All the folks moaning about loss of freedom have valid concerns, but they should be comforted by history.
War in the US has always led to a curtailment of freedoms, as it must.
We have our freedoms because we have won our wars. We have to make tradeoffs between freedoms and practicality.
With all of these (horrors) attacks on our freedoms, we are still far freer than we have been for most of our history, and more free than most of the rest of the world.
Yes, we have to be vigilant, but let's not be paranoid. Too many people on the net seem to be spoiled by never having been in a time of turmoil or genuine war. But we are at war now. There are people who have killed more of our citizens than in any attack in our history! And they hit civilians.
So keep an eye out, but knock of the absolutism and the whining. You aren't going to lose your rights unless the bad guys win. If they win, you will either convert to Islam, or die. And for females... well, bad news, eh?
The goal of radical islam is to convert the world to radical islam. Not normal islam, but a twisted, semi-marxist, extremist form of islam. And that is the enemy, and they are willing to die for their cause.
So why aren't you willing to let the government do its job. I think DMCA is more of a real threat than these security rulings.
A good way to start a post. I would say the same about yours... and will in detail.
Either the NSA can factor or it can't.
This is naive. If you really think that the entire job of NSA is breaking strong codes, you truly do not have a clue about the electronic intelligence business! As I explained in my post, traffic analysis (look it up) is useful even when you cannot break the cyphers. But it is a lot more effective if you don't have every message out there cloaked and thus evoking equal suspicion. If my message is in the clear, the NSA can quickly determine that (other than steganographic techniques) and ignore the message.
Furthermore, as far as I know, factoring has never been proven to be NP complete. The best that has been proven for most encryption systems is that cracking them is of equivalent difficulty to factoring.
For all you know, the NSA, which employs some outstanding mathematicians, may be able to factor in polynomial time.
If they can, then using modern encryption doesn't really burden them. If they can't, then no amount of ass-kissing and not using encryption is going to let them break the encryption of the terrorists who are going to be using REAL software without the government-mandated backdoors (murder is illegal too; did they respect that law?).
Again, wrong. If not many people are using the strong encryption, then the strong encryption stands out like a red flag, allowing intelligence efforts to be focussed.
You need to do a little more research about modern crypto. We're talking about things like the heat death of the universe happening before all computers in the world could finish factoring numbers that large (if factoring is "hard"). Perhaps you shouldn't leap to assumptions about other posters' knowledge of encryption.
Also, you are making a big assumption about an unproven assertion: the practical difficulty of breaking such codes. For example, a very strong code can be broken by attacking the method of key generation. It can be broken by improper use - take a look at 802.11b. It can be attacked by previously unguessed means (such as the attack on RSA by timing information). Furthermore, the NSA and other agencies are highly classified. Do you really know what they can do? Could they have a working quantum computer (which can dramatically improve factoring)? Probably not, but they might! In which case allowing them to focus those assets on dangerous messages, rather than having to break your messages and mine only to discover they are uninteresting, would be a very good thing.
Are you aware that recent research has shown that DES was apparently designed to resist differential cryptoanalysis? That differential cryptoanalysis was invented in the last decade, but that the NSA approved DES in the 1970's? Don't underestimate or overestimate the NSA (or GCHQ or others) - we just don't know.
lawing encryption will not have any effect on these people. They don't respect our laws. The only effect will be to break the security of on-line transactions (over SSL for example). Backdoored schemes are broken schemes. A panel of a dozen great minds in the industry have already shown this: Rivest, Schneier, Diffie, etc. Read the paper here. [crypto.com]
Sigh. Why not respond to what was suggested, rather than making up a strawman. My post never advocated the outlawing of encryption. Furthermore, it did not advocate using the backdoor'd scheme that Schnier et. al. analyzed. It advocated not abusing crypto, and suggested that perhaps we should use crypto which the government can break, without unduly compromising security. I didn't say it was easy. Give it to the great minds to figure out how. I wish they would focus on how to do that, along with their silent peers at the NSA.
The issue isn't making law enforcement's job easy. It is about making it somewhat more effective by making it somewhat less difficult. Furthermore, we are not talking about law enforcement here - we are talking about war. Law enforcement is designed to deal with relatively minor threats by individuals or small groups. National defense is about major attacks on the nation and society as a whole.
Finally, you misconstrue my arguments. I do not mean to end encryption use. I asked to not abuse it! Certainly its use in authentication should be, if anything, increased! Better authentication leads to a better world.
That's all very well, but how can I, in a commercial evironment, trust someone else's government not to pass on any of my trade secrets? I understand that you are writing in the context of a US national speaking about your own government, but don't forget that companies from other countries might be less than happy for their communications to be intercepted by another government
You bring up a good point. And I am not sure how one would solve it. It is entirely possibly that the "cat is out of the bag" completely on encryption, but I don't think so. One way to do this would be for the western democracies to make security agreements on this sort of thing - some scheme where the British could read traffic coming into Britain and Americans could do the same. This would take some thought. My point was mostly to argue (as you agreed with) that the unnecessary use of encryption burdens the government.
One thing that would help without any new measures is traffic analysis. If the government is watching where the messages go, they can use that in their priority setting for analysis and even decryption.
If you really care about the safety of others, don't use encryption unless you really need to (say, to safeguard personal or busines secrets). And when you do, use an encryption standard that the government can recognize and break. Before you totally freak out, please read this whole post.
The reason for my suggestion is so that the NSA, FBI and equivalent agencies in other governments can separate the truly dangerous traffic from the uninteresting, and focus their efforts on the former.
Does this imply some degree of trust of the government? Yes, it does. As does giving weapons to an army or having a police force! If you don't have a government that can, in general (if not in every case) be trusted with measures needed to provide its citizens with security, then replace it with one you can trust, or go live in anarchy!
In the US we have a constitution which is given more than just lip service by these agencies. And we have popularly elected oversight bodies with built in incentives to expose misuse of these tools. It isn't perfect (what is?). But in general it works - and that's about all you can expect from any government.
I have things I want to hide from most readers (say - my credit card numbers) but I have no reason to hide them from the government. Nor do I have a constitutional right to do so in cases of adjudicated surveillance. The fourth amendment has the word "unreasonable" in it for a reason! The reason is to *allow* reasonable search.
So, if you care about the security of your fellow citizens, don't use encryption just to thumb your nose at the government! You shouldn't expect any more privacy on the internet than on your cell phone! You do *not* have a "right" to privacy on the internet, just a right to be secure from unreasonable surveillance.
Those who use encryption to intentionally burden the NSA and FBI are unwittingly helping the terrorists! To you people, I say: wake up! You have a moral responsibility to your fellow citizens, especially when war has been declared on your nation, your way of life and your civilian populace.
To those who way the terrorists will use uncrackable encryption or (more likely) steaganographic systems to evade these measures, I offer the following arguments:
Yes, some will. Some won't. Law enforcement, and war, is a matter of percentages. There is no perfect solution, for freedom or security.
Allowing the appropriate agencies to detect non-standard (unreasonable) encryption helps them considerably, even if they can never break the encryption. Having a lot of spoiled internet brats fill the net with this encryption makes their job harder. So if you support terrorism, by all means make their job harder!
To those who use the slippery-slope argument: all government is a slippery slope. If you don't want your freedoms on a slippery slope, go live in a state of anarchy. Otherwise, it is foolish not to recognize that you must and do give up certain freedoms in order to live in a civil society and gain some measure of protection from those who truly do mean to kill you or force you into their narrow way of life (for example, extreme Islam).
And to those who keep quoting Ben Franklin... kindly button it up! Repeating his statement without a considered understanding and discussion of the trade-offs is just silly. Ben Franklin certainly understood the necessity to give up some freedoms to purchase some security, or he would never have supported the formation of the US Government (or any government), or its constitution.
Finally, I pose the following not completely unrealistic choice: free encryption for everyone, and a military draft to fight the consequences; or some reasonable limitations on your privacy? It may come to that!
I grew up in the age of the draft, and we recognized that it was needed for our security then. I gave up enormous amounts of freedom when I served in the US Navy, and I did so voluntarily, because I believed that the country needed defending, and would do so again if I wasn't a graybeard with a family to take care of!
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particu larly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The word unreasonable is important here. The 4th amendment doesn't guarantee an absolute right to privacy. It guarantees a reasonable right to privacy - and that includes reasonable within the grounds of national security. In other words, what makes everyone think the internet is so special, that you should be guaranteed privacy on it even though you are not guaranteed privacy in verbal or telephone conversations, or in the mail?
What we do have is privacy except reasonable cause exists for the government to violate it - in general (a few exceptions such as the drug war) to protect the public from domestic and foreign enemies and criminals.
I'll probably get mod'ed into the mud for this, but I believe that if were practical, a properly protected crypto backdoor system would be appropriate, and I have said so for a long time.
First a caveat - this is moot at this point, because of the widespread availability of effective crypto technology - you can't close the barn door.
BUT... in the United States and every other country in the world that I am aware of, police are empowered, under appropriate circumstances, to eavesdrop on normally private conversations - whether telephone calls, conversations in a bugged car, or mail. This is not because of a nefarious desire of governments to snoop (at least not in the free societies) but because of the clear and present danger which criminals, traitors and terrorists represent.
Many have argued that the internet should somehow be exempt from the rules of the non-wired world - but that is a very short-sighted viewpoint. The internet is part of the larger world, and internet people need to recognize that reality. The internet is not virtual; the internet can be used for great real good, but it can also be used to facilitate terrible harm. The internet is real and has real effects on the non-virtual world, and thus considerations of that non-virtual world must be allowed to affect the internet world.
The NSA has, for decades, recorded all radio traffic almost everywhere. However, they do not have authority to *listen* to them except, I suspect, in cases like this.
OTOH, they probably do have the authority to send them to GCHQ (British "NSA") and have them tell them what's in them:-)
At the moment, privacy is not my biggest worry. IN fact, I have long thought that extreme privacy advocates on the internet have ignored the real world. We need privacy protection, but the internet need be no more private than telephones (where the government, with due cause through judicial process, can monitor you).
I'm sorry but you are also misconstruing things. I suspect some politicians (Ted Kennedy for example) want to look the other way, but the US government in general certainly is against the IRA and does not approve of the funding.
Please recognize the distinction: we do not support terrorists. We cannot, however, prevent our people from doing so unless certain legal findings have been made... and those people can sue in court to make sure this isn't done arbitrarily.
The US has tried to stop the IRA, we share critical intelligence with Britain.
We have just taken a monstrous attack, and I am offended that you can equate this to the silliness of those misguided americans who send money to causes they don't understand. But to imply that the US gave tacit approval to the Provos is a slur on the US government and is simply not true.
As one who has studied US 20th century history in depth, and who lived more than half of that century, and a Vietnam Veteran, all I can say is: you are equating apples and oranges.
Differences that should be obvious include: we are a democracy, while our opponents have always been dictatorships; we have indeed supported rebels, and *some* of those rebels indeed performed terrorist acts, but that has certainly been against US policy since at least 1965.
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I call Israel a nation under siege by terrorists. And the Palestinian authority, a dictatorship as opposed to the Israeli democracy, does its best to cause Palestinian casualties, to fool people like yourself.
Israel isn't perfect, and in its war for independence some of its people committed unforgivable acts of terrorism - by the Stern gang and Irgun.
Furthermore, I disagree with Israel's settlement policy. But they are a nation that has been attacked by neighboring countries. Remember, they only conquered Palestine after they had been invaded from their in 1967.
However, targeting terrorist leaders is not terrorism. It is self defense. I hope the US starts doing the same thing. People who attack civilians on purpose are murderers and deserve whatever happens to them.
Sorry, but the Contras were no more terrorists than the Sandanistas and their bloody friends in El Salvador. We did indeed fund Contras, as revolutionaries, and I am glad we did.
Because we have a legal process here that is founded on our written constitution, the power of the government to stop such organizations as NORAID is limited. You can be sure that few politicians support the funding of the IRA. Too many Americans are uninformed about the true use of the funds they donate. It is also true that some of the groups that fund terror against Americans get funding in the US. We are not funding a war against you any more than we are funding a war aginst us!
There is no comparison between a free society where bad guys raise money and government sponsored terrorism.
Please notice the tense. I said the US Government "does not" provide funding to terrorists. I never said we didn't in the past, although in most cases the funding was to rebels, not terrorists.
There is a tremendous moral difference between targeting civilians, and hitting civilians as a side effect of military action. The US took extraordinary precautions to minimize civilian casualties in both Iraq and Servia. But nobody is perfect.
Again, the difference is moral. Just War may kill civilians, but it doesn't target civilians. Terrorism targets civilians.
What works in war is to wage war. Anyone who feels that this attack is short of war is a fool. It is now time to stop the practice of government sponsored terrorism. Perhaps you can suggest how to do that without extreme means. Perhaps you will mail some flowers to the Taliban in hopes that they will see the world your way!
The US has tried many things to answer terrorism. It is time to give up on the judicial approach and use more effective assets and send a stronger message.
These attacks are supported by governments - even if they are not exactly in the line of planning (the Afghans, for example, have already demonstrated their knowledge of "plausable deniability). With the growing sophistication of terror devices, and the mounting death toll, the free nations of the world must treat sponsorship of terrorism as equivalent to acts of war.
The US probably lost more citizens in this attack than in the Pearl Harbor attack, and these citizens were civilians of a free and generous society. We will respond. We can only hope that those other free countries, such as France and Germany, which have been happy to trade with terrorist countries, will join us.
The US Government does not provide funding to terrorists. I am aware of, and ashamed of NorAid, as an American of Irish ancestry. But it is *not* a government policy to support it.
An act of war has been committed against the United States. Worse than that, it was an attack against innocent civilians.
In order to prevent this in the future, the US must hold responsible all countries which harbor and aid terrorists, and take action against them - that action proportional to their involvement and their cooperation in soon to come demands for an end to their support and harbor.
Peace is what the US has been doing. Now it is time for other means - violent means.
The Palestinians, btw, do not do themselves a favor with their demonstrations in the street which celebrated this event.
The neutron bomb was killed due to a very successful propaganda campaign fostered by the KGB. The bomb was portrayed as a capitalists weapon - destroy the people without destroying the structures. In reality, it was designed to stop massed tank attacks with minimal damage to the structures and the people away from its effective kill range. This is because it was developed as a defensive weapon, and was expected to be used on friendly territory against a conquering massive army.
Those of us who have freedom need military strength to keep the dictators of those who don't from taking ours away!
You say you are not a dreamer, but clearly you are if you expect a unilateral disarmament of the US to lead to anything other than chaos and war. Do you really believe that the sociopaths of the world - Saddam as an example - will destroy their toys and stop being bad guyes?
GET SERIOUS Free societies need a military because free societies are productive and produce goods that everybody else wants to steal! Mankind fights wars because too many societies have not developed effective systems or cultures to prevent their leaders from waging agressive war.
Furthermore, the UN cannot do its job. The UN has a very undemocratic one-country/one-vote system (fortunately with vetoes in the SC) the means that it will always use its power to attempt against the benefit of the free and rich economies.
There has been a lot of hype about UWB technology. First, some myth busting:
It does occupy specturm. No radio system can occupy zero spectrum except an infinite duration CW signal (which is of merely academic interest).
It does not rely on any new physical principles. It is a radio system.
It is a variation of a widely studied and widely deployed form of radio communications: Spread Spectrum.
UWB is a clever form of spread spectrum technology. Spread spectrum (SS) is defined as any radio communications system in which the occupied bandwidth is much wider than the baseband (information rate) signal. The most common forms of SS include FM broadcast radio, where 200kHz is used to transmit about 50kHz of signal, and CDMA - cellular phone spread spectrum invented by Qualcomm. Spread spectrum was actually invented by the actress Heddy Lamar for use during World War II and was used for secure communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Spread spectrum has a parameter called "spreading gain" which is the ratio (expressed in DB) of the occupied bandwidth to the baseband signal. UWB is a form of spread spectrum with an extremely high spreading gain - it occupies a whole lot of spectrum (contrary to some claims) to transmit a relatively small amount of information. However, because the signal is spread over a very wide frequency range, very little signal is required on any given frequency (or technically, in any given narrowband channel). Thus the signal appears to ordinary receivers as an increase in background noise, and under most circumstances will not do so in a noticeable way.
Traditional spread spectrum uses one of two modulation techniques to mix the information signal with a spreading signal: direct sequence (DSS) and frequency hopping (FH).
Direct sequence uses a bandwidth constrained random noise generator (typically a pseudo-random digital bit stream) and multiplies the baseband signal by this. It is also band limited, either/or by filters or the spectral characteristics of the pseudo-random noise. DSS is used in CDMA cellular phones.
Frequency hopping involves moving the carrier frequency frequenly, typically in a pseudo-random manner. In fact, usually the frequency changes a number of times for each bit transmitted.
Both techniques allow reception of the transmitted information by synchronous detection - the spreading signal is duplicated in the receiver, and used to recover the baseband signal. In the case of DSS, you generate a precisely timed replica of the transmitter's pseudo-random sequence, and multiply it by the input from the antenna (or in the intermediate frequency stages - dependinng on receiver design). Low pass filtering (integration) of the output yields the original signal.
Spread spectrum systems have some or all of the following characteristics:
Low probability of intercept - if you don't know the spreading sequence, and you are not close to the transmitter, you probably cannot even detect its existence.
Interference to both narrowband systems and other spread spectrum systems takes the character of an increase in background noise. A high spreading gain SS system will put a relatively tiny amount of signal into the bandwidth of a typical non-spread spectrum receiver (NBFM, AM, SSB).
Reduced sensitivity to multiphath distortion.
To get back to UWB, it uses very narrow pulses as its spreading signal. The Fourier spectrum of a very narrow pulse shows a very flat distribution of energy over a very wide bandwidth. In this sense, UWB is spread spectrum. Likewise, it recovers the signal in a similar manner as other spread spectrum signals - it uses a regenerated narrow band pulse to synchronously sample (a form of multiplication) the radio spectrum, thus recovering the original pulse (minus pulse spreading caused by reflections and frequency dispersion).
AFAIK one could duplicate the behavior of a UWB system by using an extremely wide band direct sequence system. It would provide the precise ranging, see-through wall radar characteristics. It would have the low detectability. It would have the low interference to narrower-band signals. However, the UWB system appears to be much easier and inexpensive to build.
MAC based security just means doing securiety at the MAC level - which is the level at which the entire 802.11b operates. For example, 802.11b encryption operates at that level.
It should not be confused with simply filtering by MAC *addresses*.
MAC level can be secured by means other than simple MAC address screening. The key is to encrypt at the MAC level (as IEE802.11b does), but to do it well. 802.11b uses a private key, so if the key is chosen properly, and the encryption algorithm is strengthened (by using it right!), then one should not need any higher level protocols for normal security.
Certainly even encrypted systems are susceptible to traffic analysis (putting together an org chart by seeing who talks to who), but that is rarely a threat in the commercial world.
WEP has been proven insecure. In fact, software is available now to automatically crack any WEP system by passive monitoring.
Less clear is whether WEP must be insecure. I see no reason that a MAC-level protocol cannot be as secure as any other protocol. And WEP is based on a presumably secure encryption algorithm, which it uses poorly.
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All the folks moaning about loss of freedom have valid concerns, but they should be comforted by history.
War in the US has always led to a curtailment of freedoms, as it must.
We have our freedoms because we have won our wars. We have to make tradeoffs between freedoms and practicality.
With all of these (horrors) attacks on our freedoms, we are still far freer than we have been for most of our history, and more free than most of the rest of the world.
Yes, we have to be vigilant, but let's not be paranoid. Too many people on the net seem to be spoiled by never having been in a time of turmoil or genuine war. But we are at war now. There are people who have killed more of our citizens than in any attack in our history! And they hit civilians.
So keep an eye out, but knock of the absolutism and the whining. You aren't going to lose your rights unless the bad guys win. If they win, you will either convert to Islam, or die. And for females... well, bad news, eh?
The goal of radical islam is to convert the world to radical islam. Not normal islam, but a twisted, semi-marxist, extremist form of islam. And that is the enemy, and they are willing to die for their cause.
So why aren't you willing to let the government do its job. I think DMCA is more of a real threat than these security rulings.
A good way to start a post. I would say the same about yours... and will in detail.
Either the NSA can factor or it can't.
This is naive. If you really think that the entire job of NSA is breaking strong codes, you truly do not have a clue about the electronic intelligence business! As I explained in my post, traffic analysis (look it up) is useful even when you cannot break the cyphers. But it is a lot more effective if you don't have every message out there cloaked and thus evoking equal suspicion. If my message is in the clear, the NSA can quickly determine that (other than steganographic techniques) and ignore the message.
Furthermore, as far as I know, factoring has never been proven to be NP complete. The best that has been proven for most encryption systems is that cracking them is of equivalent difficulty to factoring.
For all you know, the NSA, which employs some outstanding mathematicians, may be able to factor in polynomial time.
If they can, then using modern encryption doesn't really burden them. If they can't, then no amount of ass-kissing and not using encryption is going to let them break the encryption of the terrorists who are going to be using REAL software without the government-mandated backdoors (murder is illegal too; did they respect that law?).
Again, wrong. If not many people are using the strong encryption, then the strong encryption stands out like a red flag, allowing intelligence efforts to be focussed.
You need to do a little more research about modern crypto. We're talking about things like the heat death of the universe happening before all computers in the world could finish factoring numbers that large (if factoring is "hard").
Perhaps you shouldn't leap to assumptions about other posters' knowledge of encryption.
Also, you are making a big assumption about an unproven assertion: the practical difficulty of breaking such codes. For example, a very strong code can be broken by attacking the method of key generation. It can be broken by improper use - take a look at 802.11b. It can be attacked by previously unguessed means (such as the attack on RSA by timing information). Furthermore, the NSA and other agencies are highly classified. Do you really know what they can do? Could they have a working quantum computer (which can dramatically improve factoring)? Probably not, but they might! In which case allowing them to focus those assets on dangerous messages, rather than having to break your messages and mine only to discover they are uninteresting, would be a very good thing.
Are you aware that recent research has shown that DES was apparently designed to resist differential cryptoanalysis? That differential cryptoanalysis was invented in the last decade, but that the NSA approved DES in the 1970's? Don't underestimate or overestimate the NSA (or GCHQ or others) - we just don't know.
lawing encryption will not have any effect on these people. They don't respect our laws. The only effect will be to break the security of on-line transactions (over SSL for example). Backdoored schemes are broken schemes. A panel of a dozen great minds in the industry have already shown this: Rivest, Schneier, Diffie, etc. Read the paper here. [crypto.com]
Sigh. Why not respond to what was suggested, rather than making up a strawman. My post never advocated the outlawing of encryption. Furthermore, it did not advocate using the backdoor'd scheme that Schnier et. al. analyzed. It advocated not abusing crypto, and suggested that perhaps we should use crypto which the government can break, without unduly compromising security. I didn't say it was easy. Give it to the great minds to figure out how. I wish they would focus on how to do that, along with their silent peers at the NSA.
Finally, you misconstrue my arguments. I do not mean to end encryption use. I asked to not abuse it! Certainly its use in authentication should be, if anything, increased! Better authentication leads to a better world.
You bring up a good point. And I am not sure how one would solve it. It is entirely possibly that the "cat is out of the bag" completely on encryption, but I don't think so. One way to do this would be for the western democracies to make security agreements on this sort of thing - some scheme where the British could read traffic coming into Britain and Americans could do the same. This would take some thought. My point was mostly to argue (as you agreed with) that the unnecessary use of encryption burdens the government.
One thing that would help without any new measures is traffic analysis. If the government is watching where the messages go, they can use that in their priority setting for analysis and even decryption.
The reason for my suggestion is so that the NSA, FBI and equivalent agencies in other governments can separate the truly dangerous traffic from the uninteresting, and focus their efforts on the former.
Does this imply some degree of trust of the government? Yes, it does. As does giving weapons to an army or having a police force! If you don't have a government that can, in general (if not in every case) be trusted with measures needed to provide its citizens with security, then replace it with one you can trust, or go live in anarchy!
In the US we have a constitution which is given more than just lip service by these agencies. And we have popularly elected oversight bodies with built in incentives to expose misuse of these tools. It isn't perfect (what is?). But in general it works - and that's about all you can expect from any government.
I have things I want to hide from most readers (say - my credit card numbers) but I have no reason to hide them from the government. Nor do I have a constitutional right to do so in cases of adjudicated surveillance. The fourth amendment has the word "unreasonable" in it for a reason! The reason is to *allow* reasonable search.
So, if you care about the security of your fellow citizens, don't use encryption just to thumb your nose at the government! You shouldn't expect any more privacy on the internet than on your cell phone! You do *not* have a "right" to privacy on the internet, just a right to be secure from unreasonable surveillance.
Those who use encryption to intentionally burden the NSA and FBI are unwittingly helping the terrorists! To you people, I say: wake up! You have a moral responsibility to your fellow citizens, especially when war has been declared on your nation, your way of life and your civilian populace.
To those who way the terrorists will use uncrackable encryption or (more likely) steaganographic systems to evade these measures, I offer the following arguments:
To those who use the slippery-slope argument: all government is a slippery slope. If you don't want your freedoms on a slippery slope, go live in a state of anarchy. Otherwise, it is foolish not to recognize that you must and do give up certain freedoms in order to live in a civil society and gain some measure of protection from those who truly do mean to kill you or force you into their narrow way of life (for example, extreme Islam).
And to those who keep quoting Ben Franklin... kindly button it up! Repeating his statement without a considered understanding and discussion of the trade-offs is just silly. Ben Franklin certainly understood the necessity to give up some freedoms to purchase some security, or he would never have supported the formation of the US Government (or any government), or its constitution.
Finally, I pose the following not completely unrealistic choice: free encryption for everyone, and a military draft to fight the consequences; or some reasonable limitations on your privacy? It may come to that!
I grew up in the age of the draft, and we recognized that it was needed for our security then. I gave up enormous amounts of freedom when I served in the US Navy, and I did so voluntarily, because I believed that the country needed defending, and would do so again if I wasn't a graybeard with a family to take care of!
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particu larly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The word unreasonable is important here. The 4th amendment doesn't guarantee an absolute right to privacy. It guarantees a reasonable right to privacy - and that includes reasonable within the grounds of national security. In other words, what makes everyone think the internet is so special, that you should be guaranteed privacy on it even though you are not guaranteed privacy in verbal or telephone conversations, or in the mail?
What we do have is privacy except reasonable cause exists for the government to violate it - in general (a few exceptions such as the drug war) to protect the public from domestic and foreign enemies and criminals.
First a caveat - this is moot at this point, because of the widespread availability of effective crypto technology - you can't close the barn door.
BUT... in the United States and every other country in the world that I am aware of, police are empowered, under appropriate circumstances, to eavesdrop on normally private conversations - whether telephone calls, conversations in a bugged car, or mail. This is not because of a nefarious desire of governments to snoop (at least not in the free societies) but because of the clear and present danger which criminals, traitors and terrorists represent.
Many have argued that the internet should somehow be exempt from the rules of the non-wired world - but that is a very short-sighted viewpoint. The internet is part of the larger world, and internet people need to recognize that reality. The internet is not virtual; the internet can be used for great real good, but it can also be used to facilitate terrible harm. The internet is real and has real effects on the non-virtual world, and thus considerations of that non-virtual world must be allowed to affect the internet world.
OTOH, they probably do have the authority to send them to GCHQ (British "NSA") and have them tell them what's in them
At the moment, privacy is not my biggest worry. IN fact, I have long thought that extreme privacy advocates on the internet have ignored the real world. We need privacy protection, but the internet need be no more private than telephones (where the government, with due cause through judicial process, can monitor you).
Please recognize the distinction: we do not support terrorists. We cannot, however, prevent our people from doing so unless certain legal findings have been made... and those people can sue in court to make sure this isn't done arbitrarily.
The US has tried to stop the IRA, we share critical intelligence with Britain.
We have just taken a monstrous attack, and I am offended that you can equate this to the silliness of those misguided americans who send money to causes they don't understand. But to imply that the US gave tacit approval to the Provos is a slur on the US government and is simply not true.
Differences that should be obvious include: we are a democracy, while our opponents have always been dictatorships; we have indeed supported rebels, and *some* of those rebels indeed performed terrorist acts, but that has certainly been against US policy since at least 1965.
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Israel isn't perfect, and in its war for independence some of its people committed unforgivable acts of terrorism - by the Stern gang and Irgun.
Furthermore, I disagree with Israel's settlement policy. But they are a nation that has been attacked by neighboring countries. Remember, they only conquered Palestine after they had been invaded from their in 1967.
However, targeting terrorist leaders is not terrorism. It is self defense. I hope the US starts doing the same thing. People who attack civilians on purpose are murderers and deserve whatever happens to them.
Sorry, but the Contras were no more terrorists than the Sandanistas and their bloody friends in El Salvador. We did indeed fund Contras, as revolutionaries, and I am glad we did.
There is no comparison between a free society where bad guys raise money and government sponsored terrorism.
Please notice the tense. I said the US Government "does not" provide funding to terrorists. I never said we didn't in the past, although in most cases the funding was to rebels, not terrorists.
Again, the difference is moral. Just War may kill civilians, but it doesn't target civilians. Terrorism targets civilians.
The US has tried many things to answer terrorism. It is time to give up on the judicial approach and use more effective assets and send a stronger message.
These attacks are supported by governments - even if they are not exactly in the line of planning (the Afghans, for example, have already demonstrated their knowledge of "plausable deniability). With the growing sophistication of terror devices, and the mounting death toll, the free nations of the world must treat sponsorship of terrorism as equivalent to acts of war.
The US probably lost more citizens in this attack than in the Pearl Harbor attack, and these citizens were civilians of a free and generous society. We will respond. We can only hope that those other free countries, such as France and Germany, which have been happy to trade with terrorist countries, will join us.
The US Government does not provide funding to terrorists. I am aware of, and ashamed of NorAid, as an American of Irish ancestry. But it is *not* a government policy to support it.
In order to prevent this in the future, the US must hold responsible all countries which harbor and aid terrorists, and take action against them - that action proportional to their involvement and their cooperation in soon to come demands for an end to their support and harbor.
Peace is what the US has been doing. Now it is time for other means - violent means.
The Palestinians, btw, do not do themselves a favor with their demonstrations in the street which celebrated this event.
The neutron bomb was killed due to a very successful propaganda campaign fostered by the KGB. The bomb was portrayed as a capitalists weapon - destroy the people without destroying the structures. In reality, it was designed to stop massed tank attacks with minimal damage to the structures and the people away from its effective kill range. This is because it was developed as a defensive weapon, and was expected to be used on friendly territory against a conquering massive army.
You say you are not a dreamer, but clearly you are if you expect a unilateral disarmament of the US to lead to anything other than chaos and war. Do you really believe that the sociopaths of the world - Saddam as an example - will destroy their toys and stop being bad guyes?
GET SERIOUS Free societies need a military because free societies are productive and produce goods that everybody else wants to steal! Mankind fights wars because too many societies have not developed effective systems or cultures to prevent their leaders from waging agressive war.
Furthermore, the UN cannot do its job. The UN has a very undemocratic one-country/one-vote system (fortunately with vetoes in the SC) the means that it will always use its power to attempt against the benefit of the free and rich economies.
UWB is a clever form of spread spectrum technology. Spread spectrum (SS) is defined as any radio communications system in which the occupied bandwidth is much wider than the baseband (information rate) signal. The most common forms of SS include FM broadcast radio, where 200kHz is used to transmit about 50kHz of signal, and CDMA - cellular phone spread spectrum invented by Qualcomm. Spread spectrum was actually invented by the actress Heddy Lamar for use during World War II and was used for secure communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Spread spectrum has a parameter called "spreading gain" which is the ratio (expressed in DB) of the occupied bandwidth to the baseband signal. UWB is a form of spread spectrum with an extremely high spreading gain - it occupies a whole lot of spectrum (contrary to some claims) to transmit a relatively small amount of information. However, because the signal is spread over a very wide frequency range, very little signal is required on any given frequency (or technically, in any given narrowband channel). Thus the signal appears to ordinary receivers as an increase in background noise, and under most circumstances will not do so in a noticeable way.
Traditional spread spectrum uses one of two modulation techniques to mix the information signal with a spreading signal: direct sequence (DSS) and frequency hopping (FH).
Direct sequence uses a bandwidth constrained random noise generator (typically a pseudo-random digital bit stream) and multiplies the baseband signal by this. It is also band limited, either/or by filters or the spectral characteristics of the pseudo-random noise. DSS is used in CDMA cellular phones.
Frequency hopping involves moving the carrier frequency frequenly, typically in a pseudo-random manner. In fact, usually the frequency changes a number of times for each bit transmitted.
Both techniques allow reception of the transmitted information by synchronous detection - the spreading signal is duplicated in the receiver, and used to recover the baseband signal. In the case of DSS, you generate a precisely timed replica of the transmitter's pseudo-random sequence, and multiply it by the input from the antenna (or in the intermediate frequency stages - dependinng on receiver design). Low pass filtering (integration) of the output yields the original signal.
Spread spectrum systems have some or all of the following characteristics:
To get back to UWB, it uses very narrow pulses as its spreading signal. The Fourier spectrum of a very narrow pulse shows a very flat distribution of energy over a very wide bandwidth. In this sense, UWB is spread spectrum. Likewise, it recovers the signal in a similar manner as other spread spectrum signals - it uses a regenerated narrow band pulse to synchronously sample (a form of multiplication) the radio spectrum, thus recovering the original pulse (minus pulse spreading caused by reflections and frequency dispersion).
AFAIK one could duplicate the behavior of a UWB system by using an extremely wide band direct sequence system. It would provide the precise ranging, see-through wall radar characteristics. It would have the low detectability. It would have the low interference to narrower-band signals. However, the UWB system appears to be much easier and inexpensive to build.
OTOH, if Richard Feynman, also a physicist, had said it, I would pay attention. Feynman was perhaps the deepest thinker about computation so far.
It should not be confused with simply filtering by MAC *addresses*.
Certainly even encrypted systems are susceptible to traffic analysis (putting together an org chart by seeing who talks to who), but that is rarely a threat in the commercial world.
Less clear is whether WEP must be insecure. I see no reason that a MAC-level protocol cannot be as secure as any other protocol. And WEP is based on a presumably secure encryption algorithm, which it uses poorly.