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A comment on 'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower. Parent comment

Re:'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistle... by rdtsc on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @02:44AM (#4875372)
They should. I agree, however effectively using encryption not as simple as it sounds (both hardware, software and user interfaces need to work together and well) for this to work. On the other side I predict using encryption is becoming strange/weird/suspicious. There is an already well designed propaganda framework to portray those who care about these issues as associated with all kinds of scary crimes.

I predict in the future after a couple of high profile scape goat cases where a famous suspected terrorist, illegal movie downloader, or say whistle blower, cannot be prosecuted because they used encryption, the use of encryption will become illegal.

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Re:'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistle... by chokma on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @06:23AM (#4875809)
> the use of encryption will become illegal

The problem with outlawing encryption is: everyone needs it for business purposes and to protect public / private infrastructure. If SSL encryption were to be forbidden, e-commerce would become very difficult...

Also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing ("Chaffing and winnowing is a cryptographic technique to achieve confidentiality without using encryption")

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Re:'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistle... by shmerl on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @03:03AM (#4875397)
There were interesting encryption related cases already:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/01/forced_decryption_ru...

However I think if some state is to ban encryption, it can be called a police state without any doubt.

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