[ExI] Encryption

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
ubject: Re: [ExI] Encryption

 

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 10:25 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

>> So what can a government do?  Investigate anyone who sends encrypted messages?

 

>…Yes, or at least investigate anyone who doesn't use government approved encryption that has a backdoor in it that the government can use whenever they want…John K Clark

 

 

I have an idea on that which might work.

 

I mentioned earlier that we have bandwidth available that is too cheap to meter (how often in history is anything of value so abundant it is indistinguishable from free?) so we can get around the problem John mentioned.

 

We have reams of text available on chat sites, news commentary sections and so forth, megabytes of text generated per second, which anyone can highlight, copy, paste, and boom you have megabytes of blather.  Just as messages can by embedded in a photo (at a ratio of 16 to 1 length of photo to length of message) anyone could embed a message encrypted by one-time pad in a text message at a ratio of 1000 to 1 and it would be undetectable.  It would start with reams of blather and a very slight tweak would leave it that way.

 

Start with a coupla K of message, such as this one, embed it in a coupla megabytes of pointless blather, encrypt that file using government-approved backdoor-enabled encryption.  Local tyrant decrypts your message and finds only a pile of commentary so commonly found everywhere on the internet, with no indication there is anything more in there.

 

Of course there is always the problem the local tyrant could beat it out of us.  But I don’t see society developing that way.

 

spike

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