Letters to the Editor
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Key Escrow
As an amateur hacker in high school and an Internet professional throughout my adult life, I was painfully and acutely aware of governmental attempts to pass or enact some sort of key escrow system(s) to bypass legitimate use of encryption by private citizens.
That I believe the government has the means to break most publicly and commercially available encryption, if they so desire, is one thing -- though the NSA would never admit it -- but that the government has succeeded in bypassing the protections afforded to private citizens by the Constitution against unreasonable search and seizure is another.
It riles me greatly.
It riles me that there are those who believe that what I do in private is any of the government's business, and it annoys me that those who claim to call themselves "conservatives" are so nonchalant regarding invasions of privacy expressly forbidden by the entire body of American law.
What self-respecting "conservative" would want the government watching them take a shit, talk to their girlfriend or spouse, or worse, lawyer. Do you want the government to see you "spanking it"? I ask this directly to our favorite authoritarian wankers, Proximity Warning and Shooter242.
Is a surveillance state the state you crave? Do you want a government who craves to view, voyeuristically, our ever act, misdeed, moment of vulnerability, weakness, moment of joy, passion, ecstasy?
Anecdotally, however, I will share this story, perhaps to put at ease some, like me, who dread this: in the middle of the 1990s a couple of friends of mine were subject to the first ever "official" ISDN wiretap. It took several tries, and surely thousands of dollars in man hours plus equipment, to get it right. When my friends were eventually charged and tried, the evidence that damned them was ultimately the stuff of traditional, old-fashioned police work -- witness testimony, and a seizure, pursuant to a search warrant, of their computers.
The point is that old fashioned police work is always better than fancy, contrived fishing expeditions.
As I knew, as my friends knew, as surely al-Qaeda knows, the "wire" cannot be trusted. Any organization, conspiracy or criminal enterprise which is truly to be feared, an effective criminal enterprise, understands this.
Don't say shit on the phone, don't hack from your house, hide your tracks.
I won't go into details as to just what finally took my friends down, but it was a common error, and one that wiretapping would have never caught.