From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Mon Dec 14 1998 - 10:32:01 MST
Peter C. McCluskey [pcm@rahul.net] wrote:
>You
>probably assume that you can evade governments by using encrypted
>communications, but I doubt that you will be able to reliably keep
>the government from observing your communications after the person
>you sent it to decrypts it (unless you are very carefull about whom you
>communicate with), and identifying you by analyzing your writing style
>if needed.
What does it matter if they can only link me to 'foobar@nym.net'; are
they going to arrest me by email? And evading writing style analysis is
easy, just feed your message into a program which converts it into a
standardized style, or modifies it to match someone else's.
>It it's universal, you can find all the information you need, but you
>have no obvious way to alter the information without someone seeing you
>perform the alteration.
And how will they prove that the video showing me modifying the data is
real and not another fake? If anyone can fake video then *nothing* can be
trusted. And if only the government can fake video, then again it can't
be trusted. The whole point I'm making is that non-sentient witnesses
cannot be trusted in either case. If we can't watch the government all the
time then they could be faking evidence; and if we can watch them all the
time then *anyone* could be faking evidence.
>den Otter's arguments appear to make sense when applied to the goal of
>having competing groups of people with surveillance power. I don't understand
>where this assumption of monopoly came from.
He was talking about the supposed inability to eliminate the state because
people are imperfect; governments are, by definition, monopolies.
>With the majority of the people substantially consenting to the takeover.
What the hell do you expect them to do about it? You can't vote for a
non-crook when there are only crooks to vote for, and you can't start
shooting them until a large fraction of the population have accepted
that shooting them is the only solution.
>By the standards you are using here, almost all evidence is a joke. Are
>you arguing against using evidence, or did you have some other point in
>mind?
Video evidence is a joke. Anyone who trusts it is an idiot. No non-sentient
witness can be trusted.
Mark
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