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> Who's going to keep us safe from the FBI? It's a reasonable question. And it has an answer: The same crypto / infosec community that's keeping us safe right
by cvwright 9y ago
> Who's going to keep us safe from the FBI?
It's a reasonable question. And it has an answer: The same crypto / infosec community that's keeping us safe right now.
If governments are going to demand some sort of "exceptional access", then that's just one more constraint that our systems have to satisfy. Figuring out how to do that, while maintaining security for the rest of the users, is the million-dollar question.
I understand that after the Crypto Wars of the 1990's, the tech community has been super resistant to working on any sort of technology that allows for any sort of compromise. But I fear that if we don't -- if security has to be all-or-nothing -- then eventually we're going to wind up with some horrible mandate for backdoors or key escrow or something worse.
- mindslight 9y agoFuck. That. Noise. There is no such thing as a "compromise" on an issue of individual rights. Every "proposal" on this topic can only be another tooth on the ratchet of [democratic] totalitarianism. Computers exist, and form a natural extension of the mind. To constrain what individuals may compute is to deny the inalienable right to think. If every computer is mandated to be an agent of the state (as such "proposals" inherently imply), then the Individual is left completely computationless (ie nearly powerless) against the state-computer. This rekindled expectation of prying into individuals' private data is entirely due to the past decade of naive adoption of "web 2.0" untrustworthy computing, fueled by the profits from commercial surveillance. As technologists, we need to move off and repudiate this broken centralizing model (for us and the plebs), not be looking for ways to further enshrine it.