Idiot Extraordinaire: David Chaum

[Dallas Wildman]

David Chaum, the "Pioneer of Internet Autonomy" hands the FBI/NSA Axis of Surveillance a MAJOR political gift with "PrivaTegrity".

Courtesy of Wired

What part of "backdoor undermines encryption", does he NOT understand?

[AdeptusHereticus]

"carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something "generally recognized as evil" to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether."
"Whoever controls that backdoor within PrivaTegrity would have the power to decide who counts as "evil""
"satisfying both the law enforcement agencies who argue that encryption offers a haven for criminals, and also those who argue that it's necessary to hobble mass spying."

That makes absolutely no sense. What kind of behaviour would I tolerate from law enforcement that I wouldn't from someone else ? I like the way they understate it with "encryption offers a haven for criminals". The real problem, as law enforcement agencies see it, is that they can not see through encryption which supposedly leads to criminals escaping their grasp. The problem for encryption advocates is that there is no difference from the point of view of the code between someone who uses any backdoor with supposedly good intent and someone who does it with bad intent. Which means there is no way to discriminate between "evil" and " good". So how can any solution that uses a backdoor can satisfy both sides ?

Plus, internally, this argument also raises concerns because if that's the way this new system should function, then the hackers just need to find a way to steal digital identities. They don't even need to crack the backdoor. So even if the backdoor holds and works as promised, we now need a new layer of encryption in top of it, with no backdoor this time, to prevent identity theft and thus, the fooling of PrivaTegrity. Which means that we are back to square one, but with a complicated system instead of a simple one.

"The debate between encryption fans and surveillance hawks has only intensified in the wake of ISIS's attacks in Paris, and in last month's Democratic presidential debate Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like Project" to develop a system that "would bring the government and the tech communities together.""

As if a backdoor would have prevented the Paris attacks ... Nobody as been able to demonstrate how as of yet. Sometimes someone just springs out of a box to say that and then we don't hear about it for a few weeks ... That must be correlated with the moon cycles, something like that ...

Also, good job Mrs Clinton : Spoken like a true politician.

[MrBogosity]

And what happens when hackers figure out where this backdoor is?

[evensgrey]

And what nation outside the US would allow such a system to be imposed on them? The NSA would obviously be given access, and the NSA has already been shown to have indulged in industrial espionage against foreign firms, stealing their trade secrets and unreleased designs and technology to transfer to US firms (and garner the US government a tax windfall from the profits from the thefts).

[AdeptusHereticus]

And what nation outside the US would allow such a system to be imposed on them? The NSA would obviously be given access, and the NSA has already been shown to have indulged in industrial espionage against foreign firms, stealing their trade secrets and unreleased designs and technology to transfer to US firms (and garner the US government a tax windfall from the profits from the thefts).

I had never heard of that. Just did a quick search to confirm. What. The. Hell. You know, each time I hear about the shit we discover about your national agencies, I wonder what could be going on in my own country that we never heard about because the name of the DGSE almost never comes up in the news ...