On Tuesday 16 January 2007 11:47, Bruno Wolff III wrote: [...] >Remember that the NSA also has it as its job to to secure systems. If it >puts in back doors, they are going to be ones that only they can take >advantage of. > >SELinux is not something that is going to give them access with its > advertised features, so it is not likely a place where they would try > to insert backdoors (any more than in any other part of the kernel). > >Strong encryption is a different issue. They have pretty much given up > on directly outlawing it (though the government did drop the case > against DJB before they lost again at the supreme court). Which they would have (lost that is), and that would have left a lot of people with egg on their faces. > What they > seem to be doing now is putting pressure on businesses not to provide > strong encryption for the masses. Especially in telephony. There is > some reason that end to end encryption isn't standard in digital > phones. That, from an engineering standpoint, is far more likely to be a consideration of latency and power consumption than in the difficulty of doing it. Strong encryption is both power hungry, and slow. No one would long tolerate a cellphone that only had 15 minutes talk time, and wasted 2-3 seconds for each turnaround in the conversation and cost $50 more than one without it because of the royalty payments such a device might incur. We are all too darned used to the instantainious(sp) nature of the analog phone. Even skype's delays bug the heck out of me. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
