Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

[[e-mail] (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Martin Millnert <[e-mail]>

    > Bruce was ... suggesting that encrypting everything on the wire makes
    > both metadata and payload collection from wires less valuable. Here
    > comes the key point: Encrypting everything on the wire raises the cost
    > for untargeted mass surveillance significantly. And that is what it is
    > all about.

I have no problems with encrypting everything, as long as we realize that in
doing so, we're only solving one corner of the problem, and the watchers will
just move their efforts elsewhere; all intelligent attackers always look for
the weak point, no?

(Although I have to wonder at the computing load needed to do so. I gather
e.g. Google's datacenters use enormous amounts of energy - I wonder if mass
encryption of all traffic on the Internet would be literally a 'boiling the
ocean' solution... I'm amused by the memory of people who used to react with
shock and horror to variable length addresses, because of the extra
computational load required to handle _them_....)

    > And best is of course if this can be end to end

That's going to take quite a while to accomplish; it requires updating all the
hosts. (I know, we don't have to get to 99.9%, but it's still non-trivial to
get to, say, 70%.)

	Noel