Paris attacks revive debate on encryption, surveillance

Just chip us all, why don't you?

Back doors won't solve anything.

"I think I’m going to have to sue George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the illegal, unauthorized remake of “Brazil,” the reality version. Isn’t it crazy?"

Terry Gilliam, 2006

Here's some of Gilliam's opus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE

The top echelons of global security services can tap and read anything

Echelon, indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Confirmation_of_ECHELON_.282015.29

They are just making the electronic haystick bigger, not developing more efficient ways of finding the needle. All of the focus on intercepting electonic data probably means that a handwritten terrorist plot sent on the back of a postcard would go entirely unnoticed.

The fact that a middle-eastern man on route to Paris can be pulled over by German police with a carload of machine guns -without that information being shared- shows that our priorities are all wrong.

They are just making the electronic haystick bigger, not developing more efficient ways of finding the needle

Who says they want to find the needle? That haystack's feathering lots of nests, after all.

I bet the world would have been more receptive to this if governments hadn't been illegally capturing all communications of their own citizens for decades without any legal reason or authority.

OTOH, that horse has already left the barn-meaning that encryption is already easily available to anyone with a web search device.

I don't use commercial encryption. Switched to F/LOSS encryption about 15 years ago which isn't controlled by any single company or country. I've never heard of it being broken when reasonable protections are made to protect the access methods with 2FA. Even if any government wanted, it is fairly certain that for people using gpg properly there isn't any known method to access the encrypted data without access to the private keys. Good luck with that. Think we are good for at least a decade with current 512-bit encryption for symmetric streams and 4K for asymmetric encrypted data.

The main risks to web-encryptions is DNS. If the encryption trusts DNS, then governments can and have been caught performing man-in-the-middle attacks. Things liike HTTPS have been broken for years because of the reliance on DNS.

One problem I see is that if the various intelligence agencies are working with the terrorists, the last thing I want to do is give them more power to spy on the public.

They can have my dataflow. Why should I care?

They can have my dataflow. Why should I care?

I don't know if you American or not. If you are an American, here is why you should care:

By what right does the government have to anything? Well, those rights and privileges that flow from the rules. This is called the rule of law. You should care about the rule of law, because government without the rule of law is tyranny.

That is why you should care.

Further, whether you care or not does not allow you to make that decision for me, for other Americans, or for generations of Americans to come. Simply put, we are stewards of the rule of law, and have a duty to preserve and protect it.

I trust this answers your question, and you need not repost the question again.

I want email etc. monitored in general, so they can pick up intelligence on terrorists and nascent anarchists and felons (past, present, and future) and Black Sabbath worshippers.

They're not going to give me special consideration, except insofar as I don't fit their profiles, so I'm not going to worry about that.