Part 2: Cryptography vs. Big Brother: How Math Became a Weapon Against Tyranny - YouTube

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 09:04:50AM +1000, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> On 2020-10-16 05:43, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:40:35 -0400
> > Robert Hettinga <hettinga at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Part 2. Two more to go...  
> >>
> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=n4qonsvSgAg&app=desktop
> >>
> > 
> > 	So speaking of NSA shills, that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect from one. The promotin of the idea that 'crypto' is a weapon against tyranny when in practice it serves the tyrants a lot more than it serves their victims. 
> > 
> > 	Cryptography is what allows big brother to control all of their big brother backdoored hardware, for instance. 
> 
> Crypto is a munition.  You want to deny us weapons, but do not want the
> government denied weapons.

I have to disagree, and the noise of Juan's anger is perhaps what makes it sometimes difficult to hear him, but it seems his position is that "all tech that gets created, gets used -more- by the fascist MIC regime dominating us all" and the obvious conclusion from this apparently correct observation is "so why the hell would you create more, or promote, any such tech?"

This argument (if I've paraphrased Juan correctly) is quite compelling - it's not obviously wrong.

So we are presented with a dilemma - you could say Juan takes a strong position on one side of that dilemma, but that's not the problem here (in fact, Juan's strong position helps us to see more clearly, the very dilemma we are faced with).

The problem is not Juan's position on this dilemma, the problem is in fact the dilemma itself.


> Which is the position of every NSA shill whenever a committee gets
> together to construct a cryptographic standard.

This may be so, but that does not make the (apparently real) dilemma "not exist".

NSA shills are not necessarily smarter than Juan on socio political issues, and they may in their mathematical cathedrals of "government power is always exercised wisely" may actually believe their own rhetoric.

But still, the dilemma (whether or not NSA shills see it) still exists.


> StrongSwan uses NSA approved standards.  Wireguard uses no NSA
> standards, relying instead entirely on standards approved by Jon Callas
> as unelected president for life of symmetric cryptography and Daniel
> Bernstein as God King of asymmetric cryptography.
> 
> So, do you oppose us using Wireguard to avoid exposing ips associated
> with the physical address where the state can find people to beat up?