[Cryptography] Hayden on encryption v. metadata

[Henry Baker]

At 10:12 PM 4/4/2016, Walter van Holst wrote:
>On 2016-04-05 03:15, dan at geer.org wrote:
>> It was said
>>
>>  | Maybe it's time to start publicly calling for Nuremberg-style war crimes
>>  | tribunals to arrest, prosecute, convict, imprison, and execute senior
>>  | surveillance state officials?
>>
>> Anyone who voluntarily uses a device whose inherent function requires
>> continuous connectivity has no, repeat no, reasonable expectation
>> of not being tracked.
>
>"reasonable expectation of privacy" may still be a thing in the US context.
>
>It is not a terribly relevant criterium in most of the rest of the industrialised world which has moved on to more sensible legal doctrines, such as informational privacy.
>
>Reasonable expectation of privacy is a fallacy because it is extremely vulnerable to technological developments.
>
>See the following statement: "Anyone who voluntarily lives in a house that is inherently permeable by UWB radar has no, repeat no, reasonable expectation of not being watched."
>
>Or apply your own statement to good old wired telephony.
>
>Or analog broadcast media.
>
>You'll notice that what you are saying is that because of the underlying technology changes, all of a sudden our privacy expectations should change.

The Japanese have been living cheek-by-jowl in paper houses with paper walls for hundreds of years.

An Edo-period Japanese person learned very quickly not to listen in on other peoples' conversations.

If someone didn't get this particular memo -- well, that's what Japanese katana swords are best used for!

Apparently, many crimes in Japan occurred within earshot of large numbers of people, but no one literally "heard" the crime, because they were trained from infancy to not hear conversations not intended for them.

A similar thing occurred in the 19th C. with telegraphers who copied Morse-coded messages.  Although they transcribed them, they never really processed them.  One such telegrapher was surprised to read in the newspaper that Lincoln had been shot, even though he had previously transcribed that particular news message himself.

So yes, people have been eavesdropping for perhaps 200,000 years.  They've also been summarily executing eavesdroppers for 199,999 years.