3 ms·
> "Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of
by jlgreco 13y ago
> "Why would people have assumed that after the failure to enforce Clipper chip usage, that NSA would have simply given up on getting access to the plaintext of messages?"
Consider this exchange on HN nearly three years ago:
@moe: I had always considered the Clipper-Chip
incident to hint at the tip of an iceberg.
Do you really think that was an isolated one-time
event?
@kgo: The Clipper Chip was introduced in the open.
They tried to push it through legislation. It's
not like the NSA blackmailed Intel executives to
include the capabilities secretly in their
Pentium Processors without notifying their
customers.
Same with the new proposed legislation. But all
that demonstrates is that the NSA has an
interest in being able to (legally) monitor
encrypted communications. Which everyone already
knows.
If someone had 'busted' the NSA trying to do
something sneaky and/or covert and/or illegal,
then you could argue that it's the tip of some
iceberg of nefarious activity. But like I said
this was all done out in the open.
You might as well say that because we know the
FBI wiretaps phones through legally obtained
court orders, that's the tip of the iceberg that
points to millions of illegal wiretaps. It's a
bad inference.
(I would emphasis certain parts of kgo's response that I find particularly... accidentally prescient?... but the result would just be me emphasizing the whole damn thing...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018456
The gist here is that Clipper, being a public effort to subvert encryption, should not be seen as evidence that the NSA was interested in non-public subversion of security.
Was this naive? In retrospect? Obviously. At the time? Arguably.
Where people, who reasonably should have been informed, caught off guard by the revelations brought to us by Snowden? You betcha.
[edited for formatting]
- mpyne 13y agoThanks for the quote, it's quite illuminating. This is actually essentially what I was arguing, not just moe's point: But all that demonstrates is that the NSA has an interest in being able to (legally) monitor encrypted communications. Which everyone already knows. I don't condone designing backdoors into products. Maybe I can research into BULLRUN more but the impression I had was that the intention was to subvert crypto in a way that only NSA could use (either via escrow or constants-up-their-sleeve), perhaps to take advantage of exploits that happened to get shipped to the commercial sector, but not to design broken gear that anyone could subvert if they know the secret handshake. Obviously even this is sneaky and shady as can be, but that goes with the territory (though @kgo would seem to agree that it's nefarious :-D). But even assuming malice here, I'd have said even at the time, with the ongoing changes to communication patterns across the world, that there's simply no way you can assume NSA isn't trying to hack everything they can. When I was reading Schneier a decade or more ago they were the very definition of Mallory, and nothing has changed on that since. But I suppose you're right, that people at the time weren't seeing NSA the same way I was.