On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 6:39 PM, Ryan Carboni wrote:

Basically [15+] years ago, all the elites made the wrong choice, and they don't even have the excuse of saying they properly weighed the issues.

Apparently wrong choices are often engineered solutions. People know this, and choose to suffer under them as fact of life rather than immediately reverting, preventing, or making better choices from the start. They let life pile upon them until one day all the choices are re-evaluated in furious wholesale glory, winner take all. Humans will never learn, glory seeking is too addictive.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 01/26/2016 06:39 PM, Ryan Carboni wrote:

The elites at Davos like to talk about change and improving lives, but some fly by helicopter from a private jet. They could have collectively chartered a plane to Zurich, and then take a train to Davos. It does become reminiscent in which Russia supports American democracy groups, and the US supports Russian democracy groups... democracy has become a buzzword for elites to reduce the autonomy of other elites.

Quite so. "Democracy" was an early casualty of the Industrial Revolution, which concentrated unprecedented wealth and power in the hands of industrialists. In the United States, the issue of collective rule by land owners vs. collective rule by factory owners was decided by the Civil War. Today "democracy" normally means "deniable subversion and control by a ruling oligarchy."

In 1793, it took less then a year for Napoleon to raise an army of a million men.

In WWII, it took America several years to build up it's fighting strength to a level capable of fighting the Nazis.

Perhaps today, if we were to start a military from scratch, it will take fifteen years to do it (probably longer if you desire aircraft).

The point I'm making is indirect, there is a lot of inertia today brought on by the complexity of technology. The decisions made today once fully implemented cannot be changed for a while.

Not to mention future shock. Big decisions made today, if they can not be implemented by next Tuesday, are likely to be implemented in a world where their relevance is limited at best - if they can be implemented at all. The future itself is recognized as an adversary by those whose interests are best served by maintaining established power structures.

The elites have made wrong decisions, they have erred in the direction of mass surveillance instead of mass liberty, but it did not stop the success of terrorists. Now we are all less secure.

Wait, what? I would question the possibility that 'elites' can make any decisions in the direction of mass liberty. If an elite class exists, its collective interest lies in increasing the liberties available to the elite class, at the expense of everyone else's liberties. Ideally the lower classes should have the 'liberty' to choose options from a menu presented to them by their betters. This softens the blow of a policy regime where "everything that is not mandatory is prohibited." Should one faction of an elite class appear to advocate for 'popular liberty,' they are doing so in an effort to shift market dynamics to favor their own enterprises, at the expense of other elite factions that will oppose any such nonsense.

Apparently Juniper routers were backdoored... some of which were used by US agencies. One seems to hear more about the OPM hack then the Obamacare website being totally insecure. Government IT policies and organizations have been totally inadequate for a long time. The GCHQ wants MIKEY-SAKKE, as opposed to MIKEY-DH, they don't just want to intercept and decrypt future communications, they want to decrypt past communications ( as if that has been a major obstacle to investigations prior to the computer).

But I ramble, to be very clear, to make the internet itself secure, it will probably take ten years. While frequent derisions that people don't use encrypted databases are nonsensical, the solutions more likely to yield a result will take longer to implement.

Basically ten years ago, all the elites made the wrong choice, and they don't even have the excuse of saying they properly weighed the issues.

Of course they weighed the issues. Doing so enables an elite class to use its power today, to remain an elite class tomorrow. At the outset of the Internet's exponential growth, America's captains of corporate industry contracted their strategic advisers - - think tanks, intelligence services, market researchers, propaganda shops - to determine what policies and practices would best serve their interests in the emerging Information Age. Informed by the openly published analyses and strategic plans of social and political activists on the early Internet (i.e. the WELL community's 'electronic democracy' advocates), these advisers reported that the Internet would destabilize social and political power structures in unprecedented ways, shifting power away from the few toward the many - much as the printing press had in an earlier age, but on a larger scale with more immediate, agile and adaptive impact. Proposed solutions included mitigating the worst impacts of the Internet on established power by making it a surveillance platform, with unprecedented scope and depth of penetration into the everyday lives of whole populations. This would facilitate faster, more effective tactical, policy and propaganda responses to the emergence of populist power centers on the network, partially mitigating the Internet's undesirable impacts. So, along with a major shift toward authoritarian governance, consolidated broadcast propaganda platforms and accelerated redistribution of wealth (= power) upward in the social hierarchy, a comprehensive State and corporate surveillance regimen was facilitated by the "open" and inherently insecure nature of its protocols and implementations. Early 'netizens' understood the potential of the Internet as a force multiplier for populist political actors, and they knew that established power blocks with a common vested interest in the status quo would fight back. They redoubled their efforts to develop, refine and propagate strategies and tactics for Internet enabled populist political action. Technologists sympathetic to these efforts started developing practical countermeasures to Internet surveillance and censorship, and the rest is Cypherpunk history. The meaning of "security" depends very much on context: Whose security, against what hostile actors? Technologists with an Anarchist, Libertarian or other populist political orientation view "insecure" network protocols, software and hardware as problems to be solved. Political warfare assets employed by military, law enforcement and corporate actors would call these same features strategic and tactical assets, enabling them to enhance the security of their employers against hostile and/or destabilizing influences. Occasionally, anti-security in the network infrastructure will turn around and bite its authors in the ass - comprehensive Chinese penetration of U.S. military contractors and the OMB personnel records fiasco will probably stand as classic examples for quite a while. But occasional victories by one's adversaries is a cost of doing business in any war, including information warfare against one's own restive and unruly populace. Lessons are learned, tactics are adjusted, and the information warriors move on to the next battle front. We shall have a "more secure Internet" going forward. But as long as we do have a ruling class, we shall not have a "secure Internet" except at the scale of darknet operations that, as their name implies, are as secure against wide public participation as they are against State and corporate surveillance. I do hope the IETF and IT industries proves me at least partially wrong, by implementing the objectives outlined in RFC 6973. But I believe nothing of this sort can be implemented until or unless sufficient technical countermeasures to enable State and corporate actors to proceed with mass surveillance and censorship as usual are available. Another security issue overshadows all of the above: The role of disinformation operations that attack the network's end users via weaponized social psychology. But that's a whole 'nother topic. :o/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJWqDeRAAoJEDZ0Gg87KR0L2LsP/jKJ6nqGNKW+QXFGnZX+wxDW AZLhYb595GhzGz0ik/gN1ob6uSKuRH3NcuSwJEK07oQzR70hFxxVsZtoWi5X/hkM RJ+yARkMG6y5HHnTZYyh7v4b19nZFJlSLx7z4xtq3bI6ECgzpCptABn3WUw8TvsS 6MTBFZ1Ek7zt3FXUYfNpZOiA466vvSxMLMmrbtErLOO62kwQfWudx3pUiHsWcqBd DhekusbFQP5LhkrHvyDq0787I+b/5uEIoA2lE6TxvkoPEnbMUPnFrRDKvTiiH8Ok 5lI30nOFiiz7FbH3QGCvzTh3ZEfjKEz6gdIAOsTXhWYOnlK3SNFhVM23bKl0E2tH 7pjlC4igb8ryJ6qV5sV9WQZldzxFvi2Gu4r0y7H5WVKb3ax5CQw2TC6Ir57Cmmkt H6WHiC+uuTk0rSiJKWt1pEt8Q4uXM90SUgexD3ZHGYgLP1ezuVfjwcy7li53Z2Tw IBlaryXCQ9RM1xjd4w+9zSt6iuewyHJy/zirxTVc13PYgaV2nsaqBbcHLpbtTrRk Fck1fWF5D09egOkEOMMHw3UpSvc4MUtr9tiC1/Mf1k29M8I0tT6Cz7Pd3t7wnBRM ic9lPYc+5ZvJc52wb9swlQMnG5zP7wZ8EhpriTq0yehUiY79giMe6hcuZjY1MIiT C/gzvKDgNVlNyZZ7EZNz =jwx0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----