How NSA access was built into Windows
Bruno Wolff III
bruno at wolff.to
Wed Jan 17 06:52:04 UTC 2007
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 23:34:45 -0500,
Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 January 2007 11:47, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >Strong encryption is a different issue. They have pretty much given up
> > on directly outlawing it (though the government did drop the case
> > against DJB before they lost again at the supreme court).
>
> Which they would have (lost that is), and that would have left a lot of
> people with egg on their faces.
And more importantly it would have been a lot harder to threaten other people
once the Supremes ruled it was OK. Now they can still threaten people
with expensive court cases if someone publishes something they don't like.
>
> > What they
> > seem to be doing now is putting pressure on businesses not to provide
> > strong encryption for the masses. Especially in telephony. There is
> > some reason that end to end encryption isn't standard in digital
> > phones.
>
> That, from an engineering standpoint, is far more likely to be a
> consideration of latency and power consumption than in the difficulty of
> doing it. Strong encryption is both power hungry, and slow. No one
> would long tolerate a cellphone that only had 15 minutes talk time, and
> wasted 2-3 seconds for each turnaround in the conversation and cost $50
> more than one without it because of the royalty payments such a device
> might incur. We are all too darned used to the instantainious(sp) nature
> of the analog phone.
It wouldn't be that bad. There are crypto systems that wouldn't need royalties.
I expect that you could have a system that couldn't be broken in real time
that wouldn't add significant latency with today's hardware.
>
> Even skype's delays bug the heck out of me.
And people here are talking about not using SELinux because they don't
trust them. I would be much more worried about Skype.
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