Privacy and Secrecy are Not The Same Thing - My Refutation of Cryptography
Valkyrie McGill
2012-08-22 00:00:00



First off, let me remind you that privacy and secrecy are NOT THE SAME THING, regardless of how many times someone wants to claim that they are. Privacy is a social right, granted actively by the community and a necessary social lubricant. Secrecy is an attempt to keep things hidden from the community out of fear of social reprisals. One is needed, the other is an attempt to avoid personal responsibility for actions which could lower one’s social status, or which actively harm others in the community. I’ve discussed this extensively here.

Cryptography, especially quantum entanglement, has been one of the most common “rebuttals” to my reports, with the basic assumption being that it will never be broken. So, let’s take this assumption as “true” despite the overwhelming historical evidence that no system of cryptography has ever remained secure, and assume that we have finally made the magical perfect cryptogram. Let us also assume that this magic device works perfectly end to end, so that no matter how many other computers this communication has gone through, only the sender and receiver have access to it.

This is the case generally presented against the elimination of secrecy, usually with a lot of defiant fist waving about defending ones freedom to keep secrets. But even a casual glance at this case should reveal some rather glaring flaws. First, that data has to start out unencrypted, then become encrypted, and finally be decrypted in order for the receiver to access it. That should ring a few alarm bells that there are at least two places along the chain which are completely vulnerable, the sender and the receiver. For example, what’s to stop a clever programmer from designing a “rider” which can travel alongside the encrypted data to its destination, then intercept it right after decryption as its being delivered to the receiver?



Remember, unless you are writing your own antivirus program, you will be relying on someone else’s program, with who knows what potential security holes. And did you build your own computer? If not, are you positive that there isn’t a device inside which might allow someone remote access to everything you do and store on it? Did you build it from scratch, using components you manufactured yourself? Are you truly positive that integrated circuit doesn’t have extra circuitry that makes your system an open book to people you really don’t want to have access to your data? How about your monitor cable. Is the data from your video card encrypted? Does your monitor have its own encryption systems to ensure that no device is sending a copy of your screen to someone else?

Then, there’s your home. How sure are you that you don’t have a micro camera setting in an air conditioner vent watching your computer (http://www.amazon.com/Wheels-Video-Racer-Micro-Camera/dp/B004SKLU5C? Keeping a record not only of your actions on the computer, but your physical actions as well? Are you really certain that mote of dust that you failed to notice landing on your eyelash isn’t a speck of smart dust( http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/)? Is that a quadcopter settling in your tree, or a bird, or even a bird-like UAV(http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2011/02/21/Bird-sized-UAV-developed/UPI-47971298305984/)? How confident are you that your cellphone isn’t being used to monitor you? They’ve already established that your i-Phone’s inertial sensors are good enough to track what you type on the keyboard sitting on the same desk (http://phys.org/news/2011-10-iphone-spiphone-smartphones-accelerometer-track.html). Once you start having LEAP style motion tracking everywhere, nothing you type anywhere will go unrecorded( http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/07/another-leap-towards-true-vr/).



The basic point is this: I’m am neither a security expert, nor a dedicated spy, and yet I can still see a variety of methods of spying which will bypass any form of cryptography, no matter whether it is “perfect” or not. No matter how many security protocols you attempt to enforce, there will ALWAYS be a means to bypass them, and a group of people who will stop at nothing to do so. The same goes for nearly every form of “privacy defense”, such as “anonymisers”. You are only as anonymous as the company allows you to be, because at the real level of the internet, there is no such thing as secrecy. Every bit of data is precisely routed and tracked in order to deliver it to your computer. If it wasn’t, you could not even USE the net. Your IP address identifies you as surely as your SS number does.

I’ve told you before that I am a cynic. You already have no secrets from those who have “power” All you have is an illusion of secrecy, sold to you at a premium. Not one bit of data on your machine is “secret” to anyone with a modest level of programming skill. Your home is only as “secure” as someone with money and power allows it to be. All you can truly claim is ignorance of the exact level of surveillance you are presently under. Face it folks, Big Brother arrived a LONG TIME AGO, and it’s only the fact that 99% of us are too uninteresting to bother to watch that lets us pretend otherwise.

The surveillance arms race is already underway. It will not stop until universal surveillance forces unidirectional surveillance to become omnidirectional surveillance, and secrecy has become impossible.