Re: Pervasive encryption: Pro and contra

In message <4t8i899ll74tpveke6a94suhk5nekfsrfr@hive.bjoern.hoehrmann.de>, Bjoer
n Hoehrmann writes:

>If "pervasive encryption" was outlawed and lawmakers asked me to explain
>the pros and the cons of it, I would not list the legal status as a con,

I'm sorry, your argument really makes no sense to me.

We don't get to decide if there will be pervasive encryption or
not, politicians decide that.

If we define a protocol which makes it impossible for goverment
snoops to do what the law says their job is, our shiny new protocol
will be broken or banned.

Our WG's mandate is to improve HTTP performance, a banned protocol is
not going to be a performance improvement.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as worked up about the Global Privacy
Elimination as you are, but I know enough about politics to realize
that we won't change that via protocol design.

If you don't belive that, look at what they did with Skype (which
allegedly was a secure protocol initially):  They paid first eBay
and subsequently Microsoft to buy it, to be able to break it open.

Of course, if you want HTTP/2.0 to be a political statement by
forcing politicians to ban it, we don't need to waste all this time
thinking about optimization, compression and performance, we should
instead concentrate the design effort on making it maximally obnoxious
for NSA, GCHQ &c.

If that is the goal, we should have started with TOR, rather than SPDY.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Received on Sunday, 17 November 2013 21:21:05 UTC