• fart_pickle@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I agree that there should be a way for whistle blowers to anonymously leak details of wrongdoings of the governments and/or corporations if it servers public interest. And I agree that modern surveillance techniques are way more advanced than few decades ago. However, so called whistle blowing is still against the law and the person who does it should be aware that it will cause a legal response.

    My problem with anonymity is that it’s being abused by “shady” people. It could be a dark web drug dealing website or some hard-core child trafficking rings. Unfortunately we live in a world where real things happen behind the scene and no whistle blower is going to change that. Here’s an example (Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Robin)

    Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard . It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.