U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
Le Chaud Lapin
When I saw this headline this morning, I was so frustrated that I
began to sweat under my arms!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html
How embarrasingly obnoxious is the Department of Justice in conjuring
such a farcical notion. As I understand it, they are basically
attempting to place the burden of "deciphering enciphered data" on the
ISP's and software providers, whatever that means.
"Investigators have been concerned for years that changing
communications technology could damage their ability to conduct
surveillance. In recent months, officials from the F.B.I., the Justice
Department, the National Security Agency, the White House and other
agencies have been meeting to develop a proposed solution."
WTF???!!!
What planet do these people live on??!! Hello? Public-key crypto? 256-
bit symmetric keys? Have you guys been paying attention for the last
40 years?
Note they are ~not~ talking about snooping apps (Wireshark). They are
talking about ISP's making it so that "encrypted data can be
decrypted"
¶ Communications services that encrypt messages must have a way to
unscramble them.
[What the hell does this mean? Of course the messages can be
unscrambled, if you have the key. Are they saying, in the unlikely
event, that the Internet starts moving backward to the encrypt-the-
pipe model, that the keys must be retained by the provider?]
¶ Foreign-based providers that do business inside the United States
must install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts.
[Of sure, lovely...what the hell is this? Who is thinking of this?
What does this actually mean?]
¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must
redesign their service to allow interception.
[Uh...get a friggin' clue. Terrorists know how to write software. And
let's face it..writing a simple app that allows secure voice
communication over the Internet is nowhere near as complicated/
expensive as designing a guided missile. Twenty-year-olds do it all
the time. What then? Are you going to find the terrorists and demand
that they comply with the new wiretapping rules? Maybe you should go
to Intel and all the other CPU manufacturers and demand that they put
software inside the CPU's that indicate when code is running crypto
software.]
I angers me to think that many of these people are earning in excess
of $150,000US/year and the have the audacity to come up with such
ridiculous plans as "wiretapping" the Internet. This morning, out of
sheer frustration, I called the FBI and told them that I had
discovered the solution to global warming. It is to drop a monstrous
ice cube in the Pacific Ocean and let it slowly melt, thereby cooling
the planet. When the guy on phone paused in incredulity, I said, "Yes,
yes, I know what you're thinking, the Pacific Ocean is huge, but what
I have in mind a really, really big ice cube."
-Le Chaud Lapin-
WTShaw
All this has been tried here before but recent hires may be ignorant
of the facts. By default, most two-party conversations are private
when not expressly public and that is for good reason as conjecture
can be easily used to falsely accuse anyone of anything, a form of
trying to prove a negative. Escrow won't work either, and there can be
First Amendment reasons for that as I explained many years ago.
Solbu
Hash: SHA1
Le Chaud Lapin sent the following transmission through subspace:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html
Here is a link that does Not require an account in order to read it.
(Beware of any line breaks)
http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/govt-and-politics/article_7714db83-e166-5dff-8405-64bf51798487.html
- --
Solbu - http://www.solbu.net
Remove '.ugyldig' for email
PGP key ID: 0xFA687324
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFMoTkjT1rWTfpocyQRAlwLAKCgmkn5BOCga2VC4J2lnL2IR/gxJACgn0Ke
KB9LFIyTkX0apBC58/+s7ek=
=Uim6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Jeffrey Walton
enforcement abuses.
Le Chaud Lapin
> > Note they are ~not~ talking about snooping apps (Wireshark). They are
> > talking about ISP's making it so that "encrypted data can be
> > decrypted"
[Thanks Solbu for the no-account-required link to article.]:
> All this has been tried here before but recent hires may be ignorant
> of the facts. By default, most two-party conversations are private
> when not expressly public and that is for good reason as conjecture
> can be easily used to falsely accuse anyone of anything, a form of
> trying to prove a negative. Escrow won't work either, and there can be
> First Amendment reasons for that as I explained many years ago.>
Yes, these are legal/ethical reasons, but what I find most ridiculous
is the technical implications, which simply do not make sense.
I'd say pretty much every amateur and not-so-amateur cryptographer in
this group understands and appreciates viscerally the end-to-end
model, where, if Alice and Bob want to have a secure communication,
they will have it, over the Internet, in broad daylight, whenever they
want, with US spy agencies having full knowledge of the occurrence,
and there will be nothing that an ISP, Facebook, MySpace, Google,
Microsoft, F.B.I., N.S.A., C.I.A., or anyone else is going to do about
it, assuming of course that the fundamental premises of strong crypto
have not been compromised by technological breakthroughs that we are
not aware of.
So eventually, this law would simply place a ridiculous burden on any
company that uses crypto software to encrypt data as a service on-
behalf of its users, and for any company that makes user-possessed
software, it would have ridiculous holes in the software with big sign
over them that says, "Hey, if you are the U.S. Government, come in
through this hole. And by the way, I promise not to use 3rd party
software to see when I am being spied on by U.S. Government."
Also, the terrorists would say, "Hmm...looks like the U.S. government
is expecting me to use social networking sites to distribute my
nuclear weapon AutoCAD files. Maybe we should try something home-grown
that they cannot do anything about."
Then they will go to Google, and search for strong crypto software
that is readily available and accessible by any software engineer who
has even a marginal understanding of crypto, and they will use their
computer, PDA, whatever computational device is in their possession,
to create, [even dirty works] point-to-point voice application using
hybrid asymmetric/symmetric crypto system, and then it will be done. A
terrorist yelling his public key over the Internet, in full view of
U.S. spy agencies, would still result in secure communications.
All terrorists will still be able to communicate securely using voice,
emails containing images, whatever...while both large and small U.S.
companies will have their software fettered with ridiculous
"backdoors" created at the behest of "we-cannot-think-of-anything-
better-to-do" US government agencies who are hoping to have their work
done for them. The general, law-abiding tech-savvy public will get
word that US government is snooping, and will look for companies,
elsewhere in other countries, to provide end-to-end secure
communication that is independent of any third-party intermediary like
Skype. One can imagine building such a system based on PGP-like keys.
And this software will be provided by *many* 1st Amendment Advocates,
not just in U.S., but in other freedom-loving countries, like
Nederlands. Of course, some terrorists will still do their business on
Facebook and such, and will get caught as a result, but no serious
terrorist organzation will use Yahoo to speak to their flock. The US
will be forced to respond with a law that says that it is not only
illegal to write crypto software that does not have a backdoor, but it
is also illegal to use crypto software that does not have backdoors
built into them for goverment purposes, but [and now WTShaw, I see
your point] since it is not possible to prove that an arbitrary
enciphered piece of data is actually harmful communication rendered by
illegal software, we get into burden-of-proof, 1st Admendment, etc,
where government finds itself in a catch-22. No warrant will be issued
for deciphering a suspects data if the warrant is not warranted, but
to prove that it is warranted, the proof will need to be shown, most
likely in the form of the deciphered data.
There seems to be an irony here - this proposal might have the adverse
affect of accelarating the realization of a new techno order where
digital users, good and bad, will finally have rock-solid means of
communicating, securely, over the Internet, at will, with no recourse
for U.S. spy agencies. The U.S. govenment will be forced to play whack-
a-mole against millions of people who value the 1st Amendment.
I learned yesterday that the push for this ridiculousness is likely
coming from within the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., or other agencies named
in the article, one of which was quick to point out that *their*
people are not the ones coming up with such ridiculous proposals. One
agency said that it was coming from the White House, but something
tells me that the White House is merely a proxy in this case, being
"strongly advised" by the F.B.I. that "we need this". And since the
White House does not keep cryptographers on staff, AFAIK, it could
just be a case of "parent acquiescing to whining child" syndrome,
where Administration says, "allright!, allright! already..., we'll
push your crypto law thingy!"
-Le Chaud Lapin-
Mok-Kong Shen
[snip]
> Yes, these are legal/ethical reasons, but what I find most ridiculous
> is the technical implications, which simply do not make sense.
>
> I'd say pretty much every amateur and not-so-amateur cryptographer in
> this group understands and appreciates viscerally the end-to-end
> model, where, if Alice and Bob want to have a secure communication,
I know nothing about US in this respect, but several years ago it was
told by someone in the group that in UK the court could order one to
provide the encryption key. Anyway, if end-to-end encryption is the
'sole' means to have secure communication, then there is a unique and
unambiguous criterion to separate all the people who communicate into
two sets, namely those have the 'need' of encryption and those who
don't. Being able thus to make that distinction is certainly something
quite valuable for the authority, isn't it?
M. K. Shen
Le Chaud Lapin
Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that it's like going into a
group of criminals and asking, "Which of you would be willing to take
a lie detector test to prove your innocence in last night's shooting
for $1000?", and then singling-out the people who decline? If so, I
think people who are not criminals/terrorists still have need for
security.
Also, with hybrid (asymmetric/symmetric), end-to-end cryptosystem, if
UK court says, "provide the key", the only one who could provide the
private key would be an end party, as you know. Intermediaries (ISP's,
etc.) would not be helpful. So a person would have to self-incriminate
to make the system breakable. Not only that, for a secure voice
conversation (or chat), the government would also have to keep a log
of the session to be able to determine what symmetric keys were used
given the private key, soon-to-be-obtained from the suspect.
So it always comes back to a user surrendering the private key of his
public/private key-pair.
The only way government spy agencies are going to get what they are
after is to find a way to:
1. Break the cryptosystem.
2. Get the private key of public/private key pair at one or both ends
of end-to-end crypto system.
If neither of these is done, then they can legislate all they want,
and it will not affect any moderately-sophisticated criminal or
terrorist.
They *can* however, monitor traffic patterns, and from these patterns,
perhaps ascertain certain forthcoming events. For example, if a drug
lord in Columbia makes a rapid succession of connections to a known
contact in Mexico, based on IP addresses, and this pattern is seen
just before a major run, then perhaps the D.E.A. can conclude that a
drop is about to be made. But beyond this type of surveillance,
there's not much that they can do, IIUC.
I strongly suspect that every spy agency everywhere arrived at these
same conclusions not long after asymmetric cryptography was invented,
and only now are started to sweat, as the average criminal becomes
educated. The implications of this, is that the spy agengies will
eventually be forced to ask Microsoft, etc. to provide back-doors into
the OS so that they can snarf the private key.
Of course, none of this is good for us good guys. It means that
organized crime should go ultra-sophisticated in about 20 years.
There are other technologically effective ways to figure out what
criminals are talking about. They should focus on these, IMO, instead
of burdening ISP's with somewhat useless laws.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
unruh
> On Sep 28, 3:22?pm, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
>> Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> > Yes, these are legal/ethical reasons, but what I find most ridiculous
>> > is the technical implications, which simply do not make sense.
>>
>> > I'd say pretty much every amateur and not-so-amateur cryptographer in
>> > model, where, if Alice and Bob want to have a secure communication,
>> > they will have it, ....[snip]
>>
>> I know nothing about US in this respect, but several years ago it was
>> told by someone in the group that in UK the court could order one to
>> provide the encryption key. Anyway, if end-to-end encryption is the
>> 'sole' means to have secure communication, then there is a unique and
>> unambiguous criterion to separate all the people who communicate into
>> two sets, namely those have the 'need' of encryption and those who
>> don't. Being able thus to make that distinction is certainly something
>> quite valuable for the authority, isn't it?
>
> Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that it's like going into a
> group of criminals and asking, "Which of you would be willing to take
> a lie detector test to prove your innocence in last night's shooting
> for $1000?", and then singling-out the people who decline? If so, I
> think people who are not criminals/terrorists still have need for
> security.
>
> Also, with hybrid (asymmetric/symmetric), end-to-end cryptosystem, if
> UK court says, "provide the key", the only one who could provide the
> private key would be an end party, as you know. Intermediaries (ISP's,
> etc.) would not be helpful. So a person would have to self-incriminate
> to make the system breakable. Not only that, for a secure voice
So what? The UK does not have the same standards of self incrimination
anyway, and even under the US Fifth, the status of an encryption key is
unclear. Producing the key does not in and of itself incriminate you.
The contents of the message may, but the courts can force you to produce
something whose contents could incriminate you. ( Where is that ledger
which lists all of your crimes that you stupidly wrote. The fifth will
not help you not to be required to produce that ledger. )
Jonathan Wilson
and my PGP keys when they pry them from my cold dead hands.
Le Chaud Lapin
> On 2010-09-28, Le Chaud Lapin <jaibudu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sep 28, 3:22?pm, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
> >> Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
> > Also, with hybrid (asymmetric/symmetric), end-to-end cryptosystem, if
> > UK court says, "provide the key", the only one who could provide the
> > private key would be an end party, as you know. Intermediaries (ISP's,
> > etc.) would not be helpful. So a person would have to self-incriminate
> > to make the system breakable. Not only that, for a secure voice
>
> So what? The UK does not have the same standards of self incrimination
> anyway, and even under the US Fifth, the status of an encryption key is
> unclear. Producing the key does not in and of itself incriminate you.
> The contents of the message may, but the courts can force you to produce
> something whose contents could incriminate you. ( Where is that ledger
> which lists all of your crimes that you stupidly wrote. The fifth will
> not help you not to be required to produce that ledger. )
Hm..I didn't know that. A bit eerie when you think about it.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
Le Chaud Lapin
> The US Government and its agencies can have my back-door free copy of PGP
> and my PGP keys when they pry them from my cold dead hands.
LOL.
I am a bit ambivalent on the issue.
On the one hand, I understand that US Federal Agencies have a job to
do, and innocent people, some whom we might know personally, could
become victims of terrorist attacks. On the other hand, what bothers
me so much is not the violation my rights, but violation of my rights
when the such violation is the "collateral damage" that results from
numb-skull policies that make no sense at all to any rationally-guided
technologist. They're sloppy, insensitive, disrepectful, and
insulting, and downright embarrassing to all the people who pay their
salaries through taxes. I think you cryptographers should be
especially offended that these people spend months in meetings in
Washinton scribbling on legal pads and drinking Perrier while trying
to sort through things that have been intuitively obvious to you for
30 years.
If push came to shove, I would probably lean on side of civil
disobediance too. After all, every person has to draws the line
somewhere, and I think they are starting to cross it with these
disruptive policies founded on wishful/erroneous thinking.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
WTShaw
> On 2010-09-28, Le Chaud Lapin <jaibudu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Sep 28, 3:22?pm, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
> >> Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
>
> >> [snip]
>
> >> > Yes, these are legal/ethical reasons, but what I find most ridiculous
> >> > is the technical implications, which simply do not make sense.
>
> > Also, with hybrid (asymmetric/symmetric), end-to-end cryptosystem, if
> > UK court says, "provide the key", the only one who could provide the
> > private key would be an end party, as you know. Intermediaries (ISP's,
> > etc.) would not be helpful. So a person would have to self-incriminate
> > to make the system breakable. Not only that, for a secure voice
>
> So what? The UK does not have the same standards of self incrimination
> anyway, and even under the US Fifth, the status of an encryption key is
> unclear. Producing the key does not in and of itself incriminate you.
> The contents of the message may, but the courts can force you to produce
> something whose contents could incriminate you. ( Where is that ledger
> which lists all of your crimes that you stupidly wrote. The fifth will
> not help you not to be required to produce that ledger. )
>
Note that recently and even long ago, 90's, I worked with derived keys
based on perhaps several words that would be used in some key
generation process. One advantage is that the phrase or sentence
could be in a form of self-incriminating content, or not be. To force
such contents to be revealed would be unconstitutional. We had a long
discussion to the end that a note from the Supreme Court passed that
they "saw the light" and keys were therefore protected. Please
revisit the my logic here as this absolutely kills the pretense of
courts having such access inquiry rights.
Mok-Kong Shen
> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>> I know nothing about US in this respect, but several years ago it was
>> told by someone in the group that in UK the court could order one to
>> provide the encryption key. Anyway, if end-to-end encryption is the
>> 'sole' means to have secure communication, then there is a unique and
>> unambiguous criterion to separate all the people who communicate into
>> two sets, namely those have the 'need' of encryption and those who
>> don't. Being able thus to make that distinction is certainly something
>> quite valuable for the authority, isn't it?
>
> Not sure what you mean. Are you saying that it's like going into a
> group of criminals and asking, "Which of you would be willing to take
> a lie detector test to prove your innocence in last night's shooting
> for $1000?", and then singling-out the people who decline? If so, I
> think people who are not criminals/terrorists still have need for
You are taking an extreme example, while I am considering the general
context. Again I can't refer to US, but consider this analogy: In Europe
e.g. in Germany every normal citizen is registered at his place of
residence and has an identity card. There are some people not legally
immigrated and thus without identity cards. So identity cards separate
the two sets. I don't want to say whether there is a higher percentage
of bad people in the one set than in the other, because I have no
exact data. But the authority may have a certain opinion of their own
and this distinction evidently may be useful for their purposes.
There are diverse reasons why the authority desires to control
people's communications, not necessarily 'plainly' related to crimes in
the dictionary sense. Maybe the ruling political partiy in some country
simply wants to know whether it has currently sufficient support from
people, etc. Those who commit big crimes (including some sitting
happily in high social positions and the definition of crime in this
context may include being an opponent to the ruling party) have their
own secure means of communications that are entirely out of the reach
of control via any laws or regulations. They use personal couriers,
sophisticated steganography, etc. etc. But those who commit lesser
crimes (but these are of a much much larger number and that's an
important point) may be to some extent better controlled through more
effective examination of the content or pattern of communications via
public channels (emails, phones, letters etc.)
M. K. Shen
Paulo Marques
> [...]> Maybe you should go
> to Intel and all the other CPU manufacturers and demand that they put
> software inside the CPU's that indicate when code is running crypto
> software.]
Now you've done it... ;)
Do you think the guys that come up with these crazy policies are smart
enough to distinguish sarcasm?
--
Paulo Marques - www.grupopie.com
"Who is general Failure and why is he reading my disk?"
rossum
<pmar...@grupopie.com> wrote:
>Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
>> [...]> Maybe you should go
>> to Intel and all the other CPU manufacturers and demand that they put
>> software inside the CPU's that indicate when code is running crypto
>> software.]
>
>Now you've done it... ;)
>
>Do you think the guys that come up with these crazy policies are smart
>enough to distinguish sarcasm?
So, how easy is it to see if there is "ROT-13" somewhere in the code
comments? :)
rossum
jbriggs444
As I understand it, your thesis here is that if you include
"I smoke dope" as a prefix to all your keys then no court
can compel you to disclose those keys because they are
self-incriminating on their face.
Leave to one side the questions of whether a grant of
limited immunity would pierce this veil and of how the
key's nature could even be argued about without first
having disclosed it. Why would a court countenance
such a flimsy and self-serving charade? Why not rule
that anyone stupid enough to voluntarily put their
confession onto a medium that is vulnerable to seizure
should not be surprised to have that confession seized.
i.e. If you crochet a detailed murder confession out
of marijuana plants and try to claim the fifth, don't be
surprised when you go down for both possession and
murder.
Simon Johnson
> ¶ Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must
> redesign their service to allow interception.
>
> [Uh...get a friggin' clue. Terrorists know how to write software. And
> let's face it..writing a simple app that allows secure voice
> communication over the Internet is nowhere near as complicated/
> expensive as designing a guided missile. Twenty-year-olds do it all
> the time. What then? Are you going to find the terrorists and demand
> that they comply with the new wiretapping rules? Maybe you should go
> to Intel and all the other CPU manufacturers and demand that they put
> software inside the CPU's that indicate when code is running crypto
> software.]
>
That isn't even the worst problem. Most of the world's programmer
population exists outside of the United States and those laws don't
apply beyond their borders. Encryption software would just be written
outside of the US.
People who request such things have a hard time understanding just how
complex the "solution" would be. Even the most simplistic analysis of
the problem would show that this is unworkable (do we really want a
backdoor in the New York Stock Exchange, for example?)
This was all debated a decade and half ago around the time of the
Clipper. The arguments against Clipper apply equally here.
It's a stupid policy conjured up by stupid people who fail to learn
from history.
Maaartin
> People who request such things have a hard time understanding just how
> complex the "solution" would be. Even the most simplistic analysis of
> the problem would show that this is unworkable (do we really want a
> backdoor in the New York Stock Exchange, for example?)
>
> from history.
This is stupid under one assumption. You're assuming they're really
trying to fight terrorism, child porn and whatever "fancy" kinds of
crime you want to think about. It's extremely obvious that against
such crimes it can never help. It's about as naive as issuing laws
against lying and ordering all wannabe criminals a mandatory visit to
the police station.
So the assumption must be wrong and we're facing somebody really
willing a backdoor in the New York Stock Exchange, for example. Or at
least somebody willing to be able to get anytime any information about
anybody, after all there are only people working in all the offices,
many of them are greedy of money and power (cf. e.g.
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/looting-of-america.html - it's OT
and I don't know if it's true, but it's quite terrifying).
Mok-Kong Shen
> So the assumption must be wrong and we're facing somebody really
> willing a backdoor in the New York Stock Exchange, for example. Or at
> least somebody willing to be able to get anytime any information about
> anybody, after all there are only people working in all the offices,
> many of them are greedy of money and power[snip]
Information, money (or its equivalent before existence of money) and
power are "inherently" dependent on one another. Anyone having
sufficient qualtity of one item could trade it for desirable quantity
of the other items. This must have been so since human civilization and
is likely to be a universal law already valid prior to that time. It is
definitely true under the worst dictatorship that history knows but is
sadly also true in the most praised democratic systems up till the
present day.
M. K. Shen
Mok-Kong Shen
> Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
> [snip]
>> Yes, these are legal/ethical reasons, but what I find most ridiculous
>> is the technical implications, which simply do not make sense.
>>
>> I'd say pretty much every amateur and not-so-amateur cryptographer in
>> this group understands and appreciates viscerally the end-to-end
>> model, where, if Alice and Bob want to have a secure communication,
>> they will have it, ....[snip]
>
> I know nothing about US in this respect, but several years ago it was
> told by someone in the group that in UK the court could order one to
Elsewhere I learned that the relevant UK law is:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/section/53
A recent application of this is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831
M. K. Shen
Mok-Kong Shen
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html an article
"Wiretapping the Internet" on this issue.
M. K. Shen
Le Chaud Lapin
> Schneier has in the October 15 issue of his CRYPTO-GRAMhttp://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.htmlan article
> "Wiretapping the Internet" on this issue.
Thanks for the link:
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1010.html
I noticed that Schneir focused on the societal aspects of the
wiretapping law and not the technological feasibilty. I think this is
smart. It basically says:
"Whether it is feasible to achieve, technically, what the government
wants, it's probably not a good idea because the detriment to society
as a whole far outweighs the benefit."
I agree, of course.
I think NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, State Department, DEA, etc. are
afflicted with a new kind of cerebral disease that seems to have taken
hold of us around 1999-2000. It basically says that, if you
1. Go to the bookstore, get "Information Technologies for Dummies"
2. Learn how to use Outlook, Word, Powerpoint
3. Articulate yourself clearly and pompously, with stellar posture in
"strategy" meetings
...then you, too, can be an IT expert and make a valuable contribution
to the effective design, managment, and deployment of groundbreaking
technology that will enable the organization to move into new
frontiers with enhanced efficiency and productivity.
[gratuitous, mindless, bombastic babble added by me...]
Every person who makes decisions regarding crypto or anything else
technical should be given a test in elementary number theory. If they
cannot understand basic modular reduction, for example, then they
should not be making [technical] decisions that affect the digital
well-being of 300 million people.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
WTShaw
Real crimes are most likely accompanied with parallel evidence of real
events rather than complaints that a totally voluntary confession was
obtained be that the latter can be fiction, conjecture, or entrapment
and might spoil the stew if exposed as such.
WTShaw
Simple reversal of the shield that protects ISP's from activities of
their users is not at all likely for a multitude of reasons that led
to that decision as a compromise to protect civil liberties from
unwarranted compromise of them.
WTShaw
>
> Every person who makes decisions regarding crypto or anything else
> technical should be given a test in elementary number theory. If they
> cannot understand basic modular reduction, for example, then they
> should not be making [technical] decisions that affect the digital
> well-being of 300 million people.
>
> -Le Chaud Lapin-
This is an inadequate filter as learning your ABC's means you can
fully apply them. LE groups tend to reject superior intelligence in
usual hiring practices. The term "dumb cop" has an historic context
whereas those hired for real expertise as often ignored in favor of a
big hammer approach to delicate, political, and/or technical problems.