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

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2020-10-16 09:55, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> 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.

If, however it was right, we would not see the government acting to
backdoor mainstream crypto (Skype, telegraph, etc) and we would not see
obvious NSA shills on cryptography standards committees.  The NSA would
not have backdoored the elliptic curve on the NSA standard.

If they went to the trouble of backdooring that curve, then obviously
using Ristretto25519 is going to cause them at least some inconvenience.

Snowden tells a tale of giving an agent a doctored usb thumbdrive, which
powned whatever computer it was plugged into.

Which implies that the computer was not pre powned.