Hippocratic oath is "do no harm"

If you think your patient will be harmed by the nocebo effect, then you have to bullshit them.

Agreed. The CLI of gpg is horrible. There are some semi-acceptible GUI variants, not least Enigmail, and a good UI is is definitely going to be required if you are going to get general acceptance.

But the main reasons it continues to not get used are

0) Math* is hard!
1) The rise of webmail
2) Inverse network effects

* encryption being a subset of math.

0) It's hard to explain to people that they need encryption, how it works, what it is. People think email is secure! The "envelope" iconography is very misleading - email is more like a postcard, delivered by a random selection of disreputable postmen.

1) Webmail makes it much harder to do encrypted mail because to make it secure you'd have to install browser plugins. None of the webmail providers want to make one, because it will destroy their revenue stream of monetizing the analysis of your mail traffic.

2) If you want to actually use (G)PG(P) your recipient also has to grok it, install software to use it, and you have to exchange keys. This is a massive hurdle to overcome for all but the most dedicated cryptonerds. Until there is a majority of people who want to use encrypted mail, that will carry on being the case.

There are projects attempting to overcome some of these hurdles ; you have the likes of keybase.io that takes some of the sting out of key exchange (and verification).

But!

Until encryption comes with the communications software you are using out of the box, is enabled by default, interoperates with everything properly, and forces you to configure it to even use it, the vast mass people won't use it. And this is well known by the SIGINT agencies who view people actually using encryption AT ALL as a red flag that they should look closer at.

Indeed.

My ex-wife is a paediatrician. She ought to know better. But she has a skewed perception of risk, because she deals with the tragic cases all day long.

The same burblings emerged from our Prime Minister a few weeks ago.

From him, it was potentially forgivable as the technically ignorant ramblings of a politican trying to score some election points.

From the Director of the NSA.... he knows exactly what he's asking for. Compulsory key escrow.

They tried this already with Clipper. They were unanimously told where to shove it. Are we really going to have to fight this battle every 20 years?

Maybe he's just acting out all petulant because their biggest hack, stealing the keys from Gemalto, has come to light and they aren't going to be able to pull that one again in a hurry.

Fascism is the natural end state of capitalism; the concentration of power eventually means that the state and the corporation merge and things are done for the benefit of the corporation.

You can't have unregulated capitalism without it devolving into fascism. I think the UK and the US are already there - the essential dishonesty of our leaders, who publicly claim to want to do the best for us, then turn around and do the best for their corporate masters. The careful creation of a rhetoric of "them and us" to justify military action which just takes what they have and has us foot the bill (and much of it goes to private contractors). The brutal destruction of our public welfare systems to clear the way for much more profitable and expensive corporate systems.

Without regulation, how does this go down? Really, the only difference would be that you'd be cowed by the private armies of the corporations, rather than the force deployed by government on their behalf. Rich men act to protect what is theirs. They fear being bereft of it. The only way people lack fear is if they feel in control, and when your interests are so large, that needs a lot of control.

"Crypto" is also a terrible misnomer for cryptographically secured currencies :-)

They aren't hidden. They are public. BitCoin only works when the entire transaction ledger is available to all it's users.

In contrast, banks keep their ledger as private as possible. Historically this stems from the fact that you had to keep it secure - or people would just alter it. Then the secrecy became something that people relied on and almost more important than the security.

More like the capitalists don't dare let them succeed. It would show the world that there was another way, and demands to go that way would escalate in other states.

A cryptocurrency would be a bold step ; placing control of the money under the government, or the people, instead of a private bank.

The real problem is "Klepto" currency - the fiat currency that's thought up out of nothing. Yes, it provides liquidity, but it also provides power. If concentration of weath begets more wealth, then the guy who can grind out as much as he likes can use it to steal everything from everyone else, which is what is by and large happening.

If you've got the broken part I presume you have enough to make a model of it - you only have to hold the thing together with superglue long enough to scan it.

I can imagine improvements to the plastic materials as well - plastics with suspended carbon nanotubes or other materials to improve their tensile strength and reduce crack propagation.

Isn't asking the NSA to secure your system like asking the fox to check the barbed wire fence around the henhouse?

Sounds like Reason..

They messed with an algorithm for generating pseudo-random numbers ;

Schneir's article

TLDR : the suspicion is that they embedded a secret key in the maths of this random number generator algorithm that would let them break any TLS connection after snooping 32 bytes of traffic.

As Bruce takes pains to point out, you can't prove anything. But really, they were pushing an RNG with no obvious advantage over the others in the running (3x slower), known flaws (slight bias in it's output), and this great big whopping potential security hole that you might conveniently exploit if you were the one who picked the "random numbers" in the appendix.

Yeah, that surprised me a bit.

If you replaced the symmetric key with a genuine private-key smartcard and registering on the network involved a proper negotiation and establishment of an ephemeral session key, things would be a lot more secure.

Oh, and more expensive, 'natch, which is why it's not designed like that - stupid legacy tech.

That may well be true... but the purpose of the hack is to spy on the US populace - that's the reason to have copies of these keys.

The actual hack may be within their operational remit, but the materiel they gathered using it is clearly for purposes that are not. You can't really justify the operational budget for it in that case.

Deniability.

If they steal the keys, there's no public record that they have them.

If they request them from the corporation, even if they use a national security letter, the corporation can announce that they have been requested, or use a warrant canary to stop confirming that they haven't.