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A Complete Guide To The New 'Crypto Wars' (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes: The latest debate over encryption did not begin with a court order demanding Apple help the FBI unlock a dead terrorist's iPhone. The new "Crypto Wars," chronicled in a comprehensive timeline by Eric Geller of the Daily Dot, dates back to at least 2003, with the introduction of "Patriot Act II." The battle over privacy and personal security versus crime-fighting and national security has, however, become a mainstream debate in recent months. The timeline covers a wide-range of incidents where the U.S. and other allied governments have tried to restrict citizens' access to strong encryption. The timeline ends with the director of national intelligence blaming NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the spread of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption.
The war over civilian use of crypto goes back to at least 1994 with skipjack...how quickly they forget
nothing to see here - move along
Or something. Crypto, by Stephen Levy, chronicles the first crypto war. Worth reading, for background, because this time, it's not "national security", it's kiddie porn and terrorists that are going to win if we don't give the Security Services the keys to everything. And, we should TOTALLY trust them to keep us safe.
Yeah, right.
http://www.stevenlevy.com/inde...
I don't think it has, and the summary's 2003 date is rather fucking arbitrary. What about DVD Jon's case in 2002? What about the clipper chip fiasco in the mid 1990s?
This is a battle that's been going on very publicly since the dawn of digital cryptography.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about "The debate between privacy and security." It's total bullshit. It's pretty hard to have security online without privacy. It's not a balance of one versus the other, one depends on the other. The US Government argues my case all the time when bitching about how when Snowden breached the government's privacy, he adversely affected national security.
This brings me to my next piece of pedantry: I'm tired of hearing about "National Security Issues." Terrorism, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/IS/Whatever, Al Qaeda, Home Grown Terrorists, Lone Wolves, the Boston Marathon Bombers, etc... do not threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. There is no invasion and there never will be. The government isn't in danger of collapse. Terrorism is a PUBLIC SAFETY concern. Stop pretending otherwise. If we do that though, who is going to keep the money flowing in to the military/industrial complex?
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
So how many of you so-called geniuses ( Wiley Coyote ) have even begun to look at cryptology and math, and started to try to develop a few methods not of the usual sort?
Wrong approach. If you want to improve the state of crypto, you need to start by learning to break crypto. Anyone can invent an encryption method, but unless you have invested a serious amount of time and skull-sweat into breaking ciphers, whatever you create will suck, terribly.
Maybe if a few hundred new encrypton algorithms were to suddenly pop-up, the governments would be a bit behind the curve of breaking them.
Your plan would make the government's job much, much easier, because the methods that people tend to come up with are mostly very closely related, and tend to all be based on independent reinvention of old ideas for which well-known cracking methods exist. In addition, you're solving a non-problem. We already have very good encryption algorithms, with zero evidence that the government can break them. Snowden's data actually confirms that if you use modern encryption algorithms correctly and manage the keys well, the NSA can't read your data.
What we need is more research into ways to make encryption easier to use correctly, not another gazillion crappy ciphers.