The US government has betrayed the Internet. We need to take it back

Fri Sep 6 18:01:46 UTC 2013

On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Naslund, Steve <SNaslund at medline.com> wrote:
> I am unclear on what you mean by technical choice.  Are you talking about a technical solution to keep the government from seeing your traffic?  That will not work for two main reasons.

[good reasons snipped]

Ah, I should have been more clear.  I'm definitely not proposing that
the private sector could succeed in such an arms race, for exactly the
two reasons that you accurately laid out: the government has vastly
greater resources, and they have the law. (And I would add a third:
they have a valid mission to accomplish).

I intended the "technical choice" idea to be more broad.  I'm no
crypto guy, but of the work happening in this space, it seems that
there are a lot of people working on the problem of "how do we keep
everyone else out?", and a lot of other people are working on "how do
we get in?"  And recently, a lot more folks are working on "how can we
quickly tell that they got in?"  But it doesn't seem to me that very
many people are working (at a technical level) on the hard problem of
"how do we simultaneously enable lawful intercept, and verifiably
preserve privacy?"

There seems to be an intractable conflict between freedom and
surveillance.  But if we set aside that assumption, we might discover
technical approaches to support both.  The politics might change if
the politicians didn't have to choose one or the other.

Pipe dream?  Certainly.  But escaping assumptions is where
breakthroughs are made.

Royce