Have you ever intended to set an act of terrorism? Like sharing a movie or a song? Something that our overlords won’t like and have decided to punish you for?
Not that I say you should and neither should you blow up buildings and probably not even try to overturn governments, but if you think about it and if any kind of conspirative communication is involved, be careful: cryptography won’t cut it any more!
Yeah, that’s right. If you want to communicate with someone about something that you want to keep hidden from the general public, the government or the secret services, you can’t rely on cryptography any more. You can’t rely on the software and you can’t rely on hardware. Such fears used to be paranoia, today they are hard facts. There is no reliably secret communication any more. You can’t trust any corporation, you can’t trust any government, they all have openly lied to us. All gadgets and all algorithms are compromised in complex ways that we can’t detect and most of the time can’t even understand. The system is rigged and it’s already far beyond 1984.
And if you really must conspire? Well, if encrypted plain text is not safe any more, alternative semantics will still do.
"Tomorrow I'm going for a drink with Albert. He suggested Eddie's. Want to join us and talk about the old times?"
can mean everything, even that you plan to rob a bank. Of course you can’t communicate the semantic code any other way than personally, but once both sides agree on a shared meaning, plain, unencrypted communication over the Internet is possible again. It seems we are back to the old way of making revolutions, the way that Robert A. Heinlein described in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”. Weird, but that is one consequence of Snowden’s revelations.
The Song of the Day is “Message To The Cool” from the De-Phazz album “Natural Fake”. Hear it on YouTube.