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Cyphernomicon 11.16

Surveillance, Privacy, And Intelligence Agencies:
Effects of Surveillance on the Spread of Crypto


  11.16.1. Surveillance and monitoring will serve to increase the use of
            encryption, at first by people with something to hide, and
            then by others
           - a snowballing effect
           - and various government agencies will themselves use
              encryption to protect their files and their privacy
  11.16.2. for those in sensitive positions, the availability of new
            bugging methods will accelerate the conversion to secure
            systems based on encrypted telecommunications and the
            avoidance of voice-based systems
  11.16.3. Surveillance Trends
           + Technology is making citizen-unit surveillance more and
              more trivial
             + video cameras on every street corners are technologically
                easy to implement, for example
               - or cameras in stores, in airports, in other public
                  places
               - traffic cameras
             - tracking of purchases with credit cards, driver's
                licenses, etc.
             - monitoring of computer emissions (TEMPEST issues, often a
                matter of paranoid speculation)
             + interception of the Net...wiretapping, interception of
                unencrypted communications, etc.
               - and compilation of dossier entries based on public
                  postings
           + This all makes the efforts to head-off a person-tracking,
              credentials-based society all the more urgent.
              Monkeywrenching, sabotage, public education, and
              development of alternatives are all needed.
             - If the surveillance state grows as rapidly as it now
                appears to be doing, more desperate measures may be
                needed. Personally, I wouldn't shed any tears if
                Washington, D.C. and environs got zapped with a terrorist
                nuke; the innocents would be replaced quickly enough, and
                the death of so many political ghouls would surely be
                worth it. The destruction of Babylon.
             + We need to get the message about "blinded credentials"
                (which can show some field, like age, without showing all
                fields, including name and such) out there. More
                radically, we need to cause people to question why
                credentials are as important as many people seem to
                think.
               - I argue that credentials are rarely needed for mutually
                  agreed-upon transactions


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