more on Google search and seizure, etc. vs. technologists

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "William S. Duncanson" <caesar () starkreality com>
Date: December 3, 2005 8:59:33 PM EST
To: karn () ka9q net
Cc: lauren () vortex org, dave () farber net
Subject: RE: [IP] Google search and seizure, etc. vs. technologists

I have to agree with Lauren here.  The "average user's" lack of
understanding has been the reason why far more important and useful
technologies have never been widely adopted.  Look at PGP or any other
digital e-mail signature technology.  The average user doesn't  
understand
why they're useful, isn't willing to pay for them or go through the  
trouble
to use a free implementation, and the whole idea just withered on the  
vine.
Even businesses, for whom e-mail has become a mission critical aspect  
find
the expense and trouble of implementing a simple, company-wide public  
key
encryption/signing system to be too much of an effort or financial  
burden
without a useful ROI.  And what could be more important to a large
corporation than secure, guaranteed communications?  The same is true of
anonymizing proxies; anonymizing proxies have been in existence for  
years,
and they're only used by a trivial number of people.  Wide scale  
adoption of
such a technology appears to be as likely as wide adoption of digitally
signed e-mail...

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 18:44
To: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: [IP] Google search and seizure, etc. vs. technologists



Begin forwarded message:

From: Phil Karn <karn () ka9q net>
Date: December 3, 2005 7:10:30 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Google search and seizure, etc. vs. technologists



> 3) Routing queries through anon proxies will provide some protection
>    for the technological elite who understand such things.  They will
>    not protect the average user, who most likely doesn't understand
>    the risks and issues, and will never use such proxies, even
>    assuming that they were trivial to use.

I wish I had a nickel for everything I've been told "the average  
user" would
never understand, need or be able to use. Back in the 1970s, the  
"average
user" would never understand, need or be able to use a personal  
computer. In
the 1980s, the "average user" would never need a local area network  
in his
home. In the early 1990s, the "average user" would never understand  
or need
the Internet. And so on.

It is no more necessary that the "average user" understand how an
anonymizing Google proxy works to use it effectively than to  
understand the
fields in TCP/IP packet headers. The whole idea of civilization and  
commerce
is that many people can benefit from specialized knowledge and skills  
that
they themselves lack. The open source movement and the Internet  
itself have
certainly demonstrated this.

Personally, I prefer the anonymizing proxy over the random query  
generator.
The proxy is likely to be more effective, and it generates no extra  
load. I
mention the generator mainly to be complete. My point is that there  
*are*
technical defenses against potential privacy abuses, and we can  
implement
them ourselves instead of naively demanding that Google respect our  
privacy
against their own commercial interests.

And even if Google were completely honest, they would still be  
subject to
Patriot Act abuses that we would never know about.

The sad fact is that "national security" has become the root password  
to the
Constitution. The only effective defense against a "rooted"
system is not to put any sensitive information in it in the first place.

--Phil




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