Re: [Cryptography] Gilmore response to NSA mathematician's make rules for NSA appeal

[Walter van Holst]

On 18/09/2013 01:50, John Gilmore wrote:

 Re Big Data: I have never seen data that could be abused by someone
 who didn't have a copy of it.  My first line of defense of privacy is
 to deny copies of that data to those who would collect it and later
 use it against me.  This is exactly the policy that NSA supposedly has
 to follow, according to the published laws and Executive Orders: to
 prevent abuses against Americans, don't collect against Americans.
 It's a good first step.  NSA is not following that policy.

What makes me a tad bitter is that we apparantly live in a world with
two classes: US citizens and the subhuman rest of it. NSA-style blanket
surveillance violates the fundamental right to privacy and ultimately
also the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

These are not rights that are solely vested in the exceptional
Americans. The Bill of Tights already alludes to their universality,
although it took the UN Declaration of Human Rights to explicitly
acknowledge their universal nature.

The way the debate is being framed in the USA does not endear the rest
of the world to the USA any more than the USA's track-record in foreign
policy already has.

Other than that I wholeheartedly agree with what you wrote.

Regards,

 Walter

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Re: [Cryptography] Usage models (was Re: In the face of cooperative end-points, PFS doesn't help)

[Walter van Holst]

On 08/09/2013 21:51, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
 On Sun, 8 Sep 2013 14:50:07 -0400 Jerry Leichter leich...@lrw.com
 wrote:
 Even for one-to-one discussions, these days, people want
 transparent movement across their hardware.  If I'm in a chat
 session on my laptop and leave the house, I'd like to be able to
 continue on my phone.  How do I hand off the conversation - and the
 keys?
 
 I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, see:
 
 http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2013-August/016872.html

Which is pretty spot-on and one of my biggest gripes about OTR. It just
doesn't mesh at all with user's expectations.

 In summary, it would appear that the most viable solution is to make
 the end-to-end encryption endpoint a piece of hardware the user owns
 (say the oft mentioned $50 Raspberry Pi class machine on their home
 net) and let the user interact with it over an encrypted connection
 (say running a normal protocol like Jabber client to server
 protocol over TLS, or IMAP over TLS, or https: and a web client.)

Sounds like another Freedom Box...

Anyway, if we consider each device an end-point to a group-chat that has
to be verified at least once by another end-point (and that is a
somewhat doable thing, e.g. the socialist millionaire's problem), what
about having end-points being able to vouch for other end-points?

For example if I introduce my smartphone to an already existing instant
messaging chat, I can vouch for it through my PC and if other end-points
already trust my PC, there is no reason not to trust my smartphone either.

If this is a dumb idea, feel free to point it out.

Regards,

 Walter

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