[Cryptography] What should I put in notifications to NSA?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 2:58 AM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 9:15 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker
> <phill at hallambaker.com> wrote:
> > I'm trying to be the type of crypto hacker that develops a strong
> encryption
> > scheme to disable NSA mass surveillance and then sells the same scheme to
> > the NSA to secure all those documents that Snowden and Manning leaked.
>
> If you want to support / enable your government in that fashion and
> purpose, that's your choice.
> Maybe after thinking more on all the questionable things it is doing
> under secrecy,
> you and others might make a different choice.


Math doesn't have a moral conscience. All that you can do is decide which
use cases you are going to address.

Looking back at the use of the ULTRA type decrypts after WWII, I am forced
to conclude that they were a net negative. Operation Ajax was a US driven
coup which replaced a democratically elected government with a
dictatorship. That coup was only possible because the US was decrypting all
the internal communications of the Iranian regime.

And there are still people in the establishment whose response to this
atrocity is 'Mosadegh had it coming'. I consider such people to be a threat
to the republic. There is far too much seditious talk in the US to start
with and it does not sound any different to me to the treason talk from
countries where a dictatorship was installed. What happens if the NSA
decides that an Obama or a Clinton 'has it coming'. If Sanders was elected
president they might well attempt a coup on the spot.

But they won't win unless they have the tools. Remember when the spate of
coups ended, it was the mid 1970s. One reason was the fall of Nixon and the
election of Jimmy Carter. But they did not restart under Reagan. By that
time the mechanical systems were being replaced by electronic and the
number of weak ciphers began to rapidly decline. There is a big difference
between being able to decrypt most traffic in any government being targeted
and being able to trick an occasional government into using kleptographic
gear.
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