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I disagree with the spirit of this comment. You don't need to ban all communication, to remove privacy in practice. Crypto is currently usable in practice. It

by feral 15y ago

I disagree with the spirit of this comment. You don't need to ban all communication, to remove privacy in practice. Crypto is currently usable in practice. Its a bit hard for many users, but its doable, especially with modern VPN implementations. If any encrypted tunnel is allowed, you can put all your traffic through it, and no one knows whether you are surfing banned websites, or working on the corporate VPN. And you can be pretty confident your modern crypto implementation isn't going to be broken. But steganography isn't really usable, in practice. If nothing else, the government can do traffic analysis, and see suspiciously large traffic volumes going to a small collection of servers (which are accepting the steg'd communication, and proxying your requests, presumably). And even if the traffic looks like normal HTTP, with images in it, that's simply not good enough to use, in a regime where the secret police can arrest you if they suspect you are trying to hide your traffic content. And they will be able to find users, because eventually the servers accepting steg'd traffic, which the population are using, will become known. So, while I think it'd be very hard to remove the ability to send small amounts of text data, from the Internet, I think it'd be possible to make private communication unworkable, in practice, for most people. I don't see how this would be worked around, without building a massive distributed network of computers that all accepted and routed steg'd communication; something like if every webserver would accept, and onion-route, incoming steg'd traffic. That doesn't exist, so I think their initiative will work, if they push it enough; hopefully rules like this remain isolated to relatively repressive regimes, and not gain widespread adoption; the widespread commercial use of encrypted communications is probably the best defence against global crypto bans.

reginaldo 15y ago
You are right that, as steganography isn't really usable right now, you don't need to ban all communication to remove privacy in practice right now. But as governments adopt privacy-removing measures, the people will react devising privacy-enabling measures, and undetectable steganography might be possible in the future. Let us remember that normal HTTP traffic follows a power-law, with relatively few sites getting the majority of the traffic, so there might be a way, if many of the high-traffic sites on the internet collaborate, of making "covert" traffic look just like "innocent" traffic. that's simply not good enough to use, in a regime where the secret police can arrest you if they suspect you are trying to hide your traffic content Even if we accept the premise of undetectable steganography, which is not possible by any possible means today, the arrests will continue to happen. However, I hope they will tend to happen less, as the large number of false-positive arrests would certainly cause high commotion in the general population. * So, while I think it'd be very hard to remove the ability to send small amounts of text data, from the Internet, I think it'd be possible to make private communication unworkable, in practice, for most people.* You are correct. Under the current situation, it'll be hard to make all your communication private under the restrictions imposed by, for instance, the Pakistani government, but dissidents don't need all communication to be private, and small amounts of text data might be all that's needed.

by feral 15y ago

reginaldo 15y ago

You are right that, as steganography isn't really usable right now, you don't need to ban all communication to remove privacy in practice right now. But as governments adopt privacy-removing measures, the people will react devising privacy-enabling measures, and undetectable steganography might be possible in the future. Let us remember that normal HTTP traffic follows a power-law, with relatively few sites getting the majority of the traffic, so there might be a way, if many of the high-traffic sites on the internet collaborate, of making "covert" traffic look just like "innocent" traffic. that's simply not good enough to use, in a regime where the secret police can arrest you if they suspect you are trying to hide your traffic content Even if we accept the premise of undetectable steganography, which is not possible by any possible means today, the arrests will continue to happen. However, I hope they will tend to happen less, as the large number of false-positive arrests would certainly cause high commotion in the general population. * So, while I think it'd be very hard to remove the ability to send small amounts of text data, from the Internet, I think it'd be possible to make private communication unworkable, in practice, for most people.* You are correct. Under the current situation, it'll be hard to make all your communication private under the restrictions imposed by, for instance, the Pakistani government, but dissidents don't need all communication to be private, and small amounts of text data might be all that's needed.