That's what happens when you are on someone else's web. So far, China is the only one deciding they are unhappy enough with the arrangement to build their own web, but the option exists for any country, or even non-geographically-bound organization if you are willing to tolerate shitty satellite connections.
It's a corollary of Clarke's law. When technology is described by someone too stupid to understand it (like nearly all journalists), the explanation makes it sound like magic, because that's how the writer sees it.
Yep, just shoulder surf the passcode the user enters on the train, or read their fingerprints/retinal patterns off their body and print it out onto your key material.
>Mass surveillance is not going to go away without huge cultural reform of the security services. They don't take concessions.
FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.
It's not going to happen on "slightly preferable terms". Either those with political power in society want surveillance, or they don't. If they do, they'll take all that they can get, and the only thing cooperating with them will do is make it all happen faster - the moment you provide a "compromise" surveillance scheme to them on a silver platter is the moment when they'll start devising how to get around the remaining limits.
So you simultaneously think the other side is so powerful that you cannot even compromise with them without being pushed back further, but they are also so weak that you believe you can achieve a total victory without conceding any points? How you you reconcile that? Or do you just resign yourself to fighting for a purer goal since you know you will lose without achieving it regardless?
Total victory, no. Total victory would be strong encryption free to use by everybody without fear of persecution. That looks increasingly unlikely.
However, I do not believe they can effectively enforce any encryption bans. Thus, people who need encryption will still have access to it. And as far as I am concerned, my duty (as a software engineer) is to ensure that it remains the case, even if using it becomes illegal.
That attitude sounds like a myopic focus on the software at the expense of everything else.
Say that in the year 2160 you have perfect, unbreakable encryption on your pocket computer. How will you use it?
With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it. Of course, the master key is most important but all of these concerns apply to the data being protected as well.
The real thing that can never be effectively enforced is privacy. People who need encryption can have access to it or not. It matters not one whit. Our duty (as people) is to push society in a direction where this change feels less catastrophic, not to fight a Caligulan war against the sea.
> With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it.
You're basically describing a totalitarian Panopticon. A society like that should be fought by all means available, including physical force, so the question of legality of encryption is somewhat moot at that point.
>"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." – John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.) as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
> Democracy means accepting that the voting public has no idea what makes good policy, but that they should determine policy anyway.
Representative democracy means that they determine policy by choosing representatives. It's disingenuous for those representatives to turn around and blame their own policy choices on an explicitly non-binding referendum that they sent to the public. (Especially so for a leader of the party who choose to do that specifically as a means of minimizing the impact of the issue so referred on a general election so as to preserve their partisan majority.
