Today is the 30th anniversary of the disclosure, by some troublemaking malcontent, of a flaw in the NSA's "Clipper Chip" key escrow scheme. www.nytimes.com/1994/06/02/u...
Some years later, I wrote up my recollections of Clipper, key escrow, and what we now know as "Crypto War I" in an invited talk at ACSAC 2011: www.mattblaze.org/papers/escro...
Today is the 30th anniversary of the disclosure, by some troublemaking malcontent, of a flaw in the NSA's "Clipper Chip" key escrow scheme. www.nytimes.com/1994/06/02/u...
My finished photo here: www.flickr.com/photos/mattb... I took the eclipse as an opportunity for lanscape photography rather than astrophotography. But eclipses as best experienced firsthand, with all the senses.
If you work (or play) in or near cryptography, it's very likely you owe a debt to the work of David Kahn, who passed away this week. wapo.st/47Weerz (gift link)
His bestselling 1967 book “The Codebreakers” established him as a preeminent scholar of signals intelligence.
Anyway, please be extra nice to election officials. They have an essential job that's difficult under even the best circumstances, but right now they're being forced to put up with more bullshit than anyone should have to see in a lifetime.
This is definitely consistent with my experience with these communities. You can't engage with them on substantively improving elections, because that's not what they're actually concerned about. You end up talking across purposes.
The lesson here seems to be that election denial, at least in these circles, has little to do with any actual demands for improving election integrity, but is more a proxy for a less focused, but very extreme, dissatisfaction with and mistrust of government generally.