From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>
To me, the problem is obviously the people who write such articles, and perhaps others that write the headlines, people who know far less about security even than those who merely frequent the Cypherpunks list. (In better times, when most of the posts were on-topic.)
Prior to the revelation of NSA's massive data farms (for instance, the one recently revealed in Utah), even the ordinary POTS (plain old telephone system) was 'fair' in security, in the sense that the large majority of the 'wheat' (the stuff the NSA wants to record, store, and search for) was immersed in a ton of 'chaff', the billions of phone calls made on a daily basis. The government couldn't look at information that they didn't know existed, and didn't have a copy of.
Relatively good would be encrypted security that cannot be (easily) broken by even the NSA.
Even better would be a system which eliminates metadata, sort of a Tor-ized cell phone system. Why doesn't that currently exist? A start would be if the major cell-phone companies publicly announced that they refuse to even collect such metadata, or at least it would be automatically erased at the end of each individual phone call. (Since most phone billing is no longer sensitive to distance, or even time, why record such information in a central location?)
Such an announcement would not be automatically believable, especially to cynics like us, but the long-term non-existence of news of criminal trials which actually admitted such evidence would tend to convince the public that the evidence is either not being collected at all, or at least is only being used secret, and not openly in criminal trials.
> Is that even possible unless you:
> 1) personally pick up your phone off the factory
> floor production line at random?
To _us_, the cypherpunks, the answer is obviously "no". But if just about everybody had phones installed with 'good' (rather than 'perfect') encryption, encryption that it would take a large amount of the NSA's resources to crack, we'd be living in a far better world than what we have now. An even better addition would be a system which actually made the NSA _FEAR_ to use such surveillance results. Would the average telephone user be willing to spend 10 cents per month to supply a fund to kill any government worker who assisted in the recording, storage, decrypting, or using such recorded information, including prosecutors, judges, and government investigators in criminal trials? $25 million per month, in America, would buy 250 deaths at $100,000 each, per month. Somehow, I think that this would solve the problem.
Jim Bell