Adam Back, a cryptographer and cypherpunk, hosts pages on crypto-era hacks, including the Perl RSA munitions t-shirt and the Lotus Notes NSA key.
HN commenters link it as 1990s crypto-war history, citing the illegal-to-export RSA Perl t-shirts and the NSA key with 'MiniTruth' and 'Big Brother' names.
Sorry, I don't think I understand your argument. Could you try it a different way?
In the 1990s crypto war there were great points to be made that encryption and authentication are technologically dual to each other, that encryption algorithms are simple, and that knowledge of cryptographic techniques can no longer be monopolized by governments. There were also great points to be made that businesses and governments strongly desired modern encryption technology, and that protecting individuals against mass surveillance sounded like a good idea from the vantage point of many different political and ethical theories. So, the 1990s encryption control approach was super-fragile because it was notionally based on controlling access to knowledge (and also the nationalist part about preventing that knowledge from reaching foreigners, or something).
One classic artifact of the old crypto war (you know, when crypto meant "cryptography") is the RSA e-mail signature / t-shirt
http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/
while another is CipherSaber, the attempt to get people to learn how to implement the RC4 cipher from scratch
http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/
Both of these seem to be based on the shared understanding between the government and privacy activists that knowing how to implement cryptographic primitives is a super-big deal that must either be strictly controlled or made ubiquitous (depending on your view of the moral valence of civilian cryptography).
In the present environment, we…
That's why the generally design the backdoor so that it's based on a key that only they have.
For example, with Dual EC DRBG, researchers discovered that it would be possible to create the constants based on another constant, with which you could predict the output easily. But without prior knowledge of that constant, it would be an infeasible brute-force search to find it.
Likewise, previous publicly known backdoors like the one in the export version of Lotus Notes depended on a key that the NSA had. There it was even simpler, and not obfuscated; it would just encrypt a portion of the session key with the NSA's public key, which they could decrypt and the easily brute-force the rest of the session key.[1]
The NSA doesn't want to make security weak against arbitrary attackers, they just want to give themselves the keys.
[1]: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Reminds me of when someone saw that the NSA's public key (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html) to be included in Lotus Notes had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother".
Moloch isn't the good guy in Howl.
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
It's a far cry from what some members of the tech community did when the government was trying to restrict code and cryptography in the 1990s. People were tattooing perl scripts onto their bodies in order to protest the restrictions. God forbid people break the law to protest bad laws.
"How to become an Arms Trafficker
Become an Arms-Trafficker in one easy step with this great way to register your protest of ITAR by Vince Cate. Just click to submit the form and join in the protest. Lots of excellent links. Have you exported RSA today? Includes an option to email a protest letter to US president." [0]
[0] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/
> Then you look at them, determine their intent (to publish Bill's SSN) and punish them or not accordingly.
That sounds like a very pragmatic view of the legal system. I'm more idealistic so I'd rather say that you have to "prove" (rather than "determine") their intent before you can punish them. ;P
Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, but there absolutely are times when the "geeks" win. For example consider export control for cryptographic algorithms which was thoroughly ridiculed by "geeks" [1] and later scrapped IIRC.
1. http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/
Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages.
The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete.
[1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html