Comment Re:Assumptions... (Score 1) 402
TekNoGos wrote:
"Now, where does cyberspace belong to? Electonic surveillance is certainly not hassling, but is it spying or just looking? Cypherpunks certainly claim that it is a private area and that nobody should even so much as look what they are doing. Cops claim that it is public, and that using monitoring tools is equivalent to street patrolling : taking a quick look in order to detect crime."
Overall, an insightful analysis. If I carry the analogy further, I could even admit that internet traffic is public, matching your analogy for legitimate police surveillance. It does travels through paths that are controlled and owned by others. Any techno-geek knows that email ~could~ be read by anybody in between source and destination.
So.. what's the big deal about encrypting? I can go to a public park and sit on the bench with a bag over my head. Let the police look, and they don't know who I am. I can whisper to my bench-mate. They can get a super duper parabolic evesdropping device. I can whisper more quietly or turn my head away or shield the conversation with background generating devices. Encryption is nothing more than the tit-for-tat that has always gone on between bad-guy and good-guy.
But only recently, am I hearing advocation to take a techology from everybody so that the bad guys can't use it. Well, actually, I can think of some older examples of this. Maybe this is an antiquated issue with a new techno-coating?
Back to the article...
In the article, the author ends with the presumption that the escalation of capability is to the "detriment to us all".
He demonstrated a mechanism -- a sequence of events that exhibits some phenomena. But he definitely didn't establish any of it is to our collective detriment. Is he suggesting that developers should intentionally not encrypt things so that web traffic can be shaped by ISPs, and monitored by good guys chasing bad guys?
Politely put, it seems as though this whole issue of encryption was dreamed up as a surrogate for what the original article was suppose to have been about, since what the original article really was about was so blatantly wrong.
"Now, where does cyberspace belong to? Electonic surveillance is certainly not hassling, but is it spying or just looking? Cypherpunks certainly claim that it is a private area and that nobody should even so much as look what they are doing. Cops claim that it is public, and that using monitoring tools is equivalent to street patrolling : taking a quick look in order to detect crime."
Overall, an insightful analysis. If I carry the analogy further, I could even admit that internet traffic is public, matching your analogy for legitimate police surveillance. It does travels through paths that are controlled and owned by others. Any techno-geek knows that email ~could~ be read by anybody in between source and destination.
So.. what's the big deal about encrypting? I can go to a public park and sit on the bench with a bag over my head. Let the police look, and they don't know who I am. I can whisper to my bench-mate. They can get a super duper parabolic evesdropping device. I can whisper more quietly or turn my head away or shield the conversation with background generating devices. Encryption is nothing more than the tit-for-tat that has always gone on between bad-guy and good-guy.
But only recently, am I hearing advocation to take a techology from everybody so that the bad guys can't use it. Well, actually, I can think of some older examples of this. Maybe this is an antiquated issue with a new techno-coating?
Back to the article...
In the article, the author ends with the presumption that the escalation of capability is to the "detriment to us all".
He demonstrated a mechanism -- a sequence of events that exhibits some phenomena. But he definitely didn't establish any of it is to our collective detriment. Is he suggesting that developers should intentionally not encrypt things so that web traffic can be shaped by ISPs, and monitored by good guys chasing bad guys?
Politely put, it seems as though this whole issue of encryption was dreamed up as a surrogate for what the original article was suppose to have been about, since what the original article really was about was so blatantly wrong.
