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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21
David Honig (honig@sprynet.com)
Wed, 07 Apr 1999 16:56:18 -0700
At 01:34 PM 4/7/99 -0400, Daniel J. Frasnelli wrote:
>I want to point something out that is often overlooked when reading
>these "snake oil" ads. The general public and even many non-crypto/infosec
>professionals are drawn into shams designed to throw a lot of
>semi-recognizable buzzwords and statistics in one's face. Why?
The buyers are ignorant and readily snowed. And few will admit or
acknowledge it,
even to themselves.
>Lack of solid public education on intelligence/crypto issues contributes
>greatly to this ignorance. I do not think that this is due to some
>massive conspiracy by a blackops government agency, but rather this:
>The general public asks "Why should I take the time to learn about
> cryptography? It's not like I'm breaking the law.."
Yes, but they will get a clue, eventually, or so I think in
my most optimistic moods. Such things as a couple recording
federal politicians' cell phone conversations in DC (or adversarial
politicians doing the same in some inbred-southern state)
get into the press. The NSA recording Ms. Lewinsky and
Herr Potus slipped out; Mr. M'sevic encourages the use
of hard crypto (and increasingly, stego) among the slavic
cognescenti, and various domestic civil servants remind
the rest of us, unintentionally. In SoCal, the pigs were
caught "gooking/chinking/slanting" the vietnamese citizens
they were trying to control, over their 'private' copradio.
Then again, some dude was busted for posting motorola's
cop radio decodes.
In the far future, people will get a clue about traffic
analysis too.
The way Louie traced Melissa to her purported author
brings hidden-ID and ISP tracing into the public eye better than some
innaleckual clipper debate about embedded key identifiers, etc.
In some circles, Melissa really made a certain point about
the joy of executable content and MS's
concept of security. Of course, active X is as popular as ever...
But evolution takes time.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Thu May 27 1999 - 23:44:21