Maybe we need the "Herd immunity" of a large number of people using encryption software. If a sufficient number of people are using encryption, then targeting those users becomes less worthwhile.
Technology is not the solution to this problem, it is society and it can be solved by rule of law, accountability, revolution and such old forgotten concepts.
Technology is not the solution to this problem, it is A solution, among others.
to compile OpenSSl you need a compiler and an entire toolchain, an operatingsystem, microcode and hardware. In any layer it is possible for an organization such as NSA to do its dirty deeds.
They dont fabricate their own chips/hardware for fun. Well, maybe for fun too, but not only for fun.
I tend to assume that Microsoft Windows has backdoors, given their track record and their corporate culture of bending to the will of the government. This means that anything you run off of Windows is already compromised. Open-source operating systems are one way to remove this unknown. The largest ones have the eyeballs of thousands of people scrutinizing them at all times.
I can't speak to hardware backdooring because I know nothing about it. Would this be able to affect end-to-end encryption like GPG? I'm assuming it would have to have extremely complicated analysis to understand the "bigger picture" of the instructions being run on the CPU...and logging every instruction is beyond the capabilities of built-in hardware for most computers, I would think. Are there any good articles on this?
On the other end, the American public needs to wake the fuck up and realize that just because one of us isn't a terrorist doesn't mean this doesn't affect each of us, individually. The government works for us, and we wrote the constitution, not the government. It is ultimately our job to enforce the constitution.
I'm starting to wonder if Americans even deserve free speech if all it's used for is to take pictures of your lunch and post it on instagram, or free press if it only covers a useless string of mundane sludge while dancing around the issues that are defining us as a people.