[Cryptography] End to End ideology is causing us to fail to meet real needs.

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 12:31 PM Robert Hettinga <hettinga at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > On Apr 11, 2022, at 4:20 AM, Ralf Senderek <crypto at senderek.ie> wrote:
> >
> > E2E is deliberately private communication. There is no way for lawful
> > access. If you want accountability, E2E is gone for good.
>
> Phill, at least since he came to the first Digital Commerce Society of
> Boston meeting at the Harvard Club in 1995, has always been for statism and
> hierarchy, dominance and otherwise. :-)
>

People can pretend that governments don't exist, but that does not make
them go away. Notice how the libertopians jabbering on about how
decentralized their currencies are start forming 'governance' structures...

It is a matter of meeting the relevant use cases. Governments are
hierarchical which is why they need hierarchical PKIs.

When you communicate with a business, your end point is the business, not
the person. Alice doesn't want to keep her conversations private between
her customer service rep and the company. It is the company she is talking
to.

Governments are more complex because I don't want to share my
communications with the IRS with other agencies. But also because they work
for us and they don't get the right to keep their communications private
from us.

No, I can't do 'lawful intercept', but I do do FOIA and I can stop the GRU
hacking into the DNC mail servers.


The entire universe really does seem to be going Phill's way though, viz,
> the ubiquity of book-entry protocols, even novel creations like Bitcoin
> (not for nothing Tim May called it the greatest innovation since double
> entry bookkeeping) and ‘blockchain’ (whatever that is), the dominance, if
> you will, of x.blabla hierarchies and its descendants: The entire
> ‘certificate authority’ infrastructure, ‘keys to the internet’, ICANN etc.


The Mesh supports hierarchies. It is not hierarchical. The root of trust
for each user is in the one place it should be.
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