Security Experts Oppose Government Access to Encrypted Communication

This isn’t necessarily true. You assume individuals are going to be able to protect private keys and it’s increasingly unlikely to be the case.

I’m pretty good with security myself but I wont pretend like I’m so good that I could protect a critical private key. I would have to admit to you the truth and that in order to protect that key it would have to be broken up and distributed among other trusted third parties.

If you knew what I knew about security you would understand why I believe that private key holders will not be more secure and also if any individual stands in the way of for example a billion dollars it would not take a lot of effort to extract their private key. Individuals should not have that kind of responsibility and most individuals who know better don’t want it.

Special forces are a different breed because they have been trained specifically for what they are doing and they know how to handle private keys. Edward Snowden because of where he worked and what he knew was probably in a position to know how to protect his private keys. The average citizen is not Edward Snowden and even the average NSA employee probably isn’t Edward Snowden.

So for most people if you have ubiquitous encryption it wouldn’t actually protect them and also there are ways which are scalable which can steal private keys in a bottom up manner. So it’s not even clear that ubiquitous encryption would work for very long.

What it would do is cause a temporary black out for law enforcement. Then law enforcement would change their methods and instead of doing top down surveillance they’ll start targeting everyone. First they’ll probably target people associated with encryption and associated with certain risky subject matter but over time the pendulum will swing back in their direction.

What you have to understand is it is an arms race. It always has been. The advantage always swings back and forth with brilliant people on both sides.

I will say this much, in certain situations, in certain less developed nations, where there aren’t brilliant code breakers like there are in developed nations, in these countries I think the advantage could last a generation. I don’t think the advantage will last long in developed countries that have the money to do something about it.

We will find out soon enough. I expect it to strengthen individuals at the expense of governments, but we will see.

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Can we PLEASE stop speaking of “government” as if it were a somebody or a real thing? It’s not, and speaking of it so makes all sorts of impossible things seem possible in conversation.

@luckybit Before we go around in anymore circles, please state the full definition of “government” which you are using.

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A government has guns which are real, and a military which is real. I’m not sure why you would believe governments “aren’t real”.

Why don’t you tell me how you define government so we can be on the same page?

Okay. Now I think it may be possible for us to perhaps get close to the same page.

This may sound demeaning but I assure you it is not meant to be. I mean what I’m about to lay out in a precise sense.

To an adult, guns and force are evidence of the truth of government, sure.

To a child, sleighs and reindeer around Christmas time are evidence of the truth of Santa.

Government is a way of thinking about things, it has no substance. Much like Santa.

Take government away, you’ve still got people in costumes (or not) with guns. Take Santa away, you’ve still got people exchanging gifts, with or without costumes.

The people with guns and the people with gifts are what is real. Government and Santa are reasons we use as excuses or rationale for doing things.

Convincing a child to believe in Santa so he’ll not miss out on presents affects his thinking and behavior. Same goes for government. Convincing the bulk of the people that a small group of them, however selected, should have the right to extort payment and do things that no individual would be considered to have the right to do, is almost exactly the same.

Both are examples of using a myth to affect behavior. Government is just a more pervasive and deeply engrained set of beliefs. Both are subject to abuse. Both are deceptive. At least we let children free of the Santa lie when they get older.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good and true reasons to exchange gifts, or to bear arms. It’s the false beliefs that get in the way.

Government is just the ideas that people hold in common and use to try to give order to some aspects of what they do. Luckily, ideas tend to start changing when confronted with enough reality.

That is what the SAFE Network brings to the scene. It is not apolitical or anti-political. It allows people to organize and share their ideas in different, unrestricted ways and to hold their ideas private. It therefore will be something that will facilitate a motion that is already well forward in our times: the motion to publicly re-empower the only source of true power there actually is, the individual.

People look to empower government trends because of fear. This is why people in government or who profit from government are such promoters of fear. The rest of the chorus are just reading the public script, and are not vested in it. They parrot what they’re told, but are not dedicated to the evil that is a “necessary” part of it.

So, long rant. But to answer your question directly, now that there is context:

Government is the IDEA that a small portion of members of society have an exclusive right to initiate force in a given geographical area, in order to collect taxes, make rules, enforce rules, be protected from the consequences of their actions, etc. These are rights that are different from and cannot be granted by the remainder of society, because the remainder doesn’t have them to begin with, so can’t delegate them.

People who believe crazy things can do crazy things. So due caution should be exerted when in the sphere of people who believe in those crazy ideas, and especially those who believe themselves to be called upon to enforce them.

But we should remember what it really is: an idea which PEOPLE use to influence their own and others’ behavior, it is not a substantial thing. To speak of it otherwise invokes the need to try to solve impossible problems, much like the penrose triangle that is the logo of MaidSafe.

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No confidence in sponsored government to be able to oppress through to the other side of stuff like SAFE. They are a spider and will get eaten by the starfish.

This is about the definition I use, and I agree wholeheartedly. How I’d explain it, government is the idea that certain people can justifiably violate others rights, that they are not acting on their own, but as part of a supposed collective will (which doesn’t exist), and that those citizens that they claim to represent are ultimately responsible for their actions. It’s also the idea that a monopoly on certain services is justified, even though each of us has a right to supply them, and a moral waiver on the act of restricting people’s rights, and on the right to claim a portion of any financial benefit received anywhere withing a certain geographical area!

None of these can acceptably be done individual to individual because they are violating someone else’s rights. Like you said, you can’t delegate a right you don’t have. If it was moral it would have been your right already. If it’s not, that’s because it is violating some other right.

My goal is to make it difficult to support or maintain the legitimacy of the notion of tax farming, or other forced collectivization schemes. Eventually, like slavery, partial claims on human’s lives by any group or individual will not be tolerated any more either, and I feel it’s my duty to work toward that outcome. I don’t think it is naive to work toward more freedom, because I think long-term things will improve, and the past inspires the future to push forward many times, even if we aren’t immediately successful.

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Thank you. You expressed it quite better than I.

It is just time to evolve some more, I think. It’s breaking out like the cracks showing light through Agent Smith.

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Should violence be distributed or should we give a monopoly on violence to professionals?

When it comes to non-violent services I agree with you that there is no reason why a government has to supply those demands. Violence on the other hand isn’t supposed to be distributed or unconstrained. So how do you manage violence without a government of some sort?

In any case, the topic is being strayed from security to whether government should or shouldn’t exist. Whether or not you think government should exist you probably do think security should exist. Figure out how to provide security without government if you think government shouldn’t exist and if you think government should exist then figure out how you can reduce the reliance on government using the private sector.

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  “If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one. ”
             ―   Robert LeFevre

A monopoly can only have a chance at being good so long as there is a real and persistent threat to it’s existence. Humanity is a mixed bag of mature (good) and immature (evil) actors. The good one’s do not seek the power to control others, and hence rarely seek to wield the power of the State … so, by default, it’s mostly the evil people who want that power and who claim that power.

Hence, there seems no rational reason to accept the State as a legitimate good for society.

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Has there ever been a model for advanced society to operate without a state. It seems someone took the opportunity for control and never relinquished it.

Many people have worked on this problem and found solutions. Here is a summary of Hans Hoppe’s “The Private Production of Defense”

Here are some other references from mises.org

There are examples, but honestly we don’t need to debate them - we need to just do what we believe is right. Everything else will follow if we continue to educate ourselves and move forward. IMO, it is the retreat to the ‘safe place’ (the familiar) out of fear of the unknown which limits our thinking and our future.

We don’t need to debate them…but if you have examples I’m interested.

As far as I know, it’s an unbroken chain since the Pharohs

General background can be found here.

Some early examples seem to have been omitted from that however, so read here and here.

Currently, Somalia has some semblance of an anarchistic existence, however, it is the people who live in a land that lend to it’s success or failure in this regard. What we need is a philosophical revolution of the mind. I personally am hopeful that strong anonymity will spur humanity in this direction. At the end of the day though, people must have basic food security, and hence some semblance of physical security to be able to have the time and importantly, the will, to educate themselves and move society forward. – EDIT: and these prerequisites are why anarchist societies are difficult to achieve and rare.

What a joke, even I as a simple minded consumer could/would come to that conclusion. Instead of writing love stories to the government these 14 cryptographers could have made a better impact by just simply working on Maidsafe code (yeah I hope that they are reading this).

In my simple mind these are the talks that are really important if your not coding. Is a cryptographic backdoor possible?

What I’m saying is: You can say no in plain text or you can say NO in code. This is why we should be grateful, patient and ALWAYS support the Maidsafe core team.
:kissing_heart:

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I have many politicians in my family, some even in rather high positions. They don’t come to that conclusion by themselves, trust me… Political zeal can blind anyone.

Much has changed since the pharohs. Slavery is largely history, murder rates are at record lows, etc.

Trading, rather than taking with violence, is clearly more civilised. Therefore, we will naturally be drawn towards it.

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This, IMO, is a key point, very very important and

is what I am hoping the SAFE Network will achieve and I think will allow the creativity to flourish creating systems where people can have

:slight_smile:

Yeah their using rubber knives these days…

http://www.cyber-berkut.ru/docs/world_need_to_know_this.mp4