On Oct 29, 2013, at 4:43 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email protected]>
 wrote:

> I am at a workshop on Cyber Metrics at MIT.
> 
> When we are talking about protection against targeted surveillance then we 
> look for the cost of a single attack to be prohibitive and we accept a 
> certain set of costs to the user.
> 
> But for stopping pervasive surveillance we can't always bear those costs. 
> Significantly increasing the per message work factor is still a benefit even 
> if the work factor is not prohibitive for single messages. 

Absolutely. If we can get the cost of surveillance to be such that the NSA can 
only afford to spy on 10,000 people, it's likely that most of us will not be 
under surveillance. I believe that I don't rank anywhere on the list of 10,000 
most dangerous terrorists or criminals. That doesn't necessarily have to be 
measured in bits. If reading my email required breaking into my home and 
stealing the private key off of my computer, that would severely limit the 
scale.

If we can ever get there, we've made significant progress in terms of privacy. 
That would still leave the issue of activists and whistleblowers treated as 
terrorists (or more correctly, wasting tax-payer money to fight political 
opponents), but it would still be progress

Yoav


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