[liberationtech] [cryptography] NSA "breakthrough"

[Jonathan Wilkes]

________________________________
 >From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
>To: Liberation Technologies <liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>; info at postbiota.org; zs-p2p at googlegroups.com 
>Sent: Saturday, June 15, 2013 8:24 AM
>Subject: Re: [liberationtech] [cryptography] NSA "breakthrough"
 

>----- Forwarded message from Danilo Gligoroski <danilo.gligoroski at gmail.com> -----

>Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 12:54:04 +0200
>From: Danilo Gligoroski <danilo.gligoroski at gmail.com>
>To: cryptography at randombit.net
>Subject: Re: [cryptography] NSA "breakthrough"
>Organization: Department of Telematics, IME, NTNU, Trondheim
>X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0
>Reply-To: danilog at item.ntnu.no

>Joachim Strömbergson wrote:

>> A "breakthrough" seems to me not to be a backdoor, but either cryptanalytical progress or progress in brute force efficiency.

>In my opinion it has nothing to do with cryptography, but rather in the advancements of: 
>1. Storage technology (increasing with a ratio of billions or trillions of times from early 1990s)

>2. Data collecting capabilities from:
>  a. Complexity of the software that billions of users use that leaks information from thousands of places (Cap'n crunch whistle phenomenon - see the video from last year CRYPTO talk of Jonathan Zittrain "End of Crypto")

Why doesn't he mention free software in the entire talk?

It'd be like giving a history of obesity and never mentioning that people can learn to read nutritional information on the foods they buy, or pay a nutritionist or personal trainer they trust to read it for them and use the knowledge to help them lose weight.

Actually it's worse than that-- it'd be like addressing obesity without letting the audience know there's a machine that exists which costs
$0 that takes nutritional information listed on a package and verifies that it's true.  Available to anyone who can read the instructions on
the side of the machine.

-Jonathan
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