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

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 08:40:01PM -0400, Karl wrote:
> On 10/15/20, Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The video makes it pretty clear that cypherpunks were holding the role
> of addressing that dilemma, right inside technology.

s/role/intention/

Cypherpunks are supposed to hold the -intention- to benefit the lower downs/ the people/ human rights, rather than govcorp.

Juan's (largely correct) point is that the pudding has proved something close to the opposite of that intention - total take surveillance, zero privacy, owelling fascism racing down the pipeline to keep us all in line (face/retina scanning, social credit, no travel/train tickets except you have the chip of the beast and a "sufficiently positive" social credit score, for just a few examples...)