Schneier on Security

1&1~=Umm • March 9, 2019 3:28 PM

@Bruce:

The ‘going dark’ issue is a bit more than 25years old. I’ve done a bit of digging on the subject and I’m sure there is more to yet find.

For a while I’ve known that FBI Director Louis Freeh ‘went on a world tour’ with it, because it was felt that the US people would not accept the wanted changes. So the idea was to persuade other countries to start down the path and use them to step by step ratchet things up to the desired level such that a tipping point was reached where ‘the US is falling behind’ type arguments could be used to overcome objections. Whilst it’s unclear as to exactly when ‘Going Dark’ as an advertising slogan style catch phrase was thought up, it’s becoming clear that the idea was developing under Freeh’s predecessor William Sessions, more famous for his ‘Winners don’t use drugs’ slogan which started under Nancy Reagan. Apparently it was Bill Sessions who thought the idea would not fly unless a tipping point was first reached. He thought that this could be done within the normal ten year tenure of an FBI director. However various strongly Republican supporters who were in various US department’s echoed the feeling of George Bush Senior that Bill Sessions was not partisan enough and various ‘fiddling the expenses’ accusations were made at various points. However when Bill Clinton came into office fresh accusations were made and Bill told William to resign. William refused and was thus sacked by Bill Clinton. The person who had done quite a lot to undermine William Sessions was Deputy Director Floyd Clarke and William said as much about him sufficiently often that any future career Clark had in public service was killed off.

With regards the technology world and the policy world as you observe neither is the real world. However it appears that the FBI aim is to build a third world that is most favourable to them. Then having obtained draconian legislation in their definition of the world spread it out to not just influance the policy world drastically but directly effect the real world as globally as possible.

The UK, Australian and other legislation you mention is just the sort of thing the FBI was looking for under Sessions and Freeh to act as a tipping point into making the US public compliant. Which is another reason why the European GDPR is so important as this will enable amongst others the US state legislatures to put on the books privacy legislation that will act as a counter balance to what the FBI and other Federal Agencies are upto.

You did however miss the point that technology is not just agnostic but the effect complexity has on it’s ability to perform any function. Put simply it is the ‘Directing Mind’ that puts technology to use in any function and it is an individuals Point of View that decides if that function is good or bad. Unfortunatly the majority POV is not necessarily the correct one due to what can best be described as propaganda. Which as you noted lobbyists are fairly adept at inventing for any given POV they get paid for.

But importantly is that for any given function that technology might be put to the level of the technologies complexity actively limits the functional level even though the technology may have broad scope. You could call it the ‘easy to use factor’ where non technologists can not use a technology for the functions they want to put it to unless the technology is sufficiently complex that it’s abilities can be made of use to non technologists. It’s one of the reasons that AI for instance is particularly worrying, whilst it can carry out functions better than humans can it has no understanding in human terms so lacks morals and ethics. Thus adding an AI front end as well as back end to a technology makes it usable to those with no morals or ethics of their own, whete as before they would have had to find technologists who also had not just a lack of morals or ethics but no qualms about doing so or carring about future times when they are nolonger protected by those who gave them direction.

As for setting up a profession of public interest technologists, I’ve always had more than a few qualms about such ‘closed shops’ because even with the best will in the world history shows us they become hierarchical with those at the top selecting those under them thus setting up patronage and other significant failings, not least of which is becoming conservative in outlook and thus stifling progress and importantly innovation.