Encryption methods are far easier to transport and spread illegally than gun are.
Rand Paul is pretty openly pro-encryption. Hillary Clinton is equivocating; I think she's probably anti-encryption. These may be exceptions that prove the rule but I think what we're really seeing is a combination of ignorance, pandering and authoritarianism across the spectrum.
Damn, we need her on our side as a proven expert in computer security and privacy.
Google donates how much to both sides?
However - I found this video of someone hacking Hillary's server encryption
At the time I wrote to my representative Bob Stump and he went and talked with Hollings and sent me a synopsis of their conversation.
It was Warren Buffett who said that we have had class warfare, and that his class won. So true.
Edit: this was not meant to be snark, just an indication that, in the context of this particular thread/discussion, he's a Republican. The parent had a valid question, please stop downvoting him/her.
Rand Paul is libertarian and mostly anti-gov. We need more people like him in Washington.
I would no sooner put a anti-gov politician in charge than hire a manager who's opposed to the existence of the team he's managing.
Please no sexism, classism, and racism in choosing people. Best people for the job regardless of their income tax bracket or their skin color. Just put people in office that understand how to run a country and limit the powers of government.
If they aren't, what can we do to remove that bias and get what you ask for?
If they are, what's preventing other groups from gaining competence?
The reality is that different cultures value different things and pursue different dreams. Only politicians benefit by peddling the agenda that some other group is keeping another group down. As an Indian education was extremely valued in the family, education not only ensured prosperity but status and excellent marriage opportunities. Automatically academic and intellectual success is something I have pursued and probably my children would do the same. My parents sold many items to put me through colleges and I would do the same for my kids. White Americans on other hand have different concepts of status, a football player is considered as cool where as smart boy is considered nerd. Guess who gets more dates ?
USA was founded on the principle that people should be free to pursue their own values. What we do not want is politicians forcing needless values on us.
That said, I'm not advocating quotas, and frankly speaking I'm all in favor of getting rid of sexism, classism, and racism.
But my money's on, if we did, our politicians at all levels of government would better reflect who they represented.
That is how you get ever expanding bureaucracy, regulatory overreach, kingdom building and information silos. Those who can see beyond their own team and work to make their department irrelevant are exactly the kind of people you want as managers in your company.
Groups do well when they enjoy freedom, chase opportunities freely, compete and drink less. Not when someone from their community is elected.
You are completely wrong about the manager aspect. A good manager will always keep the team lean, less red tape and maximize the freedom of the team members as well as the customers they are serving. managers on other hand will always claim their more resources which they will spend on their own lavish lifestyle and problems that did not need solving in first place. Obama is a good example.
He introduced the campaign finance bill that forced the government to argue before the Supreme Court that it had the power to ban books with political opinions it didn't agree with, the same argument that led to the Citizens United decision.
He made up a song about bombing Iran and sang it at campaign stops. (Tune of Beach Boys' Barbara Ann)
That's just the start. This encryption but is of a piece with his whole career. McCain is as bad as they come.
Did you oppose that bill at the time, on the grounds that it would lead to such ridiculous arguments? If you had, you would have been the only one. Most First-Amendment nose-thumbers loved that bill. I suspect their hearts were in the right place, just as I suspect McCain's was (then, on that topic; various statements made since have been disconcerting).
It would be nice if the rich bastards didn't play the body politic like a marionette, but this isn't the way to change that.
The fact that you didn't lead off with a reference to the Keating Five indicates to me that you don't actually know much about McCain or his career.
I was not the only one. [0][1] The AFL-CIO, the NRA, the ACLU, and Americans that care about the First Amendment were just the beginning. Right inside the Senate, current majority leader McConnell was warning the world about exactly what was wrong with the bill. McCain insisted on keeping all the worst and most totalitarian provisions; they were his favorites.
"Most First-Amendment nose-thumbers loved that bill. I suspect their hearts were in the right place, just as I suspect McCain's was"
That's the same kind of contempt for patriotic Americans McCain always exhibits. His heart is not in the right place.
"The fact that you didn't lead off with a reference to the Keating Five"
I could have worn my fingers down on that smartphone with the crimes of McCain before I got to his relatively tiny involvement in the Lincoln S&L bit. I think he was on the list mostly because they needed a Republican to round it out.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/letter/letter-senate-opposition-mccain-...
[1] https://www.nraila.org/articles/20010711/campaign-finance-re...
Relatively few people can keep track of what a handful of parties did in the last couple of years, imagine how short the public memory would be if it was single representatives.
<cue comments suggesting technological solutions>
Also, ideas in politics are interrelated. A big core value or strategic objective will pretty naturally lead to a bunch of other related ideas. You can view this as "buying into political beliefs wholesale" but it's a pretty natural thing to happen.
> Also, ideas in politics are interrelated. A big core value or strategic objective will pretty naturally lead to a bunch of other related ideas. You can view this as "buying into political beliefs wholesale" but it's a pretty natural thing to happen.
Ideas may be interrelated but it doesn't say anything about their validity. Whether it's natural or not, I still find it incredibly stupid. The focus on ideas seems wrong in itself. The usual discussions like whether Free Market or Government-Regulated Market are Better™ are pointless; we should be talking about whether a free-market solution or a top-down solution is better for a particular problem, like determining wages or building a power plant.
I mean, the level of absurdity of buying ideas wholesale is obvious to everyone in almost every single discipline besides politics. Static vs. dynamic typing, or Lisp vs. rest of the world, or why PHP sucks are fun topics to discuss, but when push comes to shove, everyone knows that they should use the best tool for the job and get the job done.
Imagine for a moment that we're tasked with writing a grep-like utility. If we were to run this project the way we run our countries, we'd have several opposing groups:
- C supporters arguing for C, because everything fast and big is written in C!
- Their little more progressive branch arguing for C++.
- Perl supporters, saying that C is wrong because it was used by the Sov^H^H^HMicrosoft to write Windows, therefore it is evil.
- Lisp supporters, saying that other languages are infringing on programmers' freedoms, and that the only rule should be the one of non-aggressive macro writing.
- Fortranaries arguing we should write in Fortran because in Good Old Days everything was great and was written in Fortran.
etc.
Ultimately, running a country is about solving problems - some of the most important problems we ever face. Why do we accept this insanity where it matters the most?
[0] 2/100 senators, 0/434 congressmen
I won't go that far, I would say that getting a Gun in the US or even in Europe (especially since the eastern European and Balkan states have joined (officially or unofficially Schengen) is by far easier than setting up your own secure crypto from scratch.
This isn't an argument in favor of banning crypto, just a hard simple truth that the number of people that can setup a secure cryptographic system is small, the amount of people that can design them is even smaller, and a single operational mistake can ruin your entire encryption.
Don't get me wrong at this moment in time it's "fairly" easy to get off the shelf (FOSS or commercial) encryption software that would prevent law enforcement from accessing the data, and it's possible to implement encryption that would also foil full state level (intelligence agencies, military intelligence etc.) actors from breaking your crypto in any given timely manner at least.
But there are quite a few cutting edge attacks already on RSA, AES and other ciphers for key extraction, quite a few cryptographic systems were discovered to have horrific flaws in them, and some commercial solutions also have a backdoor/work reducer in them for lawful (and unlawful) access.
That said if you currently eliminate the existing eco-system of "non-backdoored / non-broken" encryption don't expect for it to be easily revived, it will not be that hard to crush existing even FOSS crypto working groups and as time passes and agencies like the NSA can break existing encryption ciphers more easily it will only be harder and harder to build safe crypto without going into new cipher suits, and most cryptographers in the world today work for governments, or are heavily watched.
So the dream of having the worlds most prominent math and computer science prodigies raising up to the challenge and building new cryptography in a dusky basement of a Berlin bar is a fairly romantic fantasy. Just look at how hard it was to get decent (for the time) encryption software when the US and most countries treated it as highly regulated commodities, and that was without an intentional crackdown on everyone who writes and distributes such software.
No, it is far easier to download an openbsd cd image from canada than it is to physically carry a gun.
Effective like prohibition was? Or the war on drugs? All that will happen is people will stop using macOS and Windows because that is all the US government can pressure.
The effectiveness of limiting proliferation is tied directly to the difficulty and the scarcity of the human capital involved, this is why restricting the proliferation of small arms which can be build by anyone with some machining experience is near impossible, but limiting the proliferation of say nuclear arms and technology is quite possible.
It would surprise me if the NSA (or any other agency) doesn't have a list of all or most software engineers and mathematicians which are capable of designing crypto, that mailing list isn't that big.
People can easily hide data streams inside video-streams/ text-files/images to circumvent trivial screening. The government won't be able to do anything effective without massive costs and draconian measures. Not to mention people outside the US can carry on however they like anyway.
What will happen if say we do wake up to a post quantum world with much of our asymmetric cryptography being worthless. Do you really see people being able to develop a new RSA level family of algorithms at a hackaton?
If you can't increase the work that needed to be done to break your encryption at the same rate as your adversary increases their capabilities you are going to lose and lose badly.
And draconian measures and extreme costs is just what they are proposing, I'm not advocating that it's going to be effective at first or cheap, but dismissing it as even if they want too they will never be able too is just as foolish as voting for Trump ironically to give him a sympathy vote.
Go ask people from East Germany, pre-Glasnost Russia and even some countries that exist today how easy it is going to be to evade surveillance enmass.
You should never be dismissive of threats no matter how far fetched or unlikely they are or how incapable your opponent at executing them might be, this is probably one of the more important lessons one can take from history.
The threat you describe sounds like a race. But in fact, it's more like a switch. Right now the world is pre-quantum. When the switch is flipped, to post-quantum, a lot of algorithms will break. But not all of them.
See http://pqcrypto.org/ for some interesting reading.
Post-Quantum Cryptography, Bernstein, 2009: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/135832/Post_Quantum...
Regarding your point, I don't think that people here are being dismissive of your ideas. You're quite right. But there are reasons to be positive about the future, while highlighting the negatives. Isn't it so interesting that certain algorithms can be safe in a pqcrypto world?
Notice where the algorithms spring up from. You mention a hackathon, but that's not where these algorithms root. They're from universities. And universities are interesting. If the legislation will face resistance, it will probably be from academics, like in the last crypto war.
How easy would it to work on open encryption software if we'll have to revert to the Pre Bernstein V. United States era (which wasn't so long ago) and one that might actually be more heavily regulated than (restriction on actual work on encryption and related field rather than exporting software) before? Heck Phil Zimmermann almost ended up going to jail when PGP was "leaked" outside of the US, and this isn't East Germany, this is the US in the mid 90's.
This thread's article is interesting, because it's the first step toward a world you describe. But reason has a way of prevailing. Not always, but usually.
One thing that's missing now, that someone here might want to cook up, is a good explanation. The topic of crypto is difficult. Not just because it's hard like calculus, but because there are a lot of subtleties. Old analogies to locks and doors aren't really applicable. What we need is a way of highlighting what's going on, why people should care, and what they can do.
This is laughable. Getting a gun legally or illegally is harder than downloading a basic Tails live cd.
Um, I assure you that the US Government was quite serious about preventing encryption export.
You are also ignoring history. It was far harder to get an operating system image, period. It was more cost effective for me to drive to a store and buy a physical CD than download over an internet connection in 1996. The retail channel is fairly easy to control--nobody is going to spend the money to press CD's and publish something that will get them raided by US marshals.
This has changed. Dramatically. Between higher bandwidth and bittorrent, you probably couldn't stop the distribution on an OS image, nowadays.
And it seems possible to build a system that detects such illegal usage ona web scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Dianne Feinstein, who is supposed to be representing the interests of Silicon Valley, has been beating the anti-encryption drum for some time now.
At least McCain's constituency doesn't include the people who are decrying this.
DiFi is not only worse and earlier than McCain on this issue, but she's intentionally ignoring the people it is her job to represent.
And you cry "Republicans!". Okay.