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Comment by phryk | Hacker News Reader

Yep, and I think they can even keep all the communications of everyone in the US you communicate with.

Not encrypting to stay secure is just plain fucking stupid. If you don't encrypt they can read your shit anyways. Plus "reasonably believed to contain secret meaning" in all likelihood means "whatever the fuck we want".

As someone else already noted: There's strength in numbers. Let's just encrypt everything and have those fuckers deal with humongous amounts of data, most of which will be completely useless. Shit, if you're inclined to do so let some piece of software run all day that just produces encrypted gibberish and sends it off to random recipients.

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> As someone else already noted: There's strength in numbers. Let's just encrypt everything and have those fuckers deal with humongous amounts of data

Just so you know; the reasoning behind huge NSA camp they are building in Utah is not because huge camps are cool, but because someone at decisions level was presented with average number of data an average citizen of us soil digest per day, and that number was overwhelming.

So, if we all encrypt everything, 2 things gonna happen:

Either they will ask to quadruple their funding and build 10 more Utah-type camps "because we need more storage and CPU resources to catch those pesky terrorist", or

The problem will be so huge for the government that it will ban usage of PGP/encrypting. The light version of banning would be, for example: extra tax if you encrypt your data. I can see it easily reasoned: terrorist use PGP encryption so the government uses lots of resources (that equals to money) to crack those down so in order to keep their operation running they need extra money. Of course if you do not use PGP you don't have to pay that tax. If you do use PGP, you are required to pay it. Simple checkbox on your tax form. Now, if they every catch you with some encrypted files that they can reasonably say belongs to you (just like the can/cannot tell the child porn files belong to you [they can always upload them themselves]), you will be charge with a severe fine or imprisonment up to 25 years for aiding terrorist [by not supporting NSA Encryption Unit financially -- remember Bush motto? you not with us, you with terrorist].

So, long story short. Just pissing them off and encrypting everything will not fix the issue. It will just give them more reasons to ask for more funding. And they will get them.

Nobody should believe that any encryption used today will be secure against attack from anyone after nnn days due to technological advance. Even if no weakness is ever found with which to attack the encryption, Moore's Law will eventually take care of it.

edit: yeah, I was talking out my ass, get over it. I still think it's imprudent to assume that encrypted files may never be compromised in the future.

This is pretty crap, actually. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_c...

You couldn't even increment every position of a 256-bit key using the energy our Sun could provide, let alone brute force 256-bit AES.

I often TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) as containers to transport private documents on USB or in emails, and able to use multiple encryption algorithms for the containers (e.g. AES-Twofish-Serpent). Something like this will presumably slow them [NSA] down umpteen amounts of times?

Snowden:

> Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

You probably don't need to use 3 cyphers. Just make sure you're storing your private key somewhere safe.

Not sure, I'm not a crypto wizard. My guess would be that "it depends". What you describe was more-or-less the basis for 3DES IIRC, but (knowing crypto) you could probably just as easily accidentally break the cryptosystem to the effectiveness of just the best scheme.

Fine, scratch the last part.

They are collection a ton of data. As time goes on, if a large portion of it is encrypted, then it may not be feasible to break it all, even with Moore's Law. They may just have to be selective with it. You can imagine that even in if the US becomes a new-age Nazi Germany / Stalin's Russia, it may still be prohibitively expensive to go spelunking through years old communications looking for people with possible subversive thoughts.

Edit: It would probably just be easier at that point to ban encryption going forward.

You've simultaneously managed to misinterpret both the way encryption works and Moore's Law.

I should have known better than to paraphrase or quote "Moore's Law" out of context around here. I usually feel its safe to do so because I don't really consider Moore's Law to be Law, as much as "Moore's Quite Good Prediction"

s/Moore's Law/technological advance and\/or advances in cryptanalysis/

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