On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 9:40 PM, Bill Frantz
On 4/10/17 at 2:31 PM, iang@iang.org (iang) wrote:
Like Ham radio operators yelling at you if you start using crypto...
In the US, and I suspect almost everywhere else, it is illegal to attempt to hide the meaning of communications via ham radio. (There's an exception for controlling a satellite.) All of the codes used by hams (e.g. the Q codes) are published, the data encoding techniques are also published, and cyphers aren't used. Hams generally want to be seen by government regulators as being good actors as a way of protecting the spectrum allocations they have. Hence bristling when you start using crypt.
The government gave you the internet as plaintext, you bought tons of fixed hub and spoke compute endpoints, you thought crypto was a banned munition, yet you chose to defy and run crypto on it (you even encrypted wifi "radio" because reasons), and either way, they could shut it all down in one day with ease by stationing armed thugs in the centralized exchange points. The government gave you the radio spectrum as plaintext, you bought all sorts of decentralized RF equipment and towers and mobile whips, physical p2p is a thing, thus they can't shut it down without major distributed effort and expenditure 24x365. Yet you fail to run crypto on it, even when you have same reasons, and 100% defense, permission, and absolute right to do so via the 1st Amendment which trumps all lesser "law" and promulgated "regulation", a 4th to protect yourself from trolling, a 5th to shut up about your keys, etc... just like you claim with your oh so precious crypto on the internet. Get real, get consistent, grok supreme law... defy the anti-munitions and start encrypting your airwaves.
As an aside, I think we are safer if people with scanners can understand police radio communication than if these communications are encrypted, as is becoming more common.
Well, you the people are the ones letting them encrypt over you...