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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 24 2017, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the those-who-ignore-history dept.

Two graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference.

Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it.

A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy US government agency. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, it would be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power.

Stanford's lawyer said he thought they could defend any case by citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech. But the university could cover legal costs only for professors. So the students were persuaded to keep schtum.

What was this information that US spooks considered so dangerous? Were the students proposing to read out the genetic code of smallpox or lift the lid on some shocking presidential conspiracy?

No: they were planning to give the International Symposium on Information Theory an update on their work on public key cryptography.

[...] The Stanford researchers wondered whether encryption could be asymmetrical. Could you send an encrypted message to a stranger you'd never met before which only they could decode?

Before 1976 most experts would have said it was impossible. Then Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a breakthrough paper. It was Hellman who, a year later, would defy the threat of prosecution by presenting his students' work.

That same year, three researchers at MIT - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman - turned the Diffie-Hellman theory into a practical technique, called RSA encryption, after their surnames.

Our tax dollars at work.

[Ed Note: This is from the BBC's 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy series and and is discussing a historical event. - fnord]


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:45AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:45AM (#499109)

    Nope. Government is by The People for The People and YOU are The People.

    FUCK THE PEOPLE

    FUCK YOU

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:57AM (6 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:57AM (#499110) Journal

    No -- Fuck you.

    The Government is no longer, if it ever was, "for the people, of the people, or by the people." Most people are of course ruled BY the government, but there is a tiny minority which owns, directs, and controls our government. I'm not talking conspiracy BS -- no grand plan, just individual greed. This is evident in the way no regular person was begging Congress to allow their ISPs to package and market the peoples' browsing history, and yet such a law passed through Congress faster than the speed of light. Or lets talk about all of the banksters who totally got a pass on any and all criminal behavior -- never even a real investigation compared to the S&L crisis where 1000 did time in Fed. prison. Or there's the fact that lobbying for tax benefits pays about 220:1 -- for those rich enough to afford to buy lobbyists. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forget-stocks-or-bonds-invest-in-a-lobbyist [npr.org]

    The people are fucked, and they are especially fucked if they buy into the notion they aren't.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:21AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:21AM (#499126)

      > The Government is no longer, if it ever was, "for the people, of the people, or by the people."
      > ...
      > compared to the S&L crisis where 1000 did time in Fed. prison

      By your own criteria you just proved that it was "for the people" and pretty recently too.

      Its intellectually lazy to cherry-pick outrageous one-offs and ignore all the other cases where government did work "for the people." That law to enable ISP spying was a direct response to the government previously making ISP spying illegal. Why does the former count when the later doesn't?

      > The people are fucked, and they are especially fucked if they buy into the notion they aren't.

      The truth is government is multi-party war without violence. Some forces in the fight have more strength than others. Some have different strengths. Alliances come and go. Focusing on specific battles that were lost is just a coward's way of avoiding a fight. Your fatalism is what enables the enemy to win so easily. The people who are most fucked are the ones who believe they are fucked because they voluntarily give up the power that they have. People like you are doing the psy-ops work of the enemy for them. Cut that shit out.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:58AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:58AM (#499135)

        Instead they should form a society out of voluntary...

        they voluntarily give up the power that they have

        Oh

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:38AM (3 children)

        by sjames (2882) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:38AM (#499139) Journal

        That law to enable ISP spying was a direct response to the government previously making ISP spying illegal.

        Actually, it was a direct response to the government saying it wouldn't be legal much longer. At no point did it actually become illegal.

        The S&L crisis was 30 years ago.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:45AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:45AM (#499141)

          > Actually, it was a direct response to the government saying it wouldn't be legal much longer. At no point did it actually become illegal.

          Gee, a distinction without a difference. The very best kind of distinction!

          > The S&L crisis was 30 years ago.

          The country is 240 years old, your implication that 30 years is not recent is yet another pointless distinction. Congrats!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:29PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @01:29PM (#499278)

            A lot of things can change in 30 years, and they certainly did.

            You're safe and sound up till today and you're still safe tonight if I strap a bomb to you?

            You're being stupid. And that's not an insult but a statement of fact based on your retarded reasoning.

          • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:36AM

            by sjames (2882) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:36AM (#499756) Journal

            The Earth is billions of years old. Based on your logic, Julius Caesar was killed just now.

  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:30AM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:30AM (#499128) Homepage Journal

    Nope. Government is by The People for The People and YOU are The People. FUCK THE PEOPLE FUCK YOU

    That seems to be exactly how it is working.

    --
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