On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 08:06:46AM -0500, dan@geer.org wrote:
The criminals in power have privacy. The rich who can pay have privacy.
Those below the median income have none.
It has long been said that obscurity is not security (except that in modest doses it is). At the same time, obscurity most assuredly *is* a species of privacy. In other words, the quotation above has it exactly backwards.
I have written on this, which is to say that I'm on the record. The most recent is
http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt
In the meantime, everyone on this list is above world median income (USD 1,225 per annum) and almost everyone is in the world's 1% (USD 34,000 per annum). I commend Branko Milanovic's _The Haves and the Have Nots_ to your reading in that regard.
--dan
Great article Dan, thank you. In other words, privacy is easy, give up your money, and hide in obscurity. Personally, I'd rather live in a world where the top 1% just publish their tax returns, and keep live online transaction wallets that anyone can watch. Why does this idea threaten people so? I'm under 40 (just barely), and I want the little brothers. There's more money to be made, and lives lived, and the cost is some will do what others think is a crime. Call me an anarcho-capitalist-green-libertarian-farmer. (Except in Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor big brother already owns farmer) You're right, we're probably all in the top 1% here. I don't wish to impose my ethics and morals on anyone else, so I feel compelled to advocate radical transparency for most, and creative obscurity for the punks who wish to hide from the Biggest Brother. I think it's actually critical for whomever is the 'Biggest Brother' (and I'm not sure if that's FaceAmaGoogle, or the NSA) to cultivate lots of little brothers they have no control over. If they try to control them, it only takes one to slip through the cover of obscurity with a disruptive innovation (or a disruptive weapon), and crash the biggest. The surveillance states that survive must accept and encourage uncertainty and chaos, or be destroyed by those that do. If one of those states makes me an offer I can't refuse (like Farmland and Wind Turbines), and you hear about it here, I think there is reason to be optimistic. And if you don't hear about it, ask me why. I'm not hard to find. --- FaceGoog, are you listening? You need a cpunk on your payroll .. I would rather work for the NSA, but they won't figure out they need really good people with NO SECURITY CLEARANCE working for them for at least a couple more years. I have more chance of one of the NNSA/DOE open-science labs getting it. I believe I have a lot of asymmetric leverage with the last statement(s), and I hope some other transparency punk will formalize it in a better mathematical/security publication than I can.