...he's Canadian.

And stop being so cynical. Sometimes stuff can be cool without being "viral marketing".

It turns out that having a universal unique idenitifier is really handy. There are reasons you WANT to be able to be affirmatively and uniquely identified as "you", but you want that capability under your own control. Even with PKI (a system that could be trusted, anyway), someone has to hold a central database. Guess who that would likely be? And if it shouldn't be "the government", then who?

...just do the same thing we do with cryptographic tools that are considered munitions, which is ensure they aren't exported, and make efforts to provide/limit them to US persons instead of making it freely downloadable for anyone.

It's not the DOD. It's the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance, and it's about EXPORT.

Yes, it is about "controlling firearm dissemination"...for EXPORT. That's why the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance is involved. If you've already made up your mind that the true motive relates somehow to American citizens in a country with as many privately owned firearms as people, no amount of logic or reason will change your mind.

No, then it would have a classification marker struck from it. This document was never classified, but it was also never released publicly.

The point isn't that DOD thinks the files are going to disappear, and it doesn't matter anyway since the purpose isn't to "disarm Americans" or "keep the files out of the hands of Americans" or some other utter garbage.

There are treaties and various arms control export restrictions (ITAR) at stake, and US-based corporations or entities cannot provide arms in violation of these constructs. If this sort of thing is on the Pirate Bay or elsewhere, DOD trade control doesn't care.

It was a guide for open source research, published by one office from 1997 to 2007, and not updated in the last six years. Remember that before you rail on it.

Err, no, you are actually reading it completely wrong.

The point is actually that you can give encrypted data, say, some of your company's vital statistics, to an outsider (for example, a consulting agency); that agency can do a computation on that encrypted data (say, their super-secret algorithm that analyzes your company and tells you how to get rich fast) and get an encrypted result, which it then gives back to you. Only you can then decrypt the result.

You get to keep your data secret, and the company doing the computation gets to keep the function they compute secret; the only thing revealed to you is the function applied to your data, and nothing is revealed to the consulting agency.

Homomorphic encryption most certainly is not about speed gains.

No. If they stumble on something which is out of scope without specifically looking for it, it can be used. Google for "plain view doctrine".

Yes, and just like eyewitnesses to an accident, it's shown that such "points of view" are often wrong or misinterpreted.

Just one example of many: the statements by people near the Pentagon on 9/11 that it "sounded like a missile". How many of those people have actually ever even *heard* what a commercial jetliner sounds like traveling at nearly cruising speed just hundreds to dozens of feet off the ground "sounds like", much less a missile? This is then used as "proof" that it couldn't have been a plane, and probably was a "missile", despite all evidence to the contrary (including numerous statements from people saying they clearly saw the plane, sometimes in the same sentence as the cherry-picked quotes where they say it "sounded like a missile").

This is why we have professionally trained (usually) journalists and experts, because they do the filtering and analysis for us. I'm sorry, but NO individual is capable, his or her self, of becoming an authority on everything related to every major event that occurs with the end result being better analysis than what has already been done by investigators and task forces of experts. Sure, have a questioning mind and all that, but don't assume everyone in the "media" or the "government" is always lying to you, and random, out-of-context, and/or misinterpreted (or outright wrong) assertions by "citizen journalists" (or anyone else) are gospel.

You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.

What was "crowdsourced" was information that was already on the internet. Furthermore, the FBI did, in fact, release the relevant snippets of video and pictures from the private security cameras and other sources.

Sorry, but "crowdsourcing" is not always the answer, and this was not a success, much less a rousing one.

This has been a fascinating phenomenon, and it's only going to evolve more as time goes on.

Crowdsourcing or witch hunt? Reddit, 4chan users try to ID Boston bomb suspects

Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong

'I didn't do anything!' High school track runner forced to deny involvement in Boston Marathon bombings after a picture of him and his coach is widely circulated

Social media as breaking-news feed: Worse information, faster

Worse information, faster -- this neatly sums it up, and I'm a huge proponent of social media and its benefits, including to government.

And for the record, no, the FBI wasn't seeking to "censor" anyone, and the "next logical step" (as I have seen asserted elsewhere) won't be to "shut down" internet or social media resources during major public emergencies; however, law enforcement agencies absolutely can request, once they have identified suspects via investigative and legal processes, that people focus on those instead of playing CSI: Internet.

Sadly, the echo chamber of the internet enables some people, in seemingly increasing numbers, to go a step further and choose to believe everything is automatically a "false flag" conspiracy with the stated perpetrators "framed"â¦..

The "wisdom of crowds" can be a misnomer.

Thanks for letting us know you watched An Inconvenient Truth.

In other news (aside from the Twitter and Flickr accounts):

Sorry, Anonymous probably didn't hack North Korea's intranet