You're an eternal optimist, aren't you?Yeah, I was raised in the Catholic School system, denied sex, and taught that God will win out in the end.....all we must do is endure the idiots until then. :-)
The war on terrorist groups makes the government less friendly to things like widespread adoption of strong encryption. They don't want the terrorists to have secret communications in plain view. Oh come on, the terrorists have the knowledge already, and it is just wishful thinking on the part of our current leaders that they can someone keep the genie in the bottle. I admit, I'm guilty of that type of erroneous thinking too. I was raised on movies showing the "rest of the non-Anglo world" as ignorant primitives, running around barefoot, trying to feed themselves. But have our illustrious leaders watched the news lately? Chinese cities make the US look like a third world wannabe. Having a Phd is almost a pre-requisite for getting into the Russian mob. It dosn't take much training to use a computer, and I'll bet most terrorists have better computer skills than John McCain. The real reason the government opposes encryption is that most of them can't/don't want to learn it. And they figure if they stick their heads in the sand, it won't bite them on the a*s.
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Hey, I never said they had reasoned out their desire. I just said they don't want it. In quite recent years it was illegal to export any kind of cryptographic information from the US at all in a way in which anyone from certain countries might find it. See encryption golf (one time pad) for a brief discussion of how useful that was.
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I'm beginning to think that the really dangerous terrorists are not even using cell phones, computers, or anything electronic anymore...... not because they are too dumb, but because they know it will attract attention to themselves and the recipient. Electronic communication is too easy to track, and sets off red flags. I remember when public key encryption was taking off in the 90's with linux, and privacy-advocates were asking people to encrypt all emails, so as to confuse and overload the agents watching for encrypted messages.
But I doubt it has overwhelmed the watchers, few people encrypt, and those that do just flag themselves as suspicious.Occaisionally I like to post a message to alt.test consisting of just a random binary string, mostly to give them some overtime. :-)
I'll bet carrier pigeons and secret hand signs are more useful now. I say watch who is buying lots of pigeon feed, they are dangerous. WOW, is this coincidence or what? As I pressed the "create" button on this node is got this back
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