[ExI] The NSA's new data center

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Sun Apr 1 22:55:53 UTC 2012


2012/4/1 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> On 1 April 2012 12:08, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> All this talk about privacy becoming a thing of the past seems rather
>> silly to me.  Our whole society (and, some people think, even the evolution
>> of our big brains) is dependent on deception and concealing information.
>
> Perhaps, and by the increasingly monumental failure in the attempt of doing
> so.

Yes, it is an arms race. But, like the war on drugs, is it a fight
worth fighting? Yes, drugs are bad. Yes, loss of privacy is bad. But
is fighting against it worth the cost? Will it still be perceived as
worth the cost by the next generation? Those are the interesting
questions.

When we are no longer the most intelligent and important species on
the planet, our privacy will not be any more important than that of a
gorilla in the zoo. The privacy of the new big dogs will likely still
be important.

Any technology for encryption only slows the other side down. When you
encrypt something, you aren't hiding it forever, just until the
technology exists to decrypt it. And it always will. So think of it
like they rate safes. Some safes are rated for 5 minutes, others for
ten hours, big ones at the bank for a few days. Nothing can stop you
when you are determined, only slow you down. So if you have something
you want kept secret forever, then you had better not put it into
electronic form, talk over the phone about it, or anything. Just keep
it to yourself. Always. Consistently. But this is not the normal way
we think of things.

-Kelly




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