Slashdot

Generally yes, but Hushmail offered two methods of encrypting emails: on their servers and in a Java applet that did it locally. What came out during the earlier revelations was the company handed over email that they decrypted on their servers, but couldn't do so for the applet based encryption. They said up front that the applet was far more secure.

RTFAs much? Hushmail provide you with an optional, open app to encrypt things before they leave your computer. But now it seems that (based on differing hashes) the code used 'in the field' is not the same as the reference source code they show on their site.

I'd be inclined, given Hushmail's excellent track record on openness, to believe that this is more an oversight, i.e. something not updated, than a turn to the dark side.

Anyone who thinks the government is a magical entity that can automatically undo the work of independent researchers and mathematicians is deluded.

I'm sure any major government's capabilities to obtain information are beyond what they are commonly percieved to be, but that does not mean that every encryption scheme is instantly rendered null and void. No one government has control over everyone, so if you think the US government is stifling innovation in America do you also think they're doing the same in Japan, Europe, China, and anywhere else? Or do you think that those governments are all collaborating on this - now that really would be deluded.

If all available encryption mechanisms were crackable then why would governments have gone to to such lengths to try and hinder their development in years gone by - and why would many governments now be trying to attack encryption methods via other means, eg. the recent British law that makes refusal to give up keys to encrypted material punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Why be the bad guy and make those laws if they're unnecessary anyway? I suppose you could claim it's to try and mask their true abilities, or to play up to the anti-terror idiots, but I don't see that as likely.

We got past this in the 90s; initially they said that all encryption would have to be weak (e.g. 40 bit) or go through their chips (Clipper, etc.). But they found that this didn't stand up to the reality of WWW era. What worked in the 80s for the few users of encryption at that time simply couldn't scale up for web commerce. Strong encryption was a commercial necessity, so the attempts to control the industry had to be dropped. The export restrictions disappeared, and because DES was now too weak to be useful, the new AES standard was introduced.

Is AES full of back doors for the NSA? Almost certainly not, since these could also be used by any resourceful group of cryptographers, including the Chinese version of the NSA.

Is quantum computing already being used to crack AES? No. Quantum computing is the cold fusion of our industry.

believe what you want, but no commercial (or even freeware) encryption that is avaiable to YOU AND I will be worth anything other than 'for show'.

Truecrypt is freeware (open source) and is secure. In fact, it's more secure than any commercial offering I know of, due to its plausible deniability features. The source is there, it has been examined by experts and you can take a look yourself. Encryption options include both AES and Twofish, both known to be secure.

Encryption is well understood and researched by academics working in public. Sure, governments have their own secret research, but a lot of very clever people all around the world have been testing AES and Twofish for weaknesses for years and so far have found none. Governments don't have any magical ability to find flaws in encryption that ordinary academics don't.

Having said that, perhaps if you are Osama Bin Laden you might want to be a little bit paranoid. In theory, with a few billion dollars you could build a machine capable of cracking AES in months. So far there is no evidence such a machine exists, but... Most people don't have to worry about that though, even if they are doing something that could get them in serious trouble - certainly the national police, Interpol or even secret services (MI6/CIA) don't have any chance of breaking AES by brute force. Of course they could torture you now but even that isn't much of a threat to anyone not labelled a terrorist by the US.

Rules for dealing with government are simple. Do not get involved in their business, do not play their games, do not volunteer anything, do not agree to anything, do not play with them, or for them. Once you do, your ass is theirs. They own you, with your consent at that.

By the same principle, don't fuck around, don't trespass, don't steal, and don't be a crook. Learn the law VERY carefully, keep a copy of Black's Law Dictionary (I think 6th edition is out now) in several different versions. Look up innocent looking terms and verbs in forms. DO NOT consent to anything period. Sign nothing. Be sure you know what is "your name" and what is what someone may call you. Practice your rights. Yes... all of them. A right practiced doesn't need to be infringed, because you already don't have it.

Be very suspicious not of your neighbors but of men in "special" uniforms or funny hats that supposedly give them power over you. Don't let strangers into the house. Homeschool your kids and do a god job, history, law and the local mythology are especially important subjects. Several languages and a good grasp of self defense, tactics and strategy are also quite important. Those with kids who choose to be politically active are extra vulnerable, since kids are the ultimate Achilles Heel.

Never ever trust strangers. Trust people in uniforms even less. Never ever get into a stranger's car, despite what you see in the movies. If they want to talk to you, they can get into yours. If you are confronted by a "friend from high school" and like most average people you can't remember who you met yesterday, nevermind back then, look behind you, you're probably about to get cattle prodded in the back and shoved into a van.

These were simple coping strategies for those who were not average plebeians and who survived the cullings of communism. I lost relatives who were educated, men I could've learned much from. I never met them because they were taught that self defense was for cops and soldiers. And when the king's men were gone, and the cops were coopted to communism... there was nobody to protect the smart, educated, "civilized" (i.e. willingly helpless) men from the cleansings. The ones who weren't "lifted" and sent off to Siberia, were enrolled into a front line regiment and given crap gear and no real training. Very few returned, most scarred for life. All I saw of them while growing up were pictures over mantelpieces. Grandmothers mourning long lost brothers or maimed cousins. That is the fate of the helpless of those who depend on others for their protection...

And what governments are preparing today, the police states being built now, they are so much more insidious, in that they're so much better concealed behind "feel good" intentions and bullshit propaganda about "the good of man". Oh well, fools get what they deserve. There's no stopping it at this point, fools gave up that chance a long time ago. All one can do now is get out of the way and let the Leviathan leap off the cliff with all the fools aboard. Watch the splatter and feel not sorry... they laid their own beds. Trying to save the stupid from their stupidity is what got the world into its sorry state in the first place. The stupid should have been permitted to perish, and Darwin should've been allowed to have his laugh. Instead the stupid were forced to live against their best attempts, so they outbred those who merited survival and to thrive.

If you want encryption guaranteed against major governments you have to go with a one time pad.

Oh, please. You've done a good job of using impressive terms to sound like you know what you're talking about. If you want to talk about the real-world risks of having your crypto broken, then you need to consider all the real-world methods by which your crypto could be broken. It doesn't matter that a one-time pad can be theoretically proved to be invulnerable to certain kinds of attacks, to which various symmetric and asymmetric ciphers are theoretically vulnerable. What matters is the actual types of attacks that are practical and likely, and the actual problems you'll have in the practical implementation of a particular method. If you're using a one-time pad, then there are several obvious, well-known things that can go wrong: (1) you have to physically exchange the one-time pads, which may be difficult to do (and do securely) if the NSA is really following you everywhere, opening your mail, etc.; (2) both parties have to maintain the security of their own copies of the one-time pads, which may be difficult to do if the NSA is really determined to get them; (3) there is a tendency for users to get lazy and reuse a one-time pad, which then makes you vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks. Standard symmetric and asymmetric ciphers are more or less immune to these problems (#1: swapping passwords securely is a lot easier than swapping large amounts of binary data securely; #2: you can keep the password in your head instead of stuffing a keychain drive under your mattress; #3: no such issue). Yes, there are also certain kinds of attacks to which standard ciphers are vulnerable and one-time pads invulnerable (e.g., dictionary attacks on your password, shoulder-surfing,...) One-time pads are not magic pixie dust for cryptography. There is no magic pixie dust for cryptography. The good news is that we're living in a golden age of privacy, in the sense that you can legally, publicly get software to do encryption so good that essentially your main worry is no longer the encryption, it's the social/personal/legal issues surrounding its implementation.