maika

The Redditer in me perhaps is impressed, the Y is disappointed that it offers no real insight.

> censorship

A state should not have the power to veto any information under the pretence of national security. There is no accountability. What I am really advocating is the abolishment of secret secrets, or any secrets that govern public policy, government decisions/workings/connections/longevity, and that all secrets should be made available to the records of history after they go beyond their limited window of opportunity. Hopefully, in time to counter abuses of power while they are still relevant.

> Privacy and secrecy are two names for the same thing.

By private, in the previous context I am referring to the individual.

> Violent nightmare

Examples would be appreciated. I don't understand what this idea of all information being immediately and universally available and the necessary decent into a dystopian nightmare, is based on.

Yeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?

No, you don't need to continue your litany without context. I here a lot of bleating about national security, good of the state, and all, but that is used far too often as a blanket justification to cover up anything. Restriction, or manipulation, of information is what gave rise to the powers that your examples had to counter. For example, if all information relevant to the public, was public, then the Afghan/Iraq wars would never have happened.

Foolish and suicidal to prevent state secrets? I would say it should be a mandatory past time and actively encouraged. How can you have a democracy that includes censorship? If knowledge is power, and it certainly is, as a government's legitimacy can be hinged upon the concealment of a truth, or the propagation of a lie, then the systems in place should err on the side of transparency.

Perhaps then a compromise should be made, all governmental information should be made completely available in raw form by the end of a governments term, irrespective of content. Secrets like those you listed, are a grey area, perhaps these special cases can be protected further if they are indeed legitimate cases. However, let there be an open real time record kept of who requested the information to be restricted and for what reasons, but eventually and with in a reasonable time frame, 5-10 years or soon enough to break a career if that is warranted. Abuses of the system can therefore be tracked.

I would go a little further and remove any laws surrounding information (that includes copyright and patent laws), and make it a completely moral issue when it comes to a secrecy. A more open society is a more equal society, and where there are fewer power imbalances you will get fewer abuses of power.

(For sake of clarity, I am not including private information; medical records, etc, unless there is good justification. I can imagine the revelations of schizophrenia for a would be government official, demographically related illnesses (eg all war veterans of X suffer higher rates of cancer), would be desirable.)

By my understanding there are around 12401769434657526912139264 possibilities, therefore to calculate the time taken in days to brute force a password would be the application of the following formula:

  t = n / m / 86400 / P
  
  n: search space (no of possible passwords)
  m: amount of random passwords that can be tested a second
  86400: 60*60*24 (converts units to days)
  P: parallelism (number of crackers)

Let

  n = 12401769434657526912139264
  m = 100
  P = 1,000,000

It would only take 143 days to be successful. Is this correct? Second question, how do we carve up the search space and distribute this to the internet?

Edit: n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.