@SenJohnMcCain shows what a moron he is

@SenJohnMcCain has decided to continue the foray down the rabbit hole of mandating backdoors and skeleton keys for encryption. Senator McCain, in the process, proves he is a complete double dumbass that has no business being involved with technology legislation or intelligence oversight and legislation. McCain, if you’re reading this, keep going — maybe you’ll actually learn something and no longer be a totally clueless fuck up.

Over the course of many years our “intelligence” community has progressively and consistently moved towards relying more and more heavily on sigint (signal intelligence) and all but ignoring humint (human intelligence). This is incredibly stupid — it’s easy to generate fake sigint and lose the real info in the white noise. Anyone with half a brain can prove that to you. Hell, you can do it yourself — try watching your favorite news program with your radio going and you computer playing a youtube channel and your iPod or whatever spewing your playlist and a baby wailing and…. well, you get the idea. Your news program gets lost in all the other noise. It’s easy for sigint to be lost in a bunch of fake noise. Humint helps solve that problem by providing verification of the sigint.

Instead of trying to get humint in place our government has deliberately and heavily relied on sigint. Doing so did a real great job in stopping 9/11, and Benghazi, and Charlie Hebdo, and Paris, and San Bernardino, and the list goes on.

@SenJohnMcCain , you push the view that the government should be able to break in and do whatever the hell it wants to where anybody’s communications are concerned. Well guess what — people don’t trust the government not to abuse that. That was true before, and was heavily re-enforced by, Snowden’s revelations.

So @SenJohnMcCain — lesson one : it’s dirty and dangerous as hell but humint is REQUIRED. Sigint alone just can’t do it.

Now, in relation to encryption, you desperately need to either become educated or shut the fuck up, disrespect intended.

The entire point behind encryption is that only the parties involved can decrypt the message. That is accomplished by having an encoding mechanism that only the sender and recipient know. Once people outside of the sender and recipient know the encoding mechanism the code is worthless and should be dropped and replaced. Modern encryption involves the use of public/private key infrastructures using large prime numbers. The entire point is to make breaking the code extremely difficult if not outright impossible. For a really, REALY great introduction to this you should read “The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptograph” by Simon Singh (http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/0385495323?tag=duckduckgo-d-20).

Building in backdoors and skeleton keys so the government can intrude whenever it feels like for whatever trumped up reason involves deliberately making encryption worthless. You might as well and just as stupidly require all deadbolt door locks be keyed so law enforcement can enter whenever they feel like it. I mean, no criminal (meaning anybody outside of government, especially Congress and Hitlery Clinton) would ever be able to get a copy of the skeleton key, would they? Of course they would — that’s why entry doors to homes don’t have skeleton keys. It’s also why encryption tech doesn’t have them.

Even you, @SenJohnMcCain , would have to agree that having Top Secret or SAP classified information sent encrypted in such a way that a third party could intercept it would be collosally stupid.

So, @SenJohnMcCain , lesson two is this : if encryption tech has to include a backdoor or skeleton key then it is worthless and the information might as well be transmitted and stored in the clear.

The message is this, @SenJohnMcCain — either get educated about crypto or get out of the discussion because we don’t need a clueless fuck up making laws about things he doesn’t know a thing about.