News: "U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship"
Adam Shostack
adam at homeport.org
Thu Aug 30 12:16:59 PDT 2001
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
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