[liberationtech] to encrypt or not to encrypt?

[Nadim Kobeissi]

On 2013-06-21, at 12:57 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joe at cdt.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri Jun 21 12:51:11 2013, phryk wrote:
>> On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 11:55:57 -0400
>> Nadim Kobeissi <nadim at nadim.cc> wrote:
>> 
>>> The solution to this is to make encryption more and more widely used.
>>> By increasing the number of people with access to encryption
>>> technology for their communications, we dilute this threat.
>> 
>> My thought exactly, just encrypt ALL THE THINGS and let those people
>> deal with humungous amounts of data, most of which will be completely
>> useless even if decrypted.
> 
> What about the theory that by encrypting all the things we are feeding 
> some massively large NSA cryptanalysis project that uses different 
> flavors of ciphertext to find weaknesses? Very conspiracy theorist-y, 
> but I've heard a few people say that maybe we shouldn't "donate" 
> unnecessary ciphertext to such a project. :/

Just to me personally, this really doesn't sound credible at all. The NSA doesn't need people to generate ciphertext. Ciphertext generation is inexpensive.

NK

> 
> best, Joe
> 
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