Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Cryptography and the Money We Use

Jeffrey Tucker · June 18, 2013. When NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden wanted to talk to reporter Glenn Greenwald, he insisted that they use encrypted chat. Unfortunately, Greenwald didn’t know how to go about setting that up. In fact, he needed a tutorial in how to do it. Indeed, many people do. I was looking at the download figures of various encryption programs, and they are not impressive (about 52,000 for one popular program). Apparently, this approach to securing conversations is far from mainstream.

Why should anyone bother? Encrypted chat is like the “cone of silence” in the old Get Smart series, except that it actually works. It makes conversations impossible for outsiders to listen to. So far as snoops are concerned, the conversation might as well have not happened.

How can we be sure? The best case is precisely that Snowden trusted it. He knew exactly what the NSA could surveil and what was invisible. He knew that this level of encryption was NSA-proof. Otherwise, he would not have taken the risk.

Why would anyone but a whistle-blower need it? Let’s say you want to talk about a business deal with a remote party and it is extremely important that there be no security breaches. You would be crazy to use email, but even chat is a mistake. One party has a full record of it even aside from all issues of surveillance.

You don’t have to be breaking the law to use this technology. It might be useful for talking about health records or household finances or some issue that might be embarrassing to have on record or dragged up and put in your face later. There is a good reason for privacy. Encryption makes it possible.

The most common encryption standard today, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. As an anti-nuclear peace activist, he wanted to make it possible for people to communicate with each other even in totalitarian countries that prohibited speech. To his amazement, it was the U.S. government that tried to stop the code from being released. In 1993, he was prosecuted for illegal export of munitions (go figure). - Read more here: http://lfb.org/today/cryptography-and-the-money-we-use

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