Thursday, April 06, 2006
Guns vs. Random Bits
Guns vs. Random Bits:
An illustrative example is the Great Firewall of China. The Chinese government has put in place technologies to block their citizens’ access to certain information and to monitor their citizens’ communications. There are privacy-enhancing technologies that could give Chinese citizens access to the open Web and allow them to communicate privately. For example, they could encrypt all of their Internet traffic and pass it through a chain of intermediaries, so that all the government monitors saw was a stream of encrypted bits.
Such technologies work as a technical matter, but they don’t provide much comfort in practice, because people know that using such technologies — conspicuously trafficking in encrypted data — could lead to a visit from the police. Guns trump ciphers.
An illustrative example is the Great Firewall of China. The Chinese government has put in place technologies to block their citizens’ access to certain information and to monitor their citizens’ communications. There are privacy-enhancing technologies that could give Chinese citizens access to the open Web and allow them to communicate privately. For example, they could encrypt all of their Internet traffic and pass it through a chain of intermediaries, so that all the government monitors saw was a stream of encrypted bits.
Such technologies work as a technical matter, but they don’t provide much comfort in practice, because people know that using such technologies — conspicuously trafficking in encrypted data — could lead to a visit from the police. Guns trump ciphers.
