Write your representative: "5 Eyes Demanding Law Enforcement Backdoors"

In response to stories like this, it's time to get out your pen and write your various legislators again. I present to you a sample:

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Periodically this kind of demand comes up and it makes us look like utter idiots. It would be wise if someone told them to stop asking for it -- or just admit that they want to subject us all to totalitarian levels of surveillance. Points follow:

1. Strong crypto is essential for the economy we have now. Restricting crypto out of the market would destroy much business economic activity and almost all consumer economic activity.
   
2. Strong crypto with backdoors is weak crypto, even if the backdoor is a mechanism "known" only to the good guys.
   
• If the backdoor exists, authorities under tight oversight can generally be trusted (because verified) not to use it except through lawful means BUT
  
• if the backdoor exists, bad actors can 100% be trusted to pour large amounts of time, energy, money into breaking the lock. At its most insidious, all this requires is one corruptible person in the chain of responsibility for the back-doors. At its most clever, all protocols can be broken if you try hard enough. Compromising all consumer and business economic activity is just too attractive a prize for full effort not to be exerted.
  
3. There does not exist a means to provide both strong crypto (vital to our economy) and the backdoors that our security services (and others) are demanding. The math doesn't allow it. So every time they ask for it, we all look like idiots.
   

This question is closed and it might be cost-effective for the government to retain some cryptography professors and researchers to remind the ignorant of these facts. It does NOTHING for the public weal or the security of the nation for the authorities to keep asking for things so impossible, only Alice's Red Queen and the ignorant masses can believe in them.

Sincerely,...

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Give it a try! Maybe they'll listen this time. In Canada, visit http://parl.gc.ca to find your MP. In the US, senate.gov and congress.gov. In the UK, www.parliament.uk. In Australia, aph.gov.au. In New Zealand, www.parliament.nz -- stamp out the crazy wherever you find it!

Ordinary BCers, the pipeline and the NDP

Someone said something on Facebook and it set me off on a subject of note. It started when one guy said, "We must get different news in Ontario" and then someone else said that the minority NDP provincial government was popular only with the protesters. And something snapped. This is what popped out:

No, it's not just "with the protesters". There are a lot of people who've never held up a placard who are 100% against this pipeline. Pipelines are safer than trains and trucks, yes, but EVERY single joint in a pipeline represents a non-zero source of risk, most of those joints are going to be in horribly inaccessible places that are also upstream to most of us. The resulting coastal tanker traffic would go up from 40 per year to 1 or 2 every day, and if only one of those tankers ever spill, several 10s of thousands of people's livelihoods (vs. the 10s of long-term jobs the pipeline might supply) based on the relatively (very, VERY relatively) pristine state of our coastal waters would be seriously compromised.

Support for the pipeline in BC is not overwhelming. Opposition to it isn't either but the opposition has more to lose than the support has to gain from it being built so, they're a bit more passionate about it than the supporters. So, a lot of us are pretty happy with what Horgan is doing even if, like me, we've never voted for the NDP.

If you'd like barges of dil-bit going through your favourite holiday lakes, up and down your scenic rivers' rapids, then yeah, you can tell us tree-huggers what to do with Alberta's pipeline. But it's possible to be sane and to oppose the building of this pipeline vehemently. I am thankful for what Horgan is doing, what our First Nations neighbours are doing and I am appalled at the bad-husbandry that led to the extraction of this only slightly flowable tar from the sands of Northern Alberta in the first place. And the best spin I can put on Trudeau buying the pipeline is to prevent the collapse of trade relations with His Frogness to the south because of our rational opposition to this long-term source of poison and disaster that big oil has been trying to foist on us.

Still, it's pretty amusing watching the NDP try to retain a national identity between Singh, Horgan and Notley. But to finish it all, I'm sure the pipeline will be built. I'm sure it will cause at least one disaster (Exxon Valdes has NOT been cleaned up successfully to this day) and I'm sure that the people who benefit most from it having been built will bear the smallest amount of the cost of the overall problem. It's stupid, but it's happened before. It'll happen again, all from a mis-translation to "fill the earth and subdue it" of our original mandate. Shame on us all, myself included.