[Cryptography] Boing Boing pushing an RSA Conference boycott

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Arnold Reinhold <agr at me.com> wrote:

> > On 2014-01-18 04:28, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
> >> 3. If I were working for NSA tasked with with disrupting the
> >> independent cryptographic community's response to the Snowdon
> >> revelations, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better idea than
> >> a boycott of the RSA conference.
> >
> > Seems to me that the independent cryptographic community's response to
> > the Snowdon revelations is Jon Callas and Daniel Bernstein.  How does
> > boycotting RSA adversely affect them and what they are doing?
>
> So Jon and Daniel have it all taken care of? We can just relax, and their
> admirable work, which solves all known and still undiscovered problems,
> will make its way into every security product by the sheer weight of its
> superiority?  No protocol issues to resolve? No need for people looking for
> weaknesses to brainstorm possible attacks? No need for people who are
> working on similar problems to meet and share issues and solutions? No need
> for those who still don't get it to hear from those who do?
>
> I can't think of any discipline where the advocacy, relationship-building
> and cross fertilization that takes place in a conference is needed more
> than in cryptography, especially in light of the recent disclosures.
>

There are more people working on the defense certainly. And there are more
parts to the defense than just what they are doing.

The biggest roadblocks we can put up in front of programs like PRISM have
to work at the packet and link layers. Which means that only a few
companies can make the decision to deploy. There aren't many of us able to
have much impact there, its pretty much up to Bruce.

If people are getting in the way of getting those messages out they are
hurting, not helping.


We need tools for the general public to use and tools for the people
building the tools and other high profile targets. So its not even a
question of one solution for email, we are likely to need multiple schemes.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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