The FBI doesn’t just want to listen in to private conversations. It demands that people surrender the ability to have private conversations.
You’re probably not geeks, so an explanation is in order. Plus I know a few readers here are ex-military, and if they’re not computer geeks the following will seem incredible. But it’s true. In modern cryptography, defense trumps offense.
Which seems insane. It’s almost heresy, if you understand modern warfare. Military history is that offense overwhelms defense. Destruction is easier than construction. Which remains implacably true…except in cryptography.
Set aside the idea of quantum computing. (If you’re not a geek, don’t even set the idea aside. Just ignore that statement. And this one.)
Should an American be required to surrender the ability to have a private conversation?
No.
The FBI says otherwise. It wants people to activitely particapate in their signal decryption.
FBI…kiss my ass. And that of every freedom-loving person who’s ever existed. Quote me.
Non computer geek here, who promptly ignored the sentence about quantum computing. I don’t know what quantum is, except it helped Scott Bakula travel thru time.
I followed the link to that article, and the best I can figure is: The FBI wants the internet to have backdoors to encryption that will make things like internet shopping and Skype impossible due to hacking/lack of security. How stupid is that? Surely it won’t go anywhere.
Currently, it’s vastly easier to encrypt data than to decrypt it. Properly veiled, information is essentially impossible to hack. Which drives authoritarians insane. Stunts like this show their core belief: you and I have no right to private communication. We must give them the means to spy on us.
I never argue specifics beyond that philosophic point. To do that is to concede that maybe they have a point. But yes, of course if they have this power it will be abused.
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