John Gilmore: NSA obstructed development of IPSEC Crypto in Linux Kernel
linux.slashdot.org
linux.slashdot.org
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...
Although, that had just been submitted by danieldk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346531
So maybe you had a reason to make us sift through /. noise.
Personally I rather like to read Slashdot as at least it has some uplifting comedy which is frowned upon here. HN is like reviewing a technical manual rather than something of interest.
"The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust. Every postmaster, every network engineer, every webmaster, every system admin, every hostmaster, everyone crafting standards, everyone writing code, trusts that everyone else -- no matter how vehemently they disagree on a technical point -- is acting in good faith. The NSA, in its enormous arrogance, has single-handedly destroyed much of that trust overnight."
Commerce also runs on trust. The US dollar bill is a promise backed by debt...
In one case, I am seeing more evidence not to trust the US authorities. In the other, I am seeing evidence not to trust the US financial structure.
This current age is getting really strange/disquieting/fragile to me... (I reside in the US) Am I one of only a few? Or many?
It's feeling like that slippery slope when conspiracy theories start being found out as truth...
The problem is not that a hypothesis has been proven but the fact we've been trained to accept that labelling something as a conspiracy theory means that we don't need to test it again and that those who are involved are not credible.
That applies to a lot of things that we think are gospel. We've been fed 'facts' without proper evaluation for a long time.
Even the traditionally crazy things such as AIDS being engineered, holocaust denial and WTC being an inside job are fair cop for scientific investigation. I'll probably get downvoted for being rational on that one which will illustrate my point.
My country abuses its people and can't be trusted.
At least in the past, people had somewhere to flee to (here). Now, I don't know where to go.
It doesn't seem like it's even worth trying to fight it.
I am beginning to think something like this may be an alternative that I can put my efforts behind: Minimize my interaction with large US government and instead focus on making my small area as healthy as possible, economically, socially, regionally (eco/land), and living being health-wise (plants, animals, AND humans).
This would seem to be an extension of think globally, act locally.
"Our team (FreeS/WAN) built the Linux implementation of IPSEC, but at least while I was involved in it, the packet processing code never became a default part of the Linux kernel, because of bullheadedness in the maintainer who managed that part of the kernel. Instead he built a half-baked implementation that never worked. I have no idea whether that bullheadedness was natural, or was enhanced or inspired by NSA or its stooges."
What I read, among other tidbits, is:"Every once in a while, someone not an NSA employee, but who had longstanding ties to NSA, would make a suggestion that reduced privacy or security" and there are a lot of similar tidbits. The headline seems justified.
Edit: per the link in the other thread. http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...
Edit2: I'm just saying that the article really does seem to show John Gilmore speculating that the NSA seemed to interfere with IPSEC design and implementation process. I know no more than that.
Similar stories happen all the time for features with zero connection to security or the NSA. It's simply a sad fact of human nature and society that people act this way; conspiracy theories are not necessary (and are often harmful, as they distract from the real, if boring, issues).
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" and all that.
Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity.
I should be such an 'idiot'.
There are tons of people out there, yes, even kernel maintainers, who are technically skilled and smart but for whatever reasons, prove to be bad at tasks like this and make bad decisions. It's usually not a conspiracy, and John Gilmore's vague handwaving isn't a very convincing demonstration that it was in this case either... :]
Every once in a while, someone not an NSA employee, but who had longstanding ties to NSA, would make a suggestion that reduced privacy or security, but which seemed to make sense when viewed by people who didn't know much about crypto. For example, using the same IV (initialization vector) throughout a session, rather than making a new one for each packet. Or, retaining a way to for this encryption protocol to specify that no encryption is to be applied.
I'd say it's way too soon to count out the normal political process, and there's recent history of the Congress doing the right thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
If their job is to crack codes, our job should be to make unbreakable codes. Nothing personal, just bidness ;)
And wouldn't end to end encryption be pointless if you are trying to secure a mobile connection since the NSA has hooks into the provider's core infrastructure ?