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Encryption and Security

Who needs encryption? Anyone who values privacy. The #59 issue of CovertAction Quarterly has an article by New Zealand writer Nicky Hagar about the Global Surveillance Network, which is the means whereby the governments of the U.S.A. and the U.K., and to a lesser extent those of Canada, Australia and New Zealand (the five countries in the UKUSA espionage 'alliance') attempt to eavesdrop on every international telex, fax and email message. This is the ECHELON system, run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). In July 1997 plans were announced to double the capacity of the New Zealand spy station and to tap phone calls as well as non-voice communications (see Spy Power Boost for Secret Station). The way to foil the NSA eavesdroppers is to encrypt all communications. Their computers are the fastest that U.S. taxpayers' money can buy, but if many more people use encryption the NSA's computers will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of encrypted traffic.

In The Encryption Debate is Really About How Best to Spy on You Alfredo Lopez wrote:

Nobody is saying the obvious: cracking encryption to steal data is unconstitutional and illegal and this debate is taking place at a moment [mid-2015] when massive movements of protest are convering the streets of our cities organized through social media and cell-phone communications.  ... Both the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution make absolutely clear that the government cannot do mass data capture. There is no fuzziness about that in the document’s wording. Data from citizens can only be captured with a court-approved search warrant and then only when the object of the data seizure is specifically described in the warrant.  ... Privacy, the constitutional principle written to protect movements and citizen organizing (among other things), has been washed down the legal drain. The only protection we have is to encrypt what we send and constitutionally we have an absolute right to do so.

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CNN: Crypto expert: Microsoft products leave door open to NSA Wired: Debate flares over MS 'Spy Key' These reports suggest that if you use an application program which uses Microsoft's CryptoAPI [page removed and blocked at the Wayback Machine] to encrypt data which you store on your PC then the NSA has a backdoor to that data, that is, the NSA can read what you think you have safely hidden away from their prying eyes. The solution to this problem is to encrypt your data using an encryption system in whose development neither Microsoft nor the NSA had any part and which provides no backdoor — which does not let the NSA get at your data. Such a system is: Cryptosystem ME6 Windows software for multiple file encryption for secure storage. And based on the encryption algorithm used in ME6 there is: Email Encryption End-to-End A program for encrypting messages (optionally with an attached file) to send by email In the area of security software see also: Data Destroyer for permanent destruction of the contents of disk files. File Backup Lite Software to back up files in a folder and its subfolders; all files, or just new and modified files, can be backed up. Crypto and Privacy Links Here is a prescient article in two parts by the late J. Orlin Grabbe (published in 1995) about 'anonymous digital cash' — now called 'cryptocurrency': The End of Ordinary Money, Part I  The End of Ordinary Money, Part II Hermetic Systems Home Page

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