[Cryptography] Pearl Harbor and Crypto

[Henry Baker]

At 07:04 AM 11/22/2015, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
>The lesson here is that even with strong encryption, electronic communication provides a wealth of opportunities for intelligence gathering.  Good communication security requires a great deal of discipline, with even the best trained operatives making mistakes that can be exploited.  The last thing we should want is for terrorists to learn to completely avoid electronic communication. 

Earlier in his career, Osama Bin Laden used (Iridum?) satphones for communications.

The intelligence agencies were outraged when the NYTimes wrote a story about the capabilities of these agencies to utilize satphones to track people.  (Even though tracking was one of satphones' intended use cases! -- e.g., keeping track of adventurers/backpackers/climbers in far-off places.)

Whether or not he learned from the NYTimes, Bin Laden quickly gave up satphones.

Bin Laden's opsec became impeccable, which was one of the reasons why it took so long to find & kill him.

Of course, by making it so hard to communicate with him, Bin Laden also took himself out of the arena, and was essentially irrelevant by the time he was killed.

So, to the extent that opsec hygiene reduces an opponent's communications capabilities, total surveillance has some advantage.

But to the extent that coping with total surveillance *of your own citizens* reduces their efficiency, it becomes a substantial tax on the economy.

Look at the percentage of the East German economy that was reduced by the Stasi's surveillance of its own citizens -- perhaps 10%.  That's quite an extra load to be carried in an economy that may grow only at 1-2% per year normally.