3 ms·

> "People have been having untapped correspondence between each other since the dawn of language. That's THOUSANDS OF YEARS." Well, not from Amsterdam to New Y

> "People have been having untapped correspondence between each other since the dawn of language. That's THOUSANDS OF YEARS." Well, not from Amsterdam to New York with less than a second delay, or to an audience of billions of people. (I'm not judging about whether the creation of backdoors is good or bad, just saying that's a bad argument.)

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Be nice. It’s not a “bad argument,” at all. Like most of these things, it’s simply a matter of degree and scale. “Less than a second” is just a fairly “fuzzy” quantitative statement, that can have many meanings, and can be scoped to encompass many datasets. For example, in the early 1900s, the telegraph system allowed people to send “BLACK COW NOW” across thousands of miles. If the two parties involved, have decided that this means “The President is a Jackass,” then, congratulations, we’ve used cryptographic communication to send subversive, anti-government messages. The telegraph system may take an hour or so (allowing for morse code translation), which is far less than the several months/weeks than it would take, via Pony Express. Amsterdam to New York, might actually take a half a second, depending on latency, and whatnot. Amsterdam to the moon, might take an order of magnitude more. If we had quantum communications working, then that might be truly instantaneous. Where’s the threshold? At what point do we decide that “the rules have changed?” Was Pheidippides an encrypted communication packet, when he delivered the news of the victory at Marathon in a few hours (he was certainly a “read-only” packet, as he dropped dead, after delivering the news)? What about the Enigma machine? That was combined with radio communications, to allow highly encrypted data exchange. Even with Turing, et al, what really gave us Enigma, was capturing a functioning unit on a German sub. It was a really tight system. It should be noted that hundreds of people died, during the war, because we did not want to give away the fact that Enigma was cracked, and allowed several attacks to proceed without interception. That's because we knew that, if the bad guys were aware that their communication medium was compromised, they would simply use another one, that we had not cracked (like the Navajo Code Talkers, on our side). Sound familiar? It’s really all just a numbers game. There's nothing new, here.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

Be nice. It’s not a “bad argument,” at all. Like most of these things, it’s simply a matter of degree and scale. “Less than a second” is just a fairly “fuzzy” quantitative statement, that can have many meanings, and can be scoped to encompass many datasets. For example, in the early 1900s, the telegraph system allowed people to send “BLACK COW NOW” across thousands of miles. If the two parties involved, have decided that this means “The President is a Jackass,” then, congratulations, we’ve used cryptographic communication to send subversive, anti-government messages. The telegraph system may take an hour or so (allowing for morse code translation), which is far less than the several months/weeks than it would take, via Pony Express. Amsterdam to New York, might actually take a half a second, depending on latency, and whatnot. Amsterdam to the moon, might take an order of magnitude more. If we had quantum communications working, then that might be truly instantaneous. Where’s the threshold? At what point do we decide that “the rules have changed?” Was Pheidippides an encrypted communication packet, when he delivered the news of the victory at Marathon in a few hours (he was certainly a “read-only” packet, as he dropped dead, after delivering the news)? What about the Enigma machine? That was combined with radio communications, to allow highly encrypted data exchange. Even with Turing, et al, what really gave us Enigma, was capturing a functioning unit on a German sub. It was a really tight system. It should be noted that hundreds of people died, during the war, because we did not want to give away the fact that Enigma was cracked, and allowed several attacks to proceed without interception. That's because we knew that, if the bad guys were aware that their communication medium was compromised, they would simply use another one, that we had not cracked (like the Navajo Code Talkers, on our side). Sound familiar? It’s really all just a numbers game. There's nothing new, here.