimes are equal, of course not. But the unilateral branding and dehumanisation just hurts my brain and my heart.
Doesn't Jesus forgive?
Don't the Catholics forgive?
Even the gummint lets you go after you pay your penalty.
Why can't you?
"would not have happened without crypto".
What kind of retarded argumentation is this? It probably would not have happened without the invention of guns, of the cellphone or literally any of the "modern" methods used. Is that an argument against civilisation because it enables terrorism? Retarded.
This is _not_ an argument. It is like the suggestion of banning knives because they can lead to knife murders and unintentional self injury. It is not an adult approach to the subject.
Neither would a whole lot of other things, many of them good. Encryption is just a tool to be used or misused, like any other tool.
encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult.
What like before there was communications to tap or DNA forensic science so law enforcement would have to find the first black or homeless person and pin it on them?
100% agree, This statement appears to be based on the assumption that criminals are too stupid to implement their own one-time pad encryption system. 100% secure encryption has been possible for hundreds of years... criminals only use commercially available solutions because they are easily available, cheap, and easy. I also get a "methinks the maiden doth protest too much" feeling regarding all the whining about Apple not unlocking a phone for the FBI. If the NSA already had a way of unlocking iPhones, wouldn't they being doing everything in their power to convince criminals it was 100% secure? Lure them into a false sense of security then monitor all their data via a remote hack would be the fed's wet dream.
I two hundred percent disagree. There are many devices that can encrypt voice in realtime before it hits the cellphone. Just use the phone or device to make connection, use the encrypted message (Latin American patents use aes with one-time-keys) to encrypt the voice before it leaves an unencrypted link to a receiving phone. Listen as you wish, but with bidirectional conversation taking place using AES and with one-time-keys, this method is as secure as having an encrypted phone. One could say that the terrorists could have used encryption a;pmg with a pair of disposable phones that you can pick up for $40.00 almost anywhere.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
... Just. Large enough sets of random-enough data to be useful have only really been available since statistics started to become a useful field in the early 19th century. The cryptographic use of one-time pads was first described in 1882 (though they may have been used previously, but quietly). Slightly thin ice there, I wouldn't take up tap-dancing.
What? Security organisations are meant to be up-to-date with things? Who'd have thought it?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Plain text messages using circumlocution and indirection to cover up what they were really talking about. Shocking that they'd use inherently unguessable encoding to avoid the dubious security theatre of encryption.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Our military and government depend on crypto as well so getting rid of all crypto would make our security services less secure too. I agree that implementing crypto is pretty easy for those with the right background and criminals likely have the money to pay for it.