THREE - Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World by David D. Friedman - maitantaprivacy? firmaedoppiachiave lenuovearmidelsecondoemendamento privacynonpistole tecnodifesacontrotecnoffesa
the development of improved technologies for surveillance and data processing does indeed threaten our ability to restrict other people's access to information about us. But a third and less familiar technology is working in precisely the opposite direction.Read more at location 346
we will soon be experiencing in part of our lives - an increasingly important part - a level of privacy that human beings have never known before.Read more at location 348
a level of privacy that not only scares the FBI and the National Security Agency,Read more at location 349
We start with an old problem: how to communicate with someone without letting other people know what you are saying.Read more at location 350
someone can still bounce a laser beam off your windowpane and use it to pick up the vibration from your voice. I am not sure that satellite observation is good enough yet to read lips from orbit - but if not, it soon will be. Read more at location 354
A letter sealed with the sender's signet ring could not protect the messageRead more at location 357
A more ingenious approach was to protect not the physical message but the information it contained, by scrambling the messageRead more at location 359
A simple version was a substitution cipher, in which each letter in the original message was replaced by a different letter.Read more at location 360
Such methods were used, with varying degrees of success, by both sides in World War II. Read more at location 364
two problems with this way of keeping secrets. The first was that it was slow and difficultRead more at location 364
That problem has been solved. The computers most of us have on our desktops can scramble messages, using methods that are probably unbreakable even by the NSA, faster than we can type them. They can even scramble - and unscramble - the human voiceRead more at location 366
The other problem is that in order to read my scrambled message you need the keyRead more at location 368
If I do not have a safe way of sending you messages, I may not have a safe way of sending you the key either.Read more at location 369
This may not be too much of a problem for governments, willing and able to send information back and forth in briefcases handcuffed to the wrists of military attaches, but for the ordinary purposesRead more at location 372
About twenty-five years ago, this problem was solved. The solution was public key encryption,Read more at location 373
Public key encryption works by generating a pair of keys - call them A and B - each a long number that can be used to unscramble what the other has scrambled. If you encrypt a message with A, someone who possesses only A cannot decrypt it - that requires B. If you encrypt a message with B, you have to use A to decrypt it. If you send a friend key A (your public key) while keeping key B (your private key) secret, your friend can use A to encrypt messages to you and you can use B to decrypt them. If a spy gets a copy of key A, he can send you secret messages too. But he still cannot decrypt the messages from your friend.Read more at location 375
How can one have the information necessary to encrypt a message yet be unable to decrypt it?Read more at location 379
The answer to both questions depends on the fact that there are some mathematical processes that are much easier to do in one direction than another. Most of us can multiply 293 by 751 reasonably quickly, using nothing more sophisticated than pencil and paper, and get 220,043. Starting with 220,043 and finding the only pair of three-digit numbers that can be multiplied together to give it takes a lot longer.Read more at location 380
When I say that encryption is unbreakable, what I mean is that it cannot be broken at a reasonable cost in time and effort.Read more at location 386
Imagine that everyone has an Internet connection and suitable encryption software, and that everyone's public key is availableRead more at location 393
If I want to send you a message that nobody else can read, I first encrypt it with your public key. When you respond, you encrypt your message with my public key.Read more at location 395
Even if the FBI does not know what I am saying, it can learn a good deal by watching who I am saying it to - known in the trade as traffic analysis. That problem too can be solved, using public key encryption and an anonymous remailer, a site on the Internet that forwards email.Read more at location 397
the message to the remailer, including your email address, is encrypted with the remailer's public key.Read more at location 400
What if the remailer is a plant - a stooge for whoever is spying on me? There is a simple solution. The email address he forwards the message to is not actually yoursRead more at location 403
If I am sufficiently paranoid, I can bounce the message through ten different remailers before it finally gets to you. Unless all ten are working for the same spy, there is no way anyone can trace the message from me to you.Read more at location 405
We now have a way of corresponding that is doubly private - nobody can know what we are saying and nobody can find out whom we are saying it to.Read more at location 407
Who I Am When interacting with other people, it is helpful to be able to prove your identityRead more at location 409
In order to digitally sign a message, I encrypt it using my private key instead of your public key. I then send it to you with a note telling you whom it is from. You decrypt it with my public key. The fact that what comes out is a message and not gibberish tells you that it was encrypted with the matching private key. Since I am the only one who has that private key, the message must be from me. Read more at location 412
And Whom I Pay If we are going to do business online we need a way of paying for things. Checks and credit cards leave a paper trail. What we want is an online equivalent of currency - a way of making payments that cannot later be traced,Read more at location 418
The solution, discussed in some detail in a later chapter, is anonymous ecash.Read more at location 420
One of the many things it can be used for is to pay for the services of an anonymous remailer, or a string of anonymous remailers,Read more at location 421
Combine and Stir Combine public key encryption, anonymous remailers, digital signatures, and ecash, and we have a world where individuals can talk and trade with reasonable confidence that no third party is observing them. Read more at location 424
to combine anonymity and reputation. You can do business online without revealing your real-world identity - your true name.' You prove you are the same person who did business yesterday, or last year, by digitally signing your messages.Read more at location 425
With the exception of fully anonymous ecash, all of these technologies already exist,Read more at location 428
One of the attractive features of the world created by these technologies is free speech.Read more at location 462
a world where you can say things other people disapprove of without the risk of punishment,Read more at location 465
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to bear arms.Read more at location 466
A plausible interpretation of its history views it as a solution to a problem of considerable concern to eighteenth-century thinkers - the problem of standing armies.Read more at location 467
a professional army posed a serious risk of military takeover. The Second Amendment embodied an ingenious solution to that problem. Combine a small professionalRead more at location 468
In case of foreign invasion, the militia would provide a large, if imperfectly trained and disciplined, force to supplement the small regular army.Read more at location 471
In case of an attempted coup by the Federal government, the Federal army would find itself outgunned a hundred to one. Read more at location 472
The beauty of this solution is that it depends not on making a military takeover illegal but on making it impossible.Read more at location 473
conflicts between the U.S. government and its citizens are likely to involve information warfare, not guns. A government that wants to do bad things to its citizens will do them by controlling the flow of information in order to make them look like good things. Read more at location 478
In that world, widely available strong encryption functions as a virtual Second Amendment.Read more at location 479
As long as it exists, the government cannot control the flow of information. And once it does exist, eliminating it, like disarming an armed citizenry, is extraordinarily difficultRead more at location 479
Activities that occur entirely in cyberspace will be invisible to outsiders - including ones working for the Federal government. It is hard to tax or regulate things you cannot see. Read more at location 482
if I earn money in cyberspace and spend it in cyberspace they cannot observe either income or expenditure and so will have nothing to tax.Read more at location 485
Similarly for regulation. I am, currently, a law professor but not a member of the State Bar of California, making it illegal for me to sell certain sorts of legal services in California. Suppose I wanted to do so anyway. If I do it as David D. Friedman I am likely to get in trouble. But if I do it as Legal Eagle Online, taking care to keep the true name - the real-world identity - of Legal Eagle a secret, there is not much the State Bar can do about it.Read more at location 486
over time I establish an online reputation for an online identity guaranteed by my digital signature. Read more at location 491
the same logic also applies to government activities I approve of, such as preventing theft and murder.Read more at location 496
Online privacy will make it harder to keep people from sharing stolen credit card numbers or information on how to kill people or organizing plots to steal things or blow things up. Read more at location 496
to combine anonymity and reputation, strong privacy makes possible criminal firms with brand-name reputation. Read more at location 499
Suppose you very much want to have someone killed. The big problem is not the cost;Read more at location 499
The big problem - assuming you have already resolved any moral qualms - is finding a reliable sellerRead more at location 501
Put a full-page ad in the New York Times, apparently written in gibberish. Read more at location 503
Send a message to all major media outlets telling them that the number on all of those bulletin boards is a public key. If they use it to decrypt the New York Times ad they will get a description of the assassination, published the day before it happened. Read more at location 504
You have now made sure that everyone in the world has, or can get, your public key - and knows that it belongs to an organization willing and able to kill people.Read more at location 506
the problem of locating a hit man - when you are not yourself a regular participant in illegal markets - has been solved. Read more at location 509
Consider "Trade Secrets Inc. - We Buy and Sell." Or an online pirate archive, selling other people's intellectual property in digital form, computer programs, music, and much else, for a penny on the dollar, payable in anonymous digital cash. Read more at location 512
Anonymity is the ultimate defense. Not even Murder Incorporated can assassinate you if they do not know who you are. If you plan to do things that might make people want to kill you - publish a book making fun of the prophet Mohammed, say, or revealing the true crimes of Bill (Gates or Clinton) - it might be prudent not to do it under a name linked to your realspace identity.Read more at location 515
practical problems. The most serious is that the cat is already out of the bag - has been for more than twenty-five years. The mathematical principles on which public key encryption is based are public knowledge.Read more at location 523
Quite a lot of such software has already been written and is widely available.Read more at location 525
Banning the production and possession of encryption software is not a practical option, but what about banning or restricting its use?Read more at location 527
Any message that looked like gibberish and could not be shown to be the result of a legal form of encryption would lead to legal action against its author. Read more at location 529
One practical problem is the enormous volume of information flowing over computer networks.Read more at location 530
A second problem is that while it is easy enough to tell whether a message consists of text written in English, it is much harder - in practice, impossible - to identify other sorts of contentRead more at location 531
Consider a three-million pixel digital photo. It is made up of three million colored dots, each described by three numbers - intensity of red, intensity of blue, intensity of green.Read more at location 532
there is no way of giving law enforcement what it wants without imposing very high costs on the rest of us.Read more at location 541
If being a police officer gives you access to locks with millions of dollars behind them, in cash, diamonds, or information, some cops will become criminals and some criminals will become cops.Read more at location 546
You are thinking of going into the business of growing trees - hardwoods that mature slowly but produce valuable lumber. It will take forty years from planting to harvest. Should you do it? The obvious response is not unless you are confident of living at least another forty years. Like many obvious responses, it is wrong. Twenty years from now you will be able to sell the land, covered with twenty-year-old trees, for a price that reflects what those trees will be worth in another twenty years.Read more at location 560
Generalizing the argument, we can see that long-run planning depends on secure property rights.Read more at location 567
Politicians in a democratic society have insecure property rights over their political assets; Bill Clinton could rent out the White House but he could not sell it.Read more at location 570
Very few politicians will accept political costs today in exchange for benefits ten or twenty or thirty years in the future,Read more at location 572
Preventing the development of strong privacy means badly handicapping the current growth of online commerce. It means making it easier for criminals to hack into computers, intercept messages, defraud banks, steal credit cards. It is thus likely to be politically costly, not ten or twenty years from now but in the immediate future. Read more at location 573
The politics of encryption regulation so far fits the predictions of this analysis. Support for regulation has come almost entirely from long-lived bureaucracies such as the FBI and NSA.Read more at location 579
it is unlikely that serious encryption regulation, sufficient to make things much easier for law enforcement and much harder for the rest of us, will come into existence, at least in the United States.Read more at location 581
It is a world where the technology of defense has finally beaten the technology of offense.Read more at location 584
Note: LA DIFESA HA SEMPRE VINTO SULL OFFESA
