[extropy-chat] internet search privatizer

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:39:10PM -0700, spike wrote:

> Very much so.  My own views on openness were based on my own lack of desire
> to hide anything about my life.  I have no interest in prying into other's

Would this go so far as to post your complete earning statements, your daily
diary (containing your every thought, of course), and to install webcams
into your every room? Toilet included, of course? I've known of an artist
who set up a glass living room in a city's car-free zone. Would that be
perhaps something for you? 

> privacy, but I have little to hide myself.  I recognize that in this world
> there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to keep a low profile.  My

Indeedy.

> son deserves to make his own decisions on how much privacy he wants or
> needs.

Yup. Just wait until he's a teenager...
 
> Regarding transparency, there are many unanswered questions.  Consider for
> instance that PGP program that was available free a few years ago.  I
> downloaded it and used it to encrypt email perhaps a dozen times.  None of
> those cases really needed encryption.   Eventually the site was taken down

Have you never had to exchange emails with a customer who insisted
they to be encrypted? What do you think would happen if competitors
would intercept the cleartext of a pharma R&D chemical search query?
A friend of mine works for an email encryption company. Almost all
of their customers are military and intelligence organizations from
all over the world. 

> and has never returned as far as I know.  The fact is, encryption does

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pgp&btnG=Google+Search
is link #3. But you should use GPG instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPG

> enable crime.  

Film at 11: most things enable crime. Cars enable crime, should we
outlaw cars? Kitchen knives enable crime, should we do away with them, 
too? Cryptography is essential and you're daily using it without being
aware that you do. If you outlaw cryptography, you're helping the
bad guys. Why would you be helping terrorists? Why won't you think of
the children?
 
> For instance, a group of criminals, terrorists or even ordinary angry
> citizens could arrange to form a flash mob to attack a person by showing up
> from all directions at a prearranged time and place, each hurling a single
> baseball at the victim.  Being beaned once is hardly dangerous, but what if
> 200 people each hurled one ball?  The flash mob would then disappear as
> quickly as it formed, wandering off in all directions.  The authorities

You know, spontaneous fluctuation of air molecules could cause a victim
to just suffocate in a pocket of vacuum. Perfectly possible... just not at
all probable. 

> would likely catch no one, and even if they did, the participants would not
> know each other.  A recently-paroled child molester for instance, might find

But they would have to interact before, in order to form a conspiracy. 
Assume we want to assassinate president Bush. How do you find fellow co-conspirators
in a large body of people, without leaking your plan? Your friendly NSA is
doing traffic analysis on encrypted traffic. Sending email without revealing
your point of orgin takes skills. Speaking of Tor, a little bird told me
that it's empirically broken for a specific TLA adversory. You can assume
you will get special scrutiny if you connect to the Tor network.

> herself the victim of a sudden hailstorm of baseballs.
> 
> The question of transparency is problematic.

Not really. We know that technology has become arbitrarily invasive, so
personal privacy needs protection. No buts about it. This does not apply
to government and company privacy. There we need a standartized API for
public scrutiny (but for a few protected areas, of course -- and occasional
probe that this is not being used as a shield to conceal nefarious 
activities -- e.g. as the Bush administration blocking judicial probes).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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