[Cryptography] coding for compression or secrecy or both or neither

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Sat Jan 24 13:28:30 EST 2015


On Thu, 22 Jan 2015, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:

> "We might be following you around everywhere you go, but we never go 
> inside! We're definitely not tracking you!"
> 
> Interestingly following someone around is relatively legal and 
> non-invasive. Metadata actually exposes a lot more than you'd think. 
> "You went into  lady A's house for 3 hours", or "you visit X every 
> friday, just like Y does", or "you visited the `travel India` shop 
> twice" kind of makes it unnessary to actually go inside, doesn't it?

I'd love to be able to use that argument, if I may.

There's a "debate" (if that's the correct word) raging in Australia over 
this very thing.  Our beloved conservative government wants all ISPs to 
store metadata for two years (anti-terrorism, you see), saying "It's only 
metadata", whilst the progressives are saying "With the metadata, you 
don't need the data".

Our equally-beloved Attorney-General didn't even know what an IP address 
was, calling it an "electronic address", and kept contradicting himself 
over whether URLs would be recorded or not; the job of selling it to the 
sheep was given to our much-liked Communications Minister (who once ran 
Ozemail, as it happens), and is clearly uncomfortable with it, but he has 
to follow the party line.

So, I'd love to be able to use that argument here in Oz...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server."
http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)


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