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The (Technological) Shadows in the Cave
by Razer 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

Thought I'd throw this out there... The Archdruid Report Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Wednesday, November 25, 2015 The Shadows in the Cave I had intended this week’s post to be the next episode in the Retrotopia narrative, chronicling Peter Carr’s meeting with the irrepressible Col. Tom Pappas of the Lakeland Republic Army, and the trip out to Defiance County for the annual drone shoot, but that will have to wait another week. No, I haven’t decided to comment instead on the recent spate of terror attacks in France. As people in a variety of other corners of the world have pointed out, identical outrages happen all over the Third World every few days. The only reason this latest horror has gotten so much air time is that it affected people in one of the world’s privileged countries instead. Nor am I going to be devoting this week’s post to the latest, extremely troubling round of news from the climate change front—though that’s going to get a post to itself down the road a bit, when I’ve had time to do a little more research. That’s a far bigger story than the terror attacks in Paris, though of course it’s not getting anything like as much attention in the media. From the beginning of serious salt water infiltration into South Florida’s aquifers, through ominously bulging sediments in Arctic Ocean shallows, to an assortment of truly frightening data points from Greenland, it’s clear that we’ve passed the threshold from “something may happen someday” to “something is happening now”—a transition that probably has quite a bit to do with the increasingly shrill tone of climate-change denialist rhetoric just now, and even more to do with the increasingly plaintive tone of those activists who still insist that everything can be fixed if we all just join hands and sing “Kum ba ya” one more time. No, this week’s post is going to explore a topic that’s far less important in the overall scheme of things, though it’s not without its relevance to the crisis of our age. I want to talk about the reaction I fielded in response to last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, which was an exploration of our culture’s taboo against choosing not to use the latest technologies. <http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-heresy-of-technological-…> I expected that post to field its share of outraged denunciations, and it certainly did. What I didn’t expect was that it would receive more comments than any other post in the history of The Archdruid Report, and the vast majority of those comments would agree heartily with the two points of that post. The first of these points is that there’s a significant number of Americans out there who, for one good reason or another, choose not to use cell phones, televisions, automobiles, microwave ovens, and an assortment of other currently fashionable technologies. The second is that there’s an even larger number of Americans out there who get really, really freaky about people who make such choices. Some of the stories I heard from readers of my blog were absolute classics of the type. There was the couple who don’t enjoy television and so don’t own one, and had a relative ask them every single year, over and over again, if she could buy them a television for Christmas. They said no thank you every single year, and finally she went out and bought them a television anyway because she just couldn’t stand the thought that they weren’t watching one. There was the coworker who plopped a laptop playing some sitcom or other right down on the lap of one of my readers and demanded that the reader watch it, right then and there, so that they would have something to talk about. There was the person who, offended by another reader’s lack of interest in television, finally shouted, “You must be living in a dream world!” Er, which of these people was spending four to six hours a day watching paid actors playing imaginary characters act out fictional events in contrived settings? Televisions were far from the only focus of this sort of technobullying. Other readers reported getting similar reactions from other people because they didn’t happen to have, and weren’t interested in having, microwave ovens, smartphones, and so on down the list of currently fashionable trinkets. The stories are really quite eye-opening, and not in a good way. Forget about all the popular cant that insists that you’re free in the USA to make your own choices and have whatever lifestyle you want. According to a significant fraction of Americans—and to judge from what my readers reported, that fraction isn’t limited to any one class, income level, or region of the country—the only freedom you’re supposed to exercise, when it comes to technology, is that of choosing which brand label will be slapped on each item in the officially approved list of devices you’re expected to own. The prevalence of technobullying and technoshaming in today’s America is a fascinating point, and one we’ll explore in a few moments, with the able assistance of the denunciations flung at last week’s post by the minority of readers who reacted that way. What I want to consider first is the fact that so many people responded to last week’s post so positively. One blog in an uncrowded corner of the internet, written by an author whose day job as an archdruid locates him squarely on the outer fringes of contemporary American life, is very nearly the opposite of a statistically valid poll. Still, the sheer volume of the response makes me suspect that something significant is going on here. By that I don’t mean that there’s some sort of groundswell of renunciation, leading people to walk away from technologies in the same spirit that led medieval ascetics to don hair shirts and flog themselves for the good of their souls. That’s one of the common stereotypes directed at those of us who aren’t interested in the latest technotrash, and it completely misses what’s actually going on. I’ll use myself as an example here. I don’t own a television—I haven’t owned one in my adult life—and it’s not because I have some moral or political objection to televisions, or because I’m into self-denial, or what have you. I don’t own a television because I find watching television about as enticing as eating a bowl of warm snot. It’s not the programming, either—that’s another of the standard stereotypes, that the only thing one can find objectionable about television is the programming, and it’s as inaccurate as the rest. To me, quite simply, the activity of watching little colored shapes jerk around on a screen is boring and irritating, not relaxing and enjoyable, no matter what the little colored shapes are supposed to be doing. Yes, I grew up with a television in the house. I experienced plenty of it back in the day, and I have zero interest in experiencing any more, because I don’t like it. It really is that simple. It’s that simple for others as well: they don’t find this or that technology enjoyable, useful, or relevant to their lifestyles, and so they’ve chosen to do something else with their money and time. Shouldn’t so simple and personal a choice be their own business, and nobody else’s? To judge by the reactions that those who make such choices routinely field, apparently not. The pushbacks discussed in the comments page last week range from the sort of in-your-face confrontations discussed above to a much-forwarded article in I forget which online rag, where somebody was airily announcing that he wasn’t interested in being friends with somebody unless he could text some vacuous comment about lunch to the other person at 2:15 and get a response by 2:30. (My readers and I are good with that—somebody who insists on getting immediate feedback for their random outbursts of mental flatulence isn’t somebody we want as a friend, either.) Then there were the indignant responses to last week’s post, which belong in a category by themselves. I’m sorry to say that my favorite diatribe didn’t show up in the comment queue for The Archdruid Report. It appeared instead on one of the many other websites that carry my weekly posts, and it insisted, among several other less juicy bits, that my lack of enthusiasm for television obviously meant that I was conspiring to deprive everyone else of their teevees. You’ve got to admit that for sheer giddy delirium, that one’s hard to beat. By the same logic, if I dislike peanuts—as in fact I do—I must be committed to some kind of anti-peanut crusade devoted to eradicating the entire species. Not so; Arachis hypogaea is welcome to live and thrive, for all I care, and my fellow hominids are equally welcome to eat as much of its produce as they happen to desire. In fact, they can divide my share among them. The only thing I ask in return is that nobody expect me to eat the things myself. The same rule applies equally to television, as it does to a great many other things. Like most human beings, I enjoy some things and don’t enjoy others, and in the vast majority of these cases, nobody feels particularly threatened by the fact that I don’t like something they do, and avoid it for that sensible reason. For this one commenter, at least, that obviously wasn’t the case, and it’s worth reflecting on the vast personal insecurities that must have driven such a bizarre reaction. Still, that was one of a kind, so we’ll pass on to the others. A theme that showed up rather more often in the hate mail responding to last week’s post was the insistence that if I don’t have a television, a microwave, or a cell phone, I’m a hypocrite if I have an internet connection. I encourage my readers to think about that claim for a moment. I suppose a case could be made that if my lack of interest in having a television, a microwave, or a cell phone was motivated by the kind of passion for hair-shirt asceticism mentioned above, and I had an internet connection, I could be accused of the kind of slacking that used to get you thrown out of the really top-notch hermitages. From any other perspective, it’s a triumph of absurdity. If people are in fact allowed to choose, from among the currently available technologies, those that make them happiest—as the cheerleaders of the consumer economy delight to insist—what could possibly be wrong with choosing some old technologies and some newer ones, if that’s the mix you prefer? Then there are the people whose response to the technology of an older time is to yammer endlessly about whatever bad things happened in those days, even when the bad things in question had nothing to do with the technology and vice versa. People like the couple I discussed in last week’s post, who prefer Victorian furnishings and clothing to their modern equivalents, get this sort of bizarre non sequitur all the time, but variants of it turned up in my inbox last week as well. Here again, there’s some heavy-duty illogic involved. If a technology that was invented and used in the 1850s, say, is permanently tarred with the various social evils of that era, and ought to be rejected because those evils happened, wouldn’t that also mean that the internet is just as indelibly tarred with the social evils of the modern era, and ought to be discarded because bad things are happening in the world today? What’s sauce for the goose, after all, is sauce for the gander... Finally, there’s the capstone of the whole edifice of unreason, the insistence that anybody who doesn’t use the latest, hottest technotrash wants to go “back to the caves,” or to even take all of humanity to that much-denounced destination. “The caves” have a bizarre gravitational effect on the imagination of a certain class of modern thinkers. Everything that’s not part of the latest assortment of glitzy technogimmicks, in their minds, somehow morphs into the bearskin kilts and wooden clubs that so many of us still, despite well over a century of detailed archeological evidence, insist on pushing onto our prehistoric ancestors. When people of this kind archly dismiss people like the Chrismans, the neo-Victorian couple just mentioned, as going “back to the caves,” they’re engaged in a very interesting kind of absurdity. Do cavemen and Victorians belong on the same level? Sure, cavemen had flush toilets and central heating, daily newspapers and public libraries, not to mention factories, railways, global maritime trade, a telegraph network covering much of the planet’s land surface, and a great deal more of the same kind! That’s absurd, of course. It’s even more absurd to insist that people who simply don’t enjoy using this or that technology, and so don’t use it, are going back to “the caves”—but I can promise you, dear reader, from my own personal experience, that if you show a lack of interest in any piece of fashionable technology, you’ll have this phrase thrown at you. That happens because “the caves” aren’t real. They aren’t, for example, the actual cave-shrines of the Magdalenian people who lived fifteen thousand years ago, whose lifestyles were quite similar to those of Native Americans before Columbus, and who used to go deep into the caves of Europe to paint sacred images that still stun the viewer today by their beauty and artistry. “The caves” of contemporary rhetoric, rather, are thoughtstopping abstractions, bits of verbal noise that people have been taught to use so they don’t ask inconvenient questions about where this thing called “progress” is taking us and whether any sane person would actually want to go there. Flattening out the entire complex richness of the human past into a single cardboard bogeyman labeled “the caves” is one way to do that. So is papering over the distinctly ugly future we’re making for ourselves with a screen shot or two from a Jetsons cartoon and a gaudy banner saying “We’re headed for the stars!” It’s really rather fascinating, all things considered, that the image of the cave should have been picked up for that dubious purpose. Not that long ago, most literate people in the Western world tended to have a very different image come to mind when someone mentioned caves. That was courtesy of a man named Aristocles of Athens, who lived a little more than 2300 years ago and whose very broad shoulders got him the nickname Plato. In the longest, most influential, and most problematic of his works, usually called The Republic—a bad choice, as this word nowadays has connotations of rights under law that the Greek title Politeia lacks—he framed his discussion of the gap between perception and reality with an arresting image. Imagine, Plato says, that we are all shackled in a cave, unable to turn our heads to either side. All we can see are dark shapes that move this way and that on the flat wall of the cave in front of us. Those dark shapes are all we know. They are our reality. Now imagine that one of these prisoners manages to get loose from his shackles, and turns away from the cave wall and the dark shapes on it. He’s in for a shock, because what he sees when he turns around is a bonfire, and people moving objects in front of the flames so that the objects cast shadows on the cave wall. Everything he thought was reality is simply a shadow cast by these moving objects. If the prisoner who’s gotten loose pays attention, furthermore, he might just notice that the cave isn’t limited to the bonfire, the prisoners, the objects casting the shadows and the people who manipulate those objects. Off past the bonfire, on one side of the cave, the floor slopes upwards, and in the distance is a faint light that doesn’t seem to come from the fire at all. If our escaped prisoner is brave enough, he might decide to go investigate that light. As he does so, the bonfire and the shadows slip into the darkness behind him, and the light ahead grows brighter and clearer. Then, if he’s brave enough and keeps going, he steps out of the cave and into the sunlight. That’s not an easy thing, either, because the light is so much more intense than the dim red glow in the cave that for a while, he can’t see a thing. He stumbles, rubs his eyes, tries to find his bearings, and discovers that the detailed knowledge he had of the way shadows moved on the cave wall won’t help him at all in this new, blazingly bright realm. He has to discard everything he thinks he knows, and learn the rules of an unfamiliar world. Bit by bit, though, he accomplishes this. His eyes adapt to the sunlight, he learns to recognize objects and to sense things—color, for example, and depth—which didn’t exist in the shadow-world he thought he inhabited when he was still a prisoner in the cave. Eventually he can even see the sun, and know where the light that illumines the real world actually comes from. Now, Plato says, imagine that he decides to go back into the cave to tell the remaining prisoners what he’s seen. To begin with, it’s going to be rough going, because his eyes have adapted to the brilliant daylight and so he’s going to trip and stumble on the way down. Once he gets there, anything he says to the prisoners is going to be dismissed as the most consummate rubbish: what is this nonsense about color and depth, and a big bright glowing thing that crosses something called the sky? What’s more, the people to whom he’s addressing his words are going to misunderstand them, thinking that they’re about the shadow-world in front of their eyes—after all, that’s the only reality they know—and they’re going to decide that he must be an idiot because nothing he says has anything to do with the shadow-world. Plato didn’t mention that the prisoners might respond by trying to drag the escapee back into line with them and bully him into putting his shackles back on, though that’s generally the way such things work out in practice. Plato also never saw a television, which is unfortunate in a way—if he had, he could have skipped the complicated setup with the bonfire and the people waving around objects that cast shadows, and simply said, “Imagine that we’re all watching television in a dark room.” Now of course Plato had his own reasons for using the cave metaphor, and developed it in directions that aren’t relevant to this week’s post. The point I want to make here is that every technology is a filter that shapes the way we experience and interact with the world. In some cases, such as television, the filtering effect is so drastic it’s hard not to see—unless, that is, you don’t want to see it. In other cases, it’s subtle. There are valid reasons people might want to use one filter rather than another, or to set aside an assortment of filters in order to get a clearer view of some part of the world or their lives. There are also, as already noted, matters of personal choice. Some of us prefer sun and wind and depth and color to the play of shadows on the walls of the cave. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to drag those who don’t share that preference out into the blinding light, or that we’re going to turn ourselves into the Throg the Cave Man shadow that’s being waved around so enthusiastically on one corner of the cave wall. It does mean—or so the response to last week’s post suggests—that a significant number of people are losing interest in the shadow-play and clambering up the awkward but rewarding journey into the sunlight and the clean cool air, and it may just mean as well that those who try to bully them into staying put and staring at shadows may have less success than they expect. ****************** On an entirely personal note, I’m pleased to report that Founders House Publishing has just brought out a new edition of my first science fiction novel, The Fires of Shalsha. It’s closer to mainstream SF than anything else I’ve written—it’s even set on another planet—but fans of my subsequent novels, Star’s Reach and Twilight’s Last Gleaming, will find it an enjoyable read. Copies can be ordered here. Posted by John Michael Greer at 5:01 PM http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-shadows-in-cave.html

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oldspeak
by juan 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/terrorism?s=t " noun : the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes." Oops. That just happen to be a description of the way *all* governments operate.

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France - sadly not a friend of principle or truth
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

So France again demonstrates they are America's lapdogs: "[US president Obama and French president Hollande] criticised Russia for hitting moderate Syrian opposition forces, which they said only bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Hollande would not provide a date for Assad’s transition from power but said it must be “as soon as possible.” " http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/24/russian-jet-downed-by-tur… Perhaps France would like to name, identify and locate the "moderate" terrorists/ "rebels" (as Putin has asked for on multiple occasions) and explain to the world how beheadings, and a machine gun shooting of a pilot parachuting for his life, somehow constitute "moderate" behaviour? France - sadly no friend of principle or truth these days. Again, almost all prominent politicians these days appear to be utterly compromised, -and- beholden to USA's interests - France no less than anyone else. Again I say, Russian president Putin is close to the only true statesmen on the world stage today. He has brought Russia back from the absolute brink of total collapse after Yeltsin and Gorbachev, and consistently matches his and Russia's actions with his words and vice versa - the very definition of integrity (for those who have yet to do so, I recommend reading his actual speeches from the last couple years). It is so sad to me that most of the Western world today is, evidently, so utterly compromised (whether by money, sex or blackmail I can only postulate, but this is a self evident fact based on the behaviour of said politicians directly against the interests of their nations and the people they supposedly represent - we can only put down to stupidity a small proportion of all such compromised behaviour). I am grateful that there is at least one leader of a major nation who is not so compromised - this today is Vladimir Putin; I can only hope that future Russian presidents sustain such a level of integrity and commitment to national interests and his/her own people, as he does. He is rightfully popular, and we ought be rightfully proud to have such an example in front of us. Too many things today brings tears to this advocate for sanity, Zenaan

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DOSIR
by Michael Best 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

I'm looking for old copies of the Daily Open Source Infrastructure Reports, the copies I have only go back to late July. If anyone has previous editions and is willing to share, it can help reduce future FOIA requests. --Mike

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Countdown to SHA-3 Collisions
by Michael Best 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

The SHA-3 standard was released by NIST in August of this year. I'm wondering if anyone has done the math on how long until we should no longer consider it pretty secure enough-ish. For comparison, here's the 2012 maths for SHA-1: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/when_will_we_se.html > On a NIST-sponsored hash function mailing list > <http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/hash/email_list.html>, Jesse Walker (from > Intel; also a member of the Skein <http://www.schneier.com/skein.html>team) > did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate how long it will be > before we see a practical collision attack against SHA-1. I'm reprinting > his analysis here, so it reaches a broader audience. > According to E-BASH <http://bench.cr.yp.to/ebash.html>, the cost of one > block of a SHA-1 operation on already deployed commodity microprocessors is > about 214 cycles. If Stevens' attack > <http://2012.sharcs.org/slides/stevens.pdf> of 260 SHA-1 operations > serves as the baseline, then finding a collision costs about 214 * 260 ~ 2 > 74cycles. > A core today provides about 231 cycles/sec; the state of the art is 8 = 23 cores > per processor for a total of 23 * 231 = 234 cycles/sec. A server > typically has 4 processors, increasing the total to 22 * 234 = 236 cycles/sec. > Since there are about 225 sec/year, this means one server delivers about 2 > 25 * 236 = 261 cycles per year, which we can call a "server year." > There is ample evidence that Moore's law will continue through the mid > 2020s. Hence the number of doublings in processor power we can expect > between now and 2021 is: > 3/1.5 = 2 times by 2015 (3 = 2015 - 2012) > 6/1.5 = 4 times by 2018 (6 = 2018 - 2012) > 9/1.5 = 6 times by 2021 (9 = 2021 - 2012) > So a commodity server year should be about: > 261 cycles/year in 2012 > 22 * 261 = 263 cycles/year by 2015 > 24 * 261 = 265 cycles/year by 2018 > 26 * 261 = 267 cycles/year by 2021 > Therefore, on commodity hardware, Stevens' attack should cost > approximately: > 274 / 261 = 213 server years in 2012 > 274 / 263 = 211 server years by 2015 > 274 / 265 = 29 server years by 2018 > 274 / 267 = 27 server years by 2021 > Today Amazon rents compute time on commodity servers for about $0.04 / > hour ~ $350 /year. Assume compute rental fees remain fixed while server > capacity keeps pace with Moore's law. Then, since log2(350) ~ 8.4 the > cost of the attack will be approximately: > 213 * 28.4 = 221.4 ~ $2.77M in 2012 > 211 * 28.4 = 219.4 ~ $700K by 2015 > 29 * 28.4 = 217.4 ~ $173K by 2018 > 27 * 28.4 = 215.4 ~ $43K by 2021 > A collision attack is therefore well within the range of what an organized > crime syndicate can practically budget by 2018, and a university research > project by 2021. > Since this argument only takes into account commodity hardware and not > instruction set improvements (e.g., ARM 8 specifies a SHA-1 instruction), > other commodity computing devices with even greater processing power (e.g., > GPUs), and custom hardware, the need to transition from SHA-1 for collision > resistance functions is probably more urgent than this back-of-the-envelope > analysis suggests. > Any increase in the number of cores per CPU, or the number of CPUs per > server, also affects these calculations. Also, any improvements in > cryptanalysis will further reduce the complexity of this attack. > The point is that we in the community need to start the migration away > from SHA-1 and to SHA-2/SHA-3 now.

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FBI PSA: Hacktivists Threaten Law Enforcement
by Ryan Carboni 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

http://www.ic3.gov/media/2015/151118.aspx Law enforcement personnel and public officials may be at increased risk of being targeted by hacktivists. Hacking collectives are effective at leveraging open source, publicly available information identifying officers and public officials, their employers or associates, and their families. With this in mind, officers and public officials should be highly aware of their email account security and their online presence and exposure. For example, posting images wearing uniforms displaying name tags or listing their police department on social media sites can increase an officer's risk of being targeted or attacked. Many legitimate online posts are linked directly to personal social media accounts. Law enforcement personnel and public officials need to maintain an enhanced awareness of the content they post and how it may reflect on themselves, their family, and their employer, or how it could be used against them in court or during online attacks.

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Re: [Cryptography] Pearl Harbor and Crypto
by grarpamp 26 Nov '15

26 Nov '15

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Arnold Reinhold <agr(a)me.com> wrote: > I’m surprised no one has proposed this simple system for dealing with the security implications of the European refugee crisis: when the refugees are being processed initially, give them all cheap cell phones or special SIM cards for the ones they already have. Then get a voice sample along with ID photo and other biometric data, say be asking them to test the phone. Give the refugees a modest monthly voice and text budget they can add to, more if they supply their own phone. The phones would serve a humanitarian purpose, helping the refugees get settled, find lost loved ones and look for work. But the phones would also allow them all to be tracked 7/24, just like the rest of us. Any phone that falls off the network or stops being used by the same voice would add its owner to a suspect list. The phones could even serve as a credential: “Cell phone please” instead of “Papers please” at checkpoints. Tracking? Suspect (for casting off inhumane chains even, or any other nonreason)? Internal checkpoints? Really? Seems the global GDR is hiring lately, you better apply. cc: cpunks due to censors

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"Following Paris attacks, encryption services face new scrutiny"
by jim bell 25 Nov '15

25 Nov '15

http://news.yahoo.com/following-paris-attacks--encryption-services-face-new… Following Paris attacks, encryption services face new scrutiny Alyssa Bereznak, Yahoo Tech By Alyssa Bereznak, Yahoo Tech .A crowd near the Eiffel tower a week after the start of the Paris attacks. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani) A crowd near the Eiffel tower a week after the start of the Paris attacks. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani) Four days after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks that shook Paris, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, posted a photo on Instagram of himself on a balcony in France. In the image, he is dressed in black and looking off to the side, the Eiffel Tower in the background framing his stoic expression. If you saw it at a glance, you’d think it was a tribute to the mourning nation. But then there’s this caption: “I think the French government is as responsible as ISIS for this, because it is their policies and carelessness which eventually led to the tragedy,” it reads. “They take money away from hardworking people of France with outrageously high taxes and spend them on waging useless wars in the Middle East and on creating [a] parasitic social paradise for North African immigrants. It is a disgrace to see Paris in the hands of shortsighted socialists who ruin this beautiful place.” Though otherwise confusing, the statement made one thing clear: Durov would rather blame the tragedy that had befallen Paris on French taxes than call attention to the way members of the Islamic state have taken to using his encrypted messaging app to communicate.

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Interest free money in history (Russia in this case :)
by Zenaan Harkness 25 Nov '15

25 Nov '15

This is not a new concept, and not an exclusively Islamic concept. And it has been tried with incredible success historically. No wonder Russia is despised by the "elite" of "the West". Russia Debates Unorthodox Orthodox Financial Alternative http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/22/russia-debates-unorthodox-orthodox-financ… It's not a short article, but here's a key quote to get you salivating: "Under Czar Alexander III and his Finance Minister Nikolai Bunge, Russia established the Peasant Land Bank in the beginning of the 1880’s to give interest-free loans to the liberated peasantry that had been freed from serfdom in 1861 by his father, Alexander II and given land. The Land Bank invested in the modernization of Russian agriculture with farmers only paying a small handling charge for credits. The result was such a spectacular rise in Russian wheat, and other cereals that Russia became the world “bread basket” up to outbreak of World War I, exceeding the combined production of the USA, Argentina and Canada by some 25%. "

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Fwd: [Cryptography] A Paris Cryptographer On Encryption and Terrorists
by grarpamp 25 Nov '15

25 Nov '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> Date: Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 10:34 AM Subject: [Cryptography] A Paris Cryptographer On Encryption and Terrorists To: cryptography(a)metzdowd.com FYI -- https://nadim.computer/2015/11/23/on-encryption-and-terrorists.html Nadim Kobeissi On Encryption and Terrorists Nov 23, 2015 In light of the recent terrorist attacks, things are getting heated for the regular security and encryption software developer. Being one myself, I’ve been on the receiving end of a small avalanche of requests from journalists, political pundits and even law enforcement. I’m also someone who was born and raised in Beirut and who recently immigrated to Paris, both of which were the sites of twin attacks, one day apart from each other. It seems necessary to share some perspective on what’s going on with encryption software, the terrorists supposedly using it, and what this means for the rights and the security of our global communities. The encryption software community writes a large variety of software, from secure instant messaging to flight tower communication management to satellite collision prevention. We do this for a number of reasons, but there’s always an underlying shared understanding: that we’re using mathematics and engineering to contribute towards a society that’s safer, more capable and able to communicate with a sense of privacy and dignity inherent to all modern societies. The premise driving the people writing encryption software is not exactly that we’re giving people new rights or taking some away: it’s the hope that we can enforce existing rights using algorithms that guarantee your ability to free speech, to a reasonable expectation of privacy in your daily life. When you make a credit card payment or log into Facebook, you’re using the same fundamental encryption that, in another continent, an activist could be using to organize a protest against a failed regime. In a way, we’re implementing a fundamental technological advancement not dissimilar from the invention of cars or airplanes. Ford and Toyota build automobiles so that the entire world can have access to faster transportation and a better quality of life. If a terrorist is suspected of using a Toyota as a car bomb, it’s not reasonable to expect Toyota to start screening who it sells cars to, or to stop selling cars altogether. And yet, this is the line of questioning that has besieged the cryptography community immediately after the Paris attacks. A simple mention of my encryption software in an Arabic-speaking forum is enough to put me on the receiving end of press inquiries such as “are you aware of any terrorists using your software? Do you feel it’s your responsibility to monitor terrorist activity?” Or, more bluntly, do I feel like I’m complicit in aiding terrorists, by the simple fact that I write cryptography software or currently do PhD research in applied cryptography? The brouhaha that has ensued from the press has been extreme. I’ve received calls that bluntly want to interview me regarding “technology used by terrorists, such as yours.” A Wired article, like many alongside it, finds an Arabic PDF guide on encryption and immediately attributes it as an “ISIS encryption training manual” even though it was written years ago by Gaza activists with no affiliation to any jihadist group. In this rush to blame a field that is largely unknowable to the public and therefore at once alluring and terrifying, little attention has been paid to facts: The Paris terrorists did not use encryption, but coordinated over SMS, one of the easiest to monitor methods of digital communication. They were still not caught, indicating a failure in human intelligence and not in a capacity for digital surveillance. But even in light of all the evidence pointing towards a human intelligence failure, cryptography, being to the outsider a scary and mysterious usage of secret codes and complicated algorithms, remains an easy target. The press again drives the discussion, each time with a lessened priority for measured questioning and proper investigation. Why haven’t you inserted back doors into your software? Do you want terrorists to use your tools? The call for backdoors is nothing new. During my career in the private sector, I’ve seen requests to backdoor encryption software so as to please potential investors, and have seen people in the field who appeared to stand for secure software balk under the excuse of “if that’s what the customer wants,” even if it results in irreparable security weaknesses. I’ve had well-intentioned intelligence officers ask me informally, out of honest curiosity, why it is that I would refuse to insert backdoors. The issue is that cryptography depends on a set of mathematical relationships that cannot be subverted selectively. They either hold completely or not at all. It’s not something that we’re not smart enough to do; it’s something that’s mathematically impossible to do. I cannot backdoor software specifically to spy on jihadists without this backdoor applying to every single member of society relying on my software. And I’ve seen what guarantees secure communication can give a society. I’ve seen my software used in Hong Kong to organize protests against a government otherwise unwilling to give people their rights. I’ve seen my colleagues produce software used by Egyptians rallying for democracy. I’ve had childhood friends call me from Beirut, desperate to know of a way to organize protests against a government that would lock them up were they to use public phone lines. I’ve set up communication lines for LGBTQ organizations so that they can give counsel without fearing ostracization or reprisal. And in the comfort of my new life in France, I’ve also relied on encryption so that I know I’m obtaining my simple right to privacy when discussing my daily life with my friends or with my partner. I’ve come to see encryption as the natural extension a computer scientist can give a democracy. A permeation of the simple assurance that you can carry out your life freely and privately, as enshrined in the constitutions and charters of France, Lebanon as well as the United States. To take away these guarantees doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce better intelligence. It’s not why our intelligence isn’t competing in the first place. But it does help terrorist groups destroy the moral character of our politics from within, when out of fear, we forsake our principles. If we take every car off the street, every iPhone out of people’s pockets and every single plane out of the sky, it wouldn’t do anything to stop terrorism. Terrorism isn’t about means, but about ends. It’s not about the technology but about the anger, the ignorance that holds a firm grip over the actor’s mind. I grew up and spent a decade of my childhood in south Beirut and was literally neighbors with the security sector of Hezbollah, a guerilla organization that fights frequent wars with Israel. During the 2006 war, an Israeli fighter jet carpet-bombed the entire neighborhood, razing my home and that of many others to the ground. While walking through a field of rubble and unexploded cluster bombs to try and find my house, I distantly saw a friend of mine, far away on the other side of whatever it was that I was staring across. We locked eyes. Then, we burst out laughing. We laughed for a long time. In 2008, I got the opportunity to move away from Lebanon and to get an education abroad. This opportunity was rare and unusual. Making encryption software is hard, too: for many of my first years abroad, much of my software was riddled with bugs, and it took practice and feedback in order to start getting things right namely, what my education abroad of Lebanon really was about. Visiting south Beirut a few years later, I found that I had changed but that no one else there had. The rubble was mostly but not completely gone. I also found that people were angry, and that Hezbollah had pledged to rebuild their homes. Left without any hope for a good education, for a happy life, with much of their families missing, with their friends dead, many pledged themselves in return. That’s what’s causing terrorism, not encryption software. nadim(a)nadim.computer _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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