[Cryptography] October 28th is now National Cryptography Day

[John Levine]

>On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 1:12 AM, Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> wrote:
>
>> If Hilary had encrypted her email, she would almost certainly be president
>> elect.
>>
>> If Hilary had encrypted her email, she would have been faced with a court
>> ordering her to decrypt it.  Yes, there could have been a whole battle over
>> whether the 5th Amendment prevents the government from forcing you to
>> disclose your password.  The law on this is currently completely unsettled.
>>
>
>​The principal policy objection made against her private server was that it
>might have been compromised by a foreign power and classified information
>might have leaked. Encryption would have completely blocked that attack.

Nope.  There are laws about handling classified material, and they
don't allow storing it on your own equipment.  The law definitely
doesn't say "unless you use really good crypto."  If Clinton had
deliberately stored classified material on her server that would be a
violation of the law, albeit of a kind that government employees make
all the time (not their own servers, but unauthorized media) and get
no more than a wrist slap if that.

But there is in fact no reason to believe that Clinton deliberately
stored any classified material on it, and in fact her server seems
to have been more secure than State's.

This Vox article describes the whole sorry story quite well, and the
operative term is the last one in the URL.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit

R's,
John

PS: This seems relevant https://xkcd.com/538/