[Cryptography] Crypto Standards v.s. Engineering habits - Was: NIST about to weaken SHA3?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 7:36 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

> On 2013-10-04 23:57, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
>> Oh and it seems that someone has murdered the head of the IRG cyber
>> effort. I condemn it without qualification.
>>
>
> I endorse it without qualification.  The IRG are bad guys and need killing
> - all of them, every single one.
>
> War is an honorable profession, and is in our nature.  The lion does no
> wrong to kill the deer, and the warrior does no wrong to fight in a just
> war, for we are still killer apes.
>
> The problem with the NSA and NIST is not that they are doing warlike
> things, but that they are doing warlike things against their own people.
>
>
If people who purport to be on our side go round murdering their people
then they are going to go round murdering people on ours. We already have
Putin's group of thugs murdering folk with Polonium laced teapots, just so
that there can be no doubt as to the identity of the perpetrators.

We are not at war with Iran. I am aware that there are people who would
like to start a war with Iran, the same ones who wanted to start the war
with Iraq which caused a half million deaths but no war crimes trials to
date.

Iran used to have a democracy, remember what happened to it? It was people
like the brothers Dulles who preferred a convenient dictator to a
democratic government that overthrew it with the help of a rent-a-mob
supplied by one Ayatollah Khomenei.


I believe that it was the Ultra-class signals intelligence that made the
operation possible and the string of CIA inspired coups that installed
dictators or pre-empted the emergence of democratic regimes in many other
countries until the mid 1970s. Which not coincidentally is the time that
mechanical cipher machines were being replaced by electronic.

I have had a rather closer view of your establishment than most. You have
retired four star generals suggesting that in the case of a cyber-attack
against critical infrastructure, the government should declare martial law
within hours. It is not hard to see where that would lead there are plenty
of US military types who would dishonor their uniforms with a coup at home,
I have met them.


My view is that we would all be rather safer if the NSA went completely
dark for a while, at least until there has been some accountability for the
crimes of the '00s and a full account of which coups the CIA backed, who
authorized them and why.

I have lived with terrorism all my life. My family was targeted by
terrorists that Rep King and Rudy Giuliani profess to wholeheartedly
support to this day. I am not concerned about the terrorists because they
obviously can't win. It is like the current idiocy in Congress, the
Democrats are bound to win because at the end of the day the effects of the
recession that the Republicans threaten to cause will be temporary while
universal health care will be permanent. The threatened harm is not great
enough to cause a change in policy. The only cases where terrorist tactics
have worked is where a small minority have been trying to suppress the
majority, as in Rhodesia or French occupied Spain during the Napoleonic
wars.

But when I see politicians passing laws to stop people voting, judges
deciding that the votes in a Presidential election cannot be counted and
all the other right wing antics taking place in the US at the moment, the
risk of a right wing fascist coup has to be taken seriously.


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