[Cryptography] The vultures circle...

Perry E. Metzger perry at piermont.com
Wed Nov 18 19:17:00 EST 2015


I heard no less than four news stories on the radio today (two on NPR
alone) explaining that there is a tradeoff between security and
privacy and encryption helps terrorists.

None of these segments interviewed anyone with a contrary opinion,
or indeed anyone with any technical expertise. There was also no
mention of fact that encryption *is* a critical security technology.
No one mentioned the enormous danger to security that interfering with
the deployment to encryption might bring -- the security risks to
critical infrastructure, to industrial and commercial systems, all of
that was ignored.

I would suggest that those who have the ability to get their voices
heard need to respond to this quickly, or we're going to get
overwhelming momentum for very, very bad technical decisions being
imposed by very bad laws. The security services were quite literally
waiting for a terrorist incident to do another full scale
anti-cryptography PR campaign -- the security community needs to
reply.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com


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