Because your options are Beijing or DC. We like to pretend the age of empires is past but realistically we still live in a time of where there are two major world powers and everyone gets to decide which side of the line they want to fall on, accept American hegemony or submit to Chinese control.

so essentially: "because you only have worse choices"

Except that in one I can say "my president is an idiot. We need a leadership change" without wiping my credit score or being detained.

True. But it's important to note that it is likely that, given the requirements of creating large, functioning systems of administration, it might be true that all governing systems are trying to solve the same types of problems.

And it's worth remembering that, even in the US there exist examples of people who pushed for real change to these systems, and ended up detained, dead or simply disappeared.

It might also be worthwhile to consider the following well known allegations: revolving door appointments between bureaucracy and companies that it interfaces with and regulates; compromise of politicians by various interest groups using bribery of blackmail; the effects of corporate lobbying and donations to distort the legislative and electoral processes; the powers of unelected career bureaucrats whose tenures often outlast elected officials.

It's important to recall that the US is not alone is allegedly suffering from these maladies, but that it might suffer from them ought be a cause for concern.

Such considerations seem to raise the question of whether the president (and associated democratic and elected apparatuses) are in some way figureheads designed to provide a focus and an outlet, but may also function to protect the overall system against substantial reforms.

Such a description may help explain why processes in democracies often stagnate.

The is not to say that the Chinese system is "better" in any sense (our first consideration indicates that perhaps all large governing systems must essentially be the same), but it might be more honest about what it is.

This gives rise to the sense that democracy, at least in part, may be a deception that usefully provides people the illusion of a voice for change, while at the same time protecting the governing system by ensuring people do not seek more disruptive methods to alter it.

>This gives rise to the sense that democracy, at least in part, may be a deception that usefully provides people the illusion of a voice for change, while at the same time protecting the governing system by ensuring people do not seek more disruptive methods to alter it.

As Churchill said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except all others". Are there elements in democracies that entrench the status quo? Of course, especially in countries like the UK and the US with single member district, first past the post systems that favor huge parties that never change. Here we have a pretty complex party list based system that is often critiqued as "too difficult to understand for the average voter", but when people want to change who rules the country they have more than 1 viable choice of opposition. You may say, nah, it is not about the system of voting, duopoly is a feature of "mature" democracies that have been around for 400 years. To which I'll give an example of Poland where the lower chamber of parliament (Sejm) is voted for party lists proportionally and it always has a mix of many parties, and the upper chamber (Senat) that uses the classic "first past the post" system and in the senate 2 major parties(the biggest party and the current biggest opposition party) always get 95%+ of the seats.

I'm not an electoral mechanics geek but I appreciate the details, even if much of it flies over my head. Do you perchance have any resources where I could better understand such things?

Also, I think your points are very interesting but may benefit from some paragraphing for added clarity and coherence.

Another point of note is that, while interesting, it may be the case that no matter how much a government optimizes its electoral systems, it may still be subject to the other vulnerabilities listed above, which sadly might subsume any gains from such optimization.

Ha, you can say that in China too (about the US president lol).

A classic joke! https://youtu.be/9qh-1_tXeuQ?t=30

United States of China.

Peoples Republic of United States.

Sounds the same.

Half seriously, what's the difference between your career ruined via social credit being wiped by government or your career ruined via social credit being wiped on Twitter?

It's pretty simple to not be on Twitter. It's comparably hard to evade governments.

Just because you are not on Twitter (or Facebook, or whatever) won't stop other people from tweeting lies about you. And the public image that you have on social media matters a lot in this society. See also: "Cancel culture".

> or your career ruined via social credit being wiped on Twitter?

Whose career got ruined actually? Johnny Depp is still making movies, Rammstein just announced a 2024 tour, JKR still is making millions upon millions every year with Harry Potter, Trump is likely to be the Republican candidate in 2024. "Cancel culture" isn't real.

One's a repressive government and one's some number of people choosing not to like you very much anymore?

"due process"???

but we've gotta update this now that the law will turn to software

So I guess the op was right, why does the rest of the world use American standards, since we can't choose your president either

(I don't actually believe that we shouldn't use NIST standards, but my point is that's a pretty weak argument for non Americans. )

There is plenty of non-backdoored cryptography to use. It’s just the US forces various entities to use their backdoored crypto in order to get grants and government contracts and regulatory approvals.

For example, Satoshi Nakamoto chose a very interesting, lightly used elliptic curve secp256k1 for Bitcoin because for various reasons he was very confident it wasn’t backdoored, and obviously it has stood the test of time https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Secp256k1

>Because your options are Beijing or DC.

We have plenty of standards in Europe too :-)

However, with cryptography historically the best crypto has been invented in the US and it made much more sense for allies to just use ready made solutions than to roll their own. Do countries on the US crypto exports ban lists have their own incompatible crypto? I dont know, they might, but they for sure don't share it as freely available standards.

> historically the best crypto has been invented in the US

ENIGMA?

The Enigma machine was probably the weakest of its kind of machines. It had a critical security flaw in that it could never encipher a letter to itself, and most of its security came from the IV settings, which were communicated in such poor fashion that the Poles cracked it long before WW2 even started.

By contrast, the US and British rotor machines were never cracked by the Axis powers in WW2, and the other two German rotor ciphers were less thoroughly cracked by the Allies.

According to Wikipedia, rotor cyphers were probably invented in the Netherlands, not the US. It says an american tried to commercialize the idea, but went bust. The only patents they mention were issued to Europeans.

They don't seem to mention these spiffy US and UK rotor cyphers; any pointers?

> but they for sure don't share it as freely available standards.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8891 (GOST Magma) is a russian standard block cipher.

https://www.gsma.com/aboutus/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/eea3... is a Chinese stream cipher.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ribose-cfrg-sm4-... Chinese block cipher.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-oscca-cfrg-sm3-0... Chinese hash function.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4269 (SEED) is from South Korea (aligned, but still worth a mention)

> Because your options are Beijing or DC

What kind of mental contortions do you have to go through to think like this? It comes off like gung-ho ignorance at best, and reeks of some of the most obvious american military propaganda I've ever read.

NIST refereed a competition among the best-regarded academic cryptographers in the world. It didn't design any of these constructions, and practically all of the inputs into the competition, including the critiques of the submissions, came from academics (many of them not American).

One of the annoying things about how Bernstein is communicating about this is that he is counting on his audience not knowing this.

This is all nice and well, but it doesn't actually address the inherent untrustworthiness of a state-associated (and known to be penetrated) organization.

The entire point of the competition is for the state to select a state standard, so "state-associated" is not the smoking gun people suggest it is. If you don't care about state standards, hey, I'm right there with you. But: they obviously exist.

Right, I guess I'm asking why anyone puts up with the idea of a state standard to begin with when it only benefits the state.

Why not ask Bernstein why he's participating in a program to generate one?

Where else are you going to go?

The EU, UK and Australia are all bad for this in various ways, having key-disclosure laws or trying to ban e2e or whatever else. I don’t know about you but I don’t consider China or Russia to be valid places to look for un-backdoored crypto either.

It seems (to this non-American) like one of the least-worst options. Maybe we could trust a Scandinavian country or Switzerland?

(Yes, I have missed out huge swathes of the world, which I mostly know little about…)

Wasn’t Crypto AG - the Swiss company that was, oops, secretly owned by the CIA and West German intelligence - established by a Swede?

Ha, there go my two 'good' options in one fell swoop!

Yeah, As someone who grew up in one Scandinavian country and currently lives in another, I wouldn't trust a Scandinavian country to not roll over and be a US lapdog when push comes to shove.

> Where else are you going to go?

I don't know, but I'd start with getting buy-in from any interested country with an emphasis on not too much from any one. Where it's physically located is irrelevant, the issue is the clear commitment to the interests of the american state.

NIST promotes open competitions with many non-US based participants, e.g. AES was designed by Belgian researchers.

These is somewhat better than not having such a system at all.

If nothing else, you get to benefit from public analysis and pick another of the algorithms that get proposed in the competition, even if it's not the NIST-blessed one.

The issue is not AES of course, it's the NIST being associated with a government that can't be trusted when it comes to developing reliable and trustworthy encryption schemes. They've clearly demonstrated this time and time again.