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antics 18 hours ago [-]
Just to be absolutely clear, the giant OpenAI math dump replaces two (2) already efficient probabilistic algorithms with deterministic ones. Neither affects encryption as it is deployed today (one is a quantum algorithm, and the other is factorization over prime fields).
I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].
For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.
of course the frontier labs are testing their models on public key cryptography
of course it is questionable they would just dump cryptographic breakthroughs in some random batch of breakthroughs ...
abhv 18 hours ago [-]
i hope we first lose people who post dumb essays on twitter.
at least he agrees that "he can't see the future"
there is just as much evidence for the opposite stance: AI can help us improve and formally verify every security reduction we use. As long as math allows some kind of trapdoor function, AI can help us produce the best crypto we can achieve from it.
NooneAtAll3 18 hours ago [-]
I hope we first lose people who post on twitter, as I can't read the replies
Such a bitter take. It's pathetic to ask for such certainty, such absolutes. We should offload, offgas, discuss. These feelings these impulses: it's glory to have them captured, written.
AI can help us improve! That's true, but not a different point. The story here resounds with me, if you read the follow up threads linked elsewhere in this submission. We've relied heavily on a small handful of mathematicians around a very small number of public key cryptography algorithms. Is this the best humanity could do? Meh. Not really.
I think it's more likely AI is good for attack than creation. I do think we'll be ok! But this genuflecting on what is, it rocks.
swerve3815 18 hours ago [-]
This is essentially a guess that P probably = NP.
Way more likely is that every existing cryptocurrency implementation contains bugs outside of the core cryptographic algorithm that would allow stealing coins without having to break that encryption. Cybersecurity is an arms race, as it always has been.
DoctorOetker 18 hours ago [-]
a specific hardness assumption is much less general than P=NP, in case you are interested in hardness assumptions and not only P vs NP
xyzsparetimexyz 18 hours ago [-]
Counter theory: No we won't.
smalltorch 18 hours ago [-]
Seems pretty un loseable to me as well
DoctorOetker 17 hours ago [-]
When statistics to extract keyphrases from messages encoded with Vigenere ciphers became public, nobody "lost" the knowledge of Vigenere ciphers, its the Vigenere cipher losing utility.
There is a social aspect to cryptography: the study of what types of puzzles we don't publicly know how to solve (yet) can in some cases be used to construct cryptographic primitives, so that we can derive cryptographic value (access to cryptography) from parts of mathematics we don't understand yet, this obviously relies on the main body of mathematics being publicly accessible.
That window on mathematics (the puzzle needs to be employable as a cryptographic primitive AND the puzzle needs to hard enough) is expected to vary over time, as long-time puzzle types fall, and hopefully new puzzle types emerge.
One observes no guarantees on the window width, nor on how fast that window is sweeping over the frontier of mathematics (even if humans aided with LLMs are continuously capable of finding fresh cryptography, useful for a while until it expires, it takes times to manufacture hardware to replenish all end-user electronics, so if the cadence is high enough, we might continuously have novel forms of cryptography, in time as formula's, but too late to secure the boot chains across humanity, surveillance states may encounter periodic black-outs if people jailbreak their phones with the latest LLM knowledge).
Politicians will try desperate things like criminalizing mathematics...
I've always used key lengths that are significantly longer than anyone ever recommends. I don't really believe in the trade-offs that lead people to choose the shorter ones.
The only way I've been pressured to use a shorter key length is when the longer one for some reason is treated as an entirely separate algorithm that is randomly unsupported (looking at you, P-521)
Incipient 11 hours ago [-]
While "stop making stupid people famous" doesn't quite apply here, "stop making stupid posts famous" probably does.
After he clarified and recanted a HUGE number of implied points in the first comment, my take is it comes down to "currently used encryption may be vulnerable" - essentially an evergreen statement, either due to weakness in the implementation (eg weak iv) or weakness in the maths (eg new mathematical attacks). Neither of these are new or honestly even worth pointing out.
Other than crypto with immutable hashes, the rest of the internet would simply update their systems to mitigate any broken encryption (depending on the risk of the 'break').
TLDR: scary implications make a post popular, regardless of substance.
Mistletoe 18 hours ago [-]
Markets are down today over nonsense stargazing like this. If we lose cryptography, we lose everything in a sort of blackout level event like on Blade Runner 2049. It won’t matter what you buy or sell to. I see no signs we are even close to that.
cjbprime 15 hours ago [-]
Is your argument that it would be really bad if it was true, therefore it's not going to be true? It would be really bad if I got cancer, but I don't respond to that by refusing to think rationally about it.
hn_submit 18 hours ago [-]
This is just clickbait. Nothing to see here. Move along.
bugake 14 hours ago [-]
but the fireworks behind you... Should we do something?
hn_submit 11 hours ago [-]
I seriously doubt I'll see public key cryptography broken by quantum computers in my lifetime.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit that due to the lack of progress the investment in quantum computers will dry up in a couple of years.
caaqil 18 hours ago [-]
> betting against models and in favor of human intelligence being the limit has not worked well for any of us.
The thread has no coherent argument or new evidence at all but this simple truth must be drilled into the heads of the mathematicians, and whoever is next on the chopping block. Stochastic parrot with high gF will emerge one way or another, and you will like it.
dcj4 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
moralestapia 18 hours ago [-]
What a deeply ignorant statement. There are no shortcuts to factoring a (sufficiently large) number, and that's not even touching on other kinds of PKC.
But this is a great example on why appealing to authority is a mistake and how academia is full of charlatans.
Only way I see that happening is if (big f... if) P = NP and some superintelligence devises a general algorithm to solve one on the other; but he's obviously not referring to that, as the timeline in that context is the next 1-5 years, i.e. the models we have now.
Edit: Lmao, the guy namedrops MLWE and ECDLP to save face, under the argumentation that he's worried about the public key algorithms out there when the "market share" of those algos is like 5%. RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.
To be generous to the guy, he had a point, but went hyperbole, and also packing that into a scant sentence didn't help make his case.
gizmo686 10 hours ago [-]
> There are no shortcuts to factoring a (sufficiently large) number, and that's not even touching on other kinds of PKC.
This has never been proven. The entire point of the post is that all of public key cryptography is based on a small number of "hard" problems for which we have no deep reason to think are hard. In the pre-AI world, that was a pretty safe situation to be in. Math is a very old field, so the pace of progress was a known quantity. If we started to solve those hard problems, there would be plenty of time to find new ones before they all went away. With AI, the pace of math in the medium term is a much more unknown quantity; so the possibility of loosing all of them before we have time to find a new one is much more of a possibility.
> RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.
RSA has been theoretically broken for decades, as it is based on integer factorization, which is known to be vulnerable to quantum computers. Even if we ignore quantom computers, we still have no solid reason to believe that there are no solutions to integer factorization that can be realized on normal computers. At best, that gets us to 3 hard problems.
ECC is based on the assumption that ECDLP is a hard problem; and was deployed because we were concerned that integer factorization was broken.
MLWE is the backup plan if ECDLP ends up being broken.
moralestapia 7 hours ago [-]
>we still have no solid reason to believe that there are no solutions to integer factorization that can be realized on normal computers
But there are solutions to integer factorizatiom that can be realized on normal computers ... just not in a practical way that doesn't take you a million years.
That doesn't make RSA "broken", this was known from day one. Sure, quantum "might crack those one day" with a lot of emphasis on "might" and "one day".
Your comment is otherwise good but not knowing such basic stuff undermines your position, tbh.
DoctorOetker 18 hours ago [-]
> RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.
Can you show a formal proof of this, or is this belief based in faith?
moralestapia 17 hours ago [-]
Sure.
1. Build factor pair so large it takes all atoms in the universe to store it.
2. Since there's no room for anything else, nothing can factor it.
:^)
DoctorOetker 55 minutes ago [-]
So you demonstrate utility of RSA and ECC by showing how it remains "useful" by appropriating the complete universe to store your private keys? That sounds like a useless (and expensive) scheme, if it costs a universe.
smalltorch 17 hours ago [-]
In reality you can't get past a 2^256 limit of dev/urandom cspring without introducing your own random number generator which is possible.
But yeah its easy math, lets say the pair is 1,000,000. Thats 1,000,000! possible combinations. You could stack 1,000,000 PB drives across the universe and not be able to store all the unique combinations.
jauntywundrkind 19 hours ago [-]
some already refuted speculation online about what this was, that i found informative & interesting & real to our times [edited, originally intro text read: "to clarify"]
> folks, Matt Green is not predicting that public key crypto will be cracked, he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugshttps://bsky.app/profile/ver.ooo/post/3mxfbhrmk2c2u
socializer has already shown up in comments to correct this, and has a good twitter link from an hour ago, clarifying the post was really about ai math attacks possibly damaging some of the rare couple of cryptoanalysis attacks out there:
> These problems (right now basically MLWE and ECDLP with LWE and syndrome decoding as backups) have been extensively analyzed by humans. We felt good that the best known attacks were the best attacks. But we’re learning that human mathematical analysis isn’t the gold standard.
----
thankfully i think it's unrelated what else has happened in the last 24hr:
> folks, Matt Green is not predicting that public key crypto will be cracked, he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugs
You're responding to speculation about a vague tweet with more baseless speculation from a third party. He actually explained what he meant, and he did mean the advances in AI math. But he was also baselessly speculating, so I guess it's the circle of life:
> So what does “losing public-key [encryption]” mean? It does not mean cryptography or encryption is impossible, or that we live in Minicrypt. It does mean that we imminently see new cryptanalytic results that substantially improve our ability to attack standardized schemes.
> The more modest effect of this would be that several schemes we’d previously agreed were “good enough” (128 bit security level) aren’t. Maybe they’re 96-bit or 108-bit secure.
> In any case, honest standards bodies have to step back and deprecate at least those smaller parameter sets, which are already deployed in some live systems. But in principle, we can usually just crank up parameter sizes. Right?
> But crank them up to what? Right now we’re saying we have the right numbers, because humans spent 40 years (or 25 years) studying these assumptions. If suddenly it turns out we were off by 26 bits, that’s obviously not something we can lean on.
> So then, we could lean on the fact that the machines now say they’re stuck — the assumptions at the new numbers seem pretty robust, and no lab is able to make further progress.
> How do you feel about that? I don’t feel great about it. I think nobody will feel good about it.
> And what happens if we tentatively agree to trust that progress has stalled, and then some new internal model makes another step-change jump? We could end up losing trust in these assumptions at any security level except for painfully high ones.
> So again I’m not saying that any of this will happen. What I am saying is that I would be very surprised and pleased to find out that human cryptanalysis (of the non-classified form) handled by a couple of dozen people, turned out to be the best we could ever do.
19 hours ago [-]
Legend2440 19 hours ago [-]
>he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugs
That's conspiracy nonsense from the usual paranoid corners of the internet.
miohtama 18 hours ago [-]
Europol, a tax funded law enforcement body, is publicly lobbying exactly this.
Europol calls privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETS, the tools of criminals:
“PETs are used by criminal actors for secure communication, anonymisation, and protection of data. Criminal networks utilise various PETs, including end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, encrypted phones, and virtual private networks (VPNs), to communicate securely and anonymously. “
"For this reason, lawful access to electronic evidence has become one of the most critical issues for European law enforcement"
Meanwhile Canada just banned e2e and Signal is leaving the country.
wolvoleo 18 hours ago [-]
They can stick their chatcontrol where the sun don't shine, I don't expect people to play along with it. People will just move to apps that don't play ball with these backdoors.
But we'll need some decentralised ones. Signal leaving Canada is exactly the problem with centralised networks like theirs: there's a single entity to go after for compliance. So they can be forced just like telegram was forced by Durov's arrest in France.
But there's already good options that aren't centralised. I think people will move to those. At least that's what I will do and I hope most people follow suit.
it's speculation about behavior. and it's grounded in a very real truth, that law enforcement in many nations has not been impeded by security / cryptography: they've had the means to break it, route around it. the assertion that this is changing feels imminently clear.
what happens is anyone's guess. (those who know certainly aren't gonna talk to us plebe public about it, haha yeah never.) but generally i think governments have been very much on the warpath to grab control, adding age (and thus identity) verification to basically all websites, and otherwise doing all they can to increase their ability to dragnet the internet and monitor it.
your accusation that it's conspiracy nonsense does indeed some what check out with me. i'm a fan of not going glonzo. i'm a fan of keeping our head and being realistic. it might not go so bad. but also: these people have done nothing to earn the public's trust. their attempts to make the internet bad and un-private have dragged on for decades, and they lose and they lose and they lose. but eventually they get a shot through. they get lucky and it gets worse. there's been very little ratchet the other way, just a general ratchet of loss and woe for the public, for privacy, for electronic freedom frontiers. the governments have not played nice at all, have demonstrated no interest in listening to the public, have disregarded all advocacy, and keep passing bad no good very bad laws, trying with persistence until eventually they find a chink in the armor.
so yes this is a glonzo theory. somewhat. i somewhat agree. but looking at who we are looking against, how things have gone, well: it seems all too realistic.
as for "usual paranoid corners of the internet" i think you are completely fucking off base out of your mind. this is from someone very respected very in the know and very good and very serious and you're just some shithrower with nothing to say. this kind of vacuous uncontestable low grade bullshit can go piss right the fuck off.
IncRnd 18 hours ago [-]
It's conspiracy nonsense, because it wasn't what Green said.
I think it's fair to say that in the last month we have learned 0 things that would specifically confirm or disconfirm this stated view, either directly or indirectly. And that is not really Matthew's concern, anyway. His actual concern is that computers are really good at math, and if we point them at something like Module LWE or ECDLP there is a real chance that it (essentially magically) breaks them. See his statement at [1].
For better and for worse I think we are in a crisis of empiricism. As a community we are worried enough about the outcomes of breaking something like encryption that we're willing to admit statements like this one, even though we have no real, actual, concrete evidence that would indicate whether they're true or not. The line of thought Matthew articulates here (i.e., we can solve millennium problems thus "optimism [related to encryption] is a very opinionated bet") may be defensible from a risk management perspective, but it is absolutely not defensible as a statement of knowledge. Internally that's fine, but the public (including the technical public) is not going to make that distinction. They will interpret it as knowledge. That does not help us.
[1]: https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108281944291393983
of course it is questionable they would just dump cryptographic breakthroughs in some random batch of breakthroughs ...
at least he agrees that "he can't see the future"
there is just as much evidence for the opposite stance: AI can help us improve and formally verify every security reduction we use. As long as math allows some kind of trapdoor function, AI can help us produce the best crypto we can achieve from it.
https://nitter.meowing.monster/matthew_d_green/status/210827...
AI can help us improve! That's true, but not a different point. The story here resounds with me, if you read the follow up threads linked elsewhere in this submission. We've relied heavily on a small handful of mathematicians around a very small number of public key cryptography algorithms. Is this the best humanity could do? Meh. Not really.
I think it's more likely AI is good for attack than creation. I do think we'll be ok! But this genuflecting on what is, it rocks.
Way more likely is that every existing cryptocurrency implementation contains bugs outside of the core cryptographic algorithm that would allow stealing coins without having to break that encryption. Cybersecurity is an arms race, as it always has been.
There is a social aspect to cryptography: the study of what types of puzzles we don't publicly know how to solve (yet) can in some cases be used to construct cryptographic primitives, so that we can derive cryptographic value (access to cryptography) from parts of mathematics we don't understand yet, this obviously relies on the main body of mathematics being publicly accessible.
That window on mathematics (the puzzle needs to be employable as a cryptographic primitive AND the puzzle needs to hard enough) is expected to vary over time, as long-time puzzle types fall, and hopefully new puzzle types emerge.
One observes no guarantees on the window width, nor on how fast that window is sweeping over the frontier of mathematics (even if humans aided with LLMs are continuously capable of finding fresh cryptography, useful for a while until it expires, it takes times to manufacture hardware to replenish all end-user electronics, so if the cadence is high enough, we might continuously have novel forms of cryptography, in time as formula's, but too late to secure the boot chains across humanity, surveillance states may encounter periodic black-outs if people jailbreak their phones with the latest LLM knowledge).
Politicians will try desperate things like criminalizing mathematics...
The only way I've been pressured to use a shorter key length is when the longer one for some reason is treated as an entirely separate algorithm that is randomly unsupported (looking at you, P-521)
After he clarified and recanted a HUGE number of implied points in the first comment, my take is it comes down to "currently used encryption may be vulnerable" - essentially an evergreen statement, either due to weakness in the implementation (eg weak iv) or weakness in the maths (eg new mathematical attacks). Neither of these are new or honestly even worth pointing out.
Other than crypto with immutable hashes, the rest of the internet would simply update their systems to mitigate any broken encryption (depending on the risk of the 'break').
TLDR: scary implications make a post popular, regardless of substance.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit that due to the lack of progress the investment in quantum computers will dry up in a couple of years.
The thread has no coherent argument or new evidence at all but this simple truth must be drilled into the heads of the mathematicians, and whoever is next on the chopping block. Stochastic parrot with high gF will emerge one way or another, and you will like it.
But this is a great example on why appealing to authority is a mistake and how academia is full of charlatans.
Only way I see that happening is if (big f... if) P = NP and some superintelligence devises a general algorithm to solve one on the other; but he's obviously not referring to that, as the timeline in that context is the next 1-5 years, i.e. the models we have now.
Edit: Lmao, the guy namedrops MLWE and ECDLP to save face, under the argumentation that he's worried about the public key algorithms out there when the "market share" of those algos is like 5%. RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.
To be generous to the guy, he had a point, but went hyperbole, and also packing that into a scant sentence didn't help make his case.
This has never been proven. The entire point of the post is that all of public key cryptography is based on a small number of "hard" problems for which we have no deep reason to think are hard. In the pre-AI world, that was a pretty safe situation to be in. Math is a very old field, so the pace of progress was a known quantity. If we started to solve those hard problems, there would be plenty of time to find new ones before they all went away. With AI, the pace of math in the medium term is a much more unknown quantity; so the possibility of loosing all of them before we have time to find a new one is much more of a possibility.
> RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.
RSA has been theoretically broken for decades, as it is based on integer factorization, which is known to be vulnerable to quantum computers. Even if we ignore quantom computers, we still have no solid reason to believe that there are no solutions to integer factorization that can be realized on normal computers. At best, that gets us to 3 hard problems.
ECC is based on the assumption that ECDLP is a hard problem; and was deployed because we were concerned that integer factorization was broken.
MLWE is the backup plan if ECDLP ends up being broken.
But there are solutions to integer factorizatiom that can be realized on normal computers ... just not in a practical way that doesn't take you a million years.
That doesn't make RSA "broken", this was known from day one. Sure, quantum "might crack those one day" with a lot of emphasis on "might" and "one day".
Your comment is otherwise good but not knowing such basic stuff undermines your position, tbh.
Can you show a formal proof of this, or is this belief based in faith?
1. Build factor pair so large it takes all atoms in the universe to store it.
2. Since there's no room for anything else, nothing can factor it.
:^)
But yeah its easy math, lets say the pair is 1,000,000. Thats 1,000,000! possible combinations. You could stack 1,000,000 PB drives across the universe and not be able to store all the unique combinations.
> folks, Matt Green is not predicting that public key crypto will be cracked, he's predicting it will be regulated out of existence because LE will have no means to break into systems once we fix all the bugs https://bsky.app/profile/ver.ooo/post/3mxfbhrmk2c2u
socializer has already shown up in comments to correct this, and has a good twitter link from an hour ago, clarifying the post was really about ai math attacks possibly damaging some of the rare couple of cryptoanalysis attacks out there:
> These problems (right now basically MLWE and ECDLP with LWE and syndrome decoding as backups) have been extensively analyzed by humans. We felt good that the best known attacks were the best attacks. But we’re learning that human mathematical analysis isn’t the gold standard.
----
thankfully i think it's unrelated what else has happened in the last 24hr:
> If you haven’t asked abliterated GLM 5.3 to hack the Internet’s core routers, then you’re a happier person than I am right now. https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mxd...
and then oh look, a couple hours latter:
Critical Cisco Nexus Flaws Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code With Root Privileges https://cybersecuritynews.com/critical-cisco-nexus-flaws/
You're responding to speculation about a vague tweet with more baseless speculation from a third party. He actually explained what he meant, and he did mean the advances in AI math. But he was also baselessly speculating, so I guess it's the circle of life:
https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2108278850555674975
> So what does “losing public-key [encryption]” mean? It does not mean cryptography or encryption is impossible, or that we live in Minicrypt. It does mean that we imminently see new cryptanalytic results that substantially improve our ability to attack standardized schemes.
> The more modest effect of this would be that several schemes we’d previously agreed were “good enough” (128 bit security level) aren’t. Maybe they’re 96-bit or 108-bit secure.
> In any case, honest standards bodies have to step back and deprecate at least those smaller parameter sets, which are already deployed in some live systems. But in principle, we can usually just crank up parameter sizes. Right?
> But crank them up to what? Right now we’re saying we have the right numbers, because humans spent 40 years (or 25 years) studying these assumptions. If suddenly it turns out we were off by 26 bits, that’s obviously not something we can lean on.
> So then, we could lean on the fact that the machines now say they’re stuck — the assumptions at the new numbers seem pretty robust, and no lab is able to make further progress.
> How do you feel about that? I don’t feel great about it. I think nobody will feel good about it.
> And what happens if we tentatively agree to trust that progress has stalled, and then some new internal model makes another step-change jump? We could end up losing trust in these assumptions at any security level except for painfully high ones.
> So again I’m not saying that any of this will happen. What I am saying is that I would be very surprised and pleased to find out that human cryptanalysis (of the non-classified form) handled by a couple of dozen people, turned out to be the best we could ever do.
That's conspiracy nonsense from the usual paranoid corners of the internet.
Europol calls privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETS, the tools of criminals:
“PETs are used by criminal actors for secure communication, anonymisation, and protection of data. Criminal networks utilise various PETs, including end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, encrypted phones, and virtual private networks (VPNs), to communicate securely and anonymously. “
"For this reason, lawful access to electronic evidence has become one of the most critical issues for European law enforcement"
https://www.europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/docume...
Meanwhile Canada just banned e2e and Signal is leaving the country.
But we'll need some decentralised ones. Signal leaving Canada is exactly the problem with centralised networks like theirs: there's a single entity to go after for compliance. So they can be forced just like telegram was forced by Durov's arrest in France.
But there's already good options that aren't centralised. I think people will move to those. At least that's what I will do and I hope most people follow suit.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013...
what happens is anyone's guess. (those who know certainly aren't gonna talk to us plebe public about it, haha yeah never.) but generally i think governments have been very much on the warpath to grab control, adding age (and thus identity) verification to basically all websites, and otherwise doing all they can to increase their ability to dragnet the internet and monitor it.
your accusation that it's conspiracy nonsense does indeed some what check out with me. i'm a fan of not going glonzo. i'm a fan of keeping our head and being realistic. it might not go so bad. but also: these people have done nothing to earn the public's trust. their attempts to make the internet bad and un-private have dragged on for decades, and they lose and they lose and they lose. but eventually they get a shot through. they get lucky and it gets worse. there's been very little ratchet the other way, just a general ratchet of loss and woe for the public, for privacy, for electronic freedom frontiers. the governments have not played nice at all, have demonstrated no interest in listening to the public, have disregarded all advocacy, and keep passing bad no good very bad laws, trying with persistence until eventually they find a chink in the armor.
so yes this is a glonzo theory. somewhat. i somewhat agree. but looking at who we are looking against, how things have gone, well: it seems all too realistic.
as for "usual paranoid corners of the internet" i think you are completely fucking off base out of your mind. this is from someone very respected very in the know and very good and very serious and you're just some shithrower with nothing to say. this kind of vacuous uncontestable low grade bullshit can go piss right the fuck off.