On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 5:08 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote:

On 2011-06-15 7:05 PM, Nico Williams wrote:

...

It's only when push comes to shove that crypto doesn't help.

In the conflict with Al Quaeda, as in any war, push has come to shove, and yet encryption does help.

Encryption, assuming they use it, hasn't helped them all that much. A great many of their rank-and-file as well as their leadership are dead. At least some of them were found via intelligence processes that, from what we know, required no code breaking. Osama, for example, was found in part by traffic analysis. Maybe he should have been using Tor instead of USB sticks and couriers, but I bet usage of Tor from a sleepy Islamabad suburb would have led to his being found sooner. In other words, you've proved my point.

[...]

The state can escalate - but so can we.

Sheer lunacy. There's a real world analogy for most online situations, and if you're willing to stretch a bit, for all online situations. Crypto is no more than an equivalent of doors, locks, keys, safes, and hiding. At the end of the day the rubber has to meet the road. People need to interact with other people in order to obtain the things they need for mere survival. There are not eight billion deserted islands in which each of us can survive alone, and we'd not want to anyways because we're social beings. And when the rubber meets the road, the crypto stops helping. Anyone can build a fortress to protect themselves from the surrounding state. There have been many such fortresses in the U.S., yet when push came to shove in the case of the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, the fortress didn't help. The reason: the state has more resources because they represent a larger society. Now, maybe the Davidians should have made bio/chem/nuclear weapons with which to blackmail the state into leaving them alone, but that would probably have brought them to the attention of the state sooner, soon enough, one hopes, that they never managed to get the weapons and delivery mechanisms that would make them capable of pulling off the blackmail. Nico -- _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE