Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 19, 2018 4:36 AM

@ echo,

One question I had is what did the Incas talk about?

We will probably never know what the majority talked about. Study of “written” records from other cultures indicates the process of making a record was almost always very very Labour intensive thus expensive. Thus the society had to have sufficient excess wealth to alow for paying of such labours. In most cases such societies fell, thus few written records made it through to subsequent societies.

Which ment that most records are those of “Kings and Priests” provided both the content and the record, often “cast in stone”. Thus proclaim greatness law and it’s processes/judgments.

As less expensive and faster record making processes became available in societies that did not fall as quickly (mainly due to trade”. The documents became financial/business/property related in nature. It’s only when duplication of records becomes easy that the thoughts of the common man start getting committed to wriyten records, such as plays, stories and recaling of earlier times.

If you think about it it’s less than a century ago that typewriters became sufficiently inexpensive to make the production of clear records available to those of the middle classes. Which needed a real industrial base with sufficient “over capacity” to allow industrial mass production. Likewise it’s only in the last third of a century that computers –which require not just industry but advanced science as well,– to become available to the majority who want to commit their day to day thoughts to storage.

The problem now is the vast amounts of data generated. As rather than write the majority prefer the push of a smartphone button to make records via sound and vision. But worse for historians such records are basically usless as they lack context and timeline, and rapidly become inaccessable due to rapidly changing data storage formats involving compression, thus rapid bit loss issues.

But it’s actually worse where content is essentially vacuous, think what historians in a thousand years time will make of dancing hamster cartoons and Cute Kitty video clips and the mostly junk that fills the servers of Alphabet Facebook etc we call “social networking”. Which in effect is replacing alcohol and tobacco as “the drugs of the masses”. Apart from the exploitive aspects the worth is so little that it might well never have been recorded because it is simultaniously both to little –to be usefull– and to much –to be studied–.

Oh and the exploitation aspect of electronic communications makes the records made of even less use not just historically but for other uses. Whilst it does not appear so at first glance, people are becoming more cautious the “Chilling Effect” is starting to profuse it’s way through society who are starting to see the harms that befall others less wise or prescient. The “Lets Encrypt Everything” response to State and Corporate “Lets Collect Everything” is happening, people are being more cautious in what they do, say and show via electronic communications.

Whilst the likes of “whistle blowers” got sufficient of society over the initial inertia. It’s the likes of the FBI’s Louis “Screech” Freeh with his “Secret briefing trips to Europe etc”, and those who followed him that “have kept the snowball rolling and growing”. They have “Cried Wolf” so often about “Going Dark” to get around what they no doubt views as a “to liberal” constitutional[1] protections of the individual, that they have ended up “cooking their own goose”. That once was “The goose that laid the golden eggs” of intel in plain text. It was their laziness and greed that has resulted in more and more people rapidly adding the Secret ‘making’ Sauce of encryption via easy use apps on Smart Devices. Thus for now the technology pendulum is swinging away from their greedy grasping hands and maws.

So within a relatively short time, either encryption will render what is important unseen to their mostly illegal eavesdropping[2], or the tyranny of totalitarianism of the Police State will cause the empire to fall and fragment as trust ceases to keep society together in a cohesive way.

As others have noted the societies that appear the happiest are those where trust is both informal and strong, making society not just accepting but open. Importantly with neither Politics or Religion featuring strongly in their lives to break down and rend asunder the trust and openness.

[1] A view that is common in what many would regard as as an “Overly Conservative Catholic Republican” fraction of the population that have very undesirable “Paternalistic Views” approaching those of most rabidly totalitarian. Who wrap themselves in flags and ideologies (think of those of the French Revolution, Communism etc etc) and believe they know better than the majority “What is good for them” which in reality is the worse than slavery serfdom. Those of a type George Orwell depicted in both 1984 and Animal Farm.

[2] I’m of the opinion that “secret legislation and argument” are not actually lawfull in a reasonable society. Thus the US Patriot Act and EO’s are not legal, thus anything they cover is likewise not legal. Justice requires that you be aware that you are doing wrong –mens rea–, before you are actually committing a crime. Thus you have to be aware of the legislation, or it must transgress what the “reasonable man” would consider societies current mores.