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Date: 2013-09-09 05:35 pm (UTC)The NSA: I thought something was up when there was an aside about decrypting VPN traffic in a previous story from Snowden, but the scope of it is pretty mind blowing. Yeah, we're doomed.
Partly because if you're dealing with an organisation with a massive budget there's no telling just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Reflections on trusting trust is getting a lot of linkage at the moment for a reason. ISTR if you want an export licence, you show GCHQ your code, so, yeah...
Partly because fixing it with the current Internet is hard and most people (including me) can't be bothered. I got briefly enthusiastic about PGP during the Crypto Wars in the 90s, but soon realised that the number of people you can talk to with it is limited. Even back then, there wasn't a good way to do it when your email lives on a central server (as it did for students back then, and as it does for everyone using webmail now).
Schneier's manifesto for taking back the Net looks good and is the only way it can actually work: privacy needs to be designed in, not layered on top. Much like all those "let's replace Facebook with a distributed system" projects, though, I suspect network effects will doom it.