Text 5825, 55 rader
Skriven 2007-12-31 08:29:22 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 5791 av Daniel Prather (948.pol_inc)
Ärende: Global information change
=================================
Replying to a message of Daniel Prather to JOHNJWILSON:

 >> I believe the internet is changing the world.

 DP> I really do think the Internet empowers people.  But, there's a bit of
 DP> an information overload too, and it requires a bit more work on the
 DP> part of the individual for filtering out the truth from the noise.

 DP> Unfortunately, the governments of the world know all too well the
 DP> disadvantage at which the Internet places them.

I said that nearly 20 years ago when computer BBSes and Fidonet were
state-of-the-art.  Governments don't *want* people to be able to freely
exchange information and opinions because said governments cannot *control*
that exchange (and they *can* control the mass communications - radio, TV and
print media - in this country).

20 years ago the government tried to get control of computer networks - or shut
them down - by claiming they were mainly used to exchange porn.  Today it's
child molesters and child porn.  They *never* mention that they really want to
be able to control *all* of it.

 DP>  That's why you're
 DP> seeing an increasing amount of censorship and surveillance.  At some
 DP> point, I think we're going to have to move to largely encrypted
 DP> communications for just about everything.

Governments don't like ordinary people to use encryption, either.  Witness the
paroxysms
of horror the government went through when it found out about Pretty Good
Privacy (PGP).
The US government tried to prosecute Phil Zimmerman for inventing and freely
distributing PGP, the government tried to charge him with exporting
'munitions.'  Apparently NSA has trouble breaking messages encrypted with PGP -
although I wouldn't trust any versions of
PGP after about version 3.0, development after that version was transferred to
a company
that's under the government's thumb.

What I would do - and encourage others to do - is take a program that's a
couple of K
in size, run it through a routine that scrambles the bytes into garbage, run
that garbage
through uucp to convert it to ASCII characters (still garbage), separate that
into five-
character groups and feed those groups to PGP.  Then make the PGP encrypted
output freely
available and let the NSA spooks work themselves into a nervous breakdown
trying to
break it; something that never was intelligible text cannot be 'broken' to
intelligible text regardless of the amount of brain and computer power that is
used in the attempt.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)