News: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"

[Adam Shostack]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 11:36:56AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
| On Thursday, August 30, 2001, at 11:07 AM, Adam Shostack wrote:
| 
| > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 10:02:54AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
| > | Alas, the marketing of such "dissident-grade untraceability" is
| > | difficult. Partly because anything that is dissident-grade is also
| > | pedophile-grade, money launderer-grade, freedom fighter-grade,
| > | terrorist-grade, etc.
| >
| > I think a larger problem is that we don't know how to build it.  Once
| > we build it, we may be able to market it.  But when you look at
| > building something for dissidents, you realize that you have very high
| > stealth requirements, since using such software is likely to subject
| > its users to rubber-hose, and harsher forms of attack.
| 
| A quibble, but I would separate the stego aspect from the untraceability 
| aspect. It is true that in certain regime--China, Afghanistan, Iran, 
| Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.--sending and receiving encrypted packets will 
| be ipso facto proof of guilt or at least grounds for hauling in for 
| torture. Even stego in the ad banners, sound files, images, etc. will be 
| problematic. This is the stego, or stealth, topic we all know about. 
| (Aimee and Ray, cover your ears.)
|
| In regimes where something akin to the First Amendment provides 
| unassailable protection against sending and receiving bits in a form not 
| necessarily readable by snoops, providing untraceability is enough.

Well, I'm glad you'd seperate it, but when you get down to
constructing systems, you have to re-integrate it.  And if you're
talking about dissidents, you have to solve it really well.  I
wouldn't be comfortable saying "Yeah, use this and Bejing won't bother 
you" with anything less.  Maybe you would.

As far as not readable by the FBI/NSA, see the Back/Muller/Stiglic
paper.

As far as your opinions of our business, well, I'm really uninterested 
in getting into a pissing match with you.  The reality is that
customers and investors give us money tp produce privacy tools, and
they, not you, are the ones I need to keep happy.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume