Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google

ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Re:Fiction?

[MrNaz]

Fiction [threadwatch.org] eh? [theinquirer.net]

NSA actually made DES stronger!

[Anonymous Coward]

DES was actually quite strong, it is only in the past 10 years or so that certain attacks that reduced its strength became public, but its main weakness was being only 56 bit encryption which was fine when it was designed but by the late 90s computing power had increased by a dozen orders of magnitude and it wasn't good enough even if there were no attacks.

The most interesting thing is that when IBM drafted DES and the NSA was given the draft for their comments, they suggested certain changes. For many years conspiracy theorists believed the changes were to make it easier for the NSA to crack it, when in fact the changes prevented certain types of attacks that only became public about 20 years later!

That doesn't prove or disprove the conspiracy theories that hold that the NSA either had an attack against DES back then or had the computing power to brute force it (though I think the latter is pretty obviously false on its face given the state of the art in the 70s)

Re:This is fiction?

[theefer]

Granted, I'm not a great fan of fiction outside of Hemmingway, but damn, could you pick a more lame and boring subject?

Cory was actually commissioned [craphound.com] to write a story on this topic.

Re:Fiction?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Section 505, "Miscellaneous national security authorities." Allows for National Security Letters that bypass judicial review. Struck down on April 9th, 2004 by Doe v. Ashcroft. Reauthorized legislation later struck down on September 6th, 2007, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

DES

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The NSA changed the S-boxes without explaining why. When the white world re-invented differential cryptanalysis, it turned out that the NSA had strengthened DES with the changes.

The only realistic weakness in DES was the short key length, which the whole world knew about. To this day, triple DES is an accepted if slow cipher.

Scroogle.org

[garbletext]

Funny that the title is "scroogled," that's the name of a prominent anti-google site that runs the Scroogle Scraper [scroogle.org], so you can search google without having your entries put in your database. It's nice for doing searches that you'd rather not have in your search profile that google keeps for you. If you use their other services like gmail, they can basically know you intimately. I'd rather they didn't, but can't give up gmail. So it's easy to modify firefox to use scroogle instead of google for searching, and if you adblock adsense, and their urchin.js script, or just google-analytics.com/* they can't see what sites you visit either. It's sad that you have to work so hard to hide your movements from a company that "does no evil" but I guess that's the information economy for you.

You dont have to use Google

[supersnail]

Seriously you can reduce google's market share by using another search engine occasionally.
As Market Share equates directly to income in the search business you deprive google of money and power by using another search engine.

It would obviously be sinful to use MSN search, but Yahoo! is merely bad taste.

"www.ask.com" is nearly as good as google and has a nice clean interface.

Plus there are some Open Source "SETI at home" type search engines under development that are worth
supporting "grub" and "Majestic-12" are two.

Although as Majestic-12 is based in the UK, and the UK government is currently under the direct control of the US executive it would be easy to give the NSA direct access to everything.

Re:The ending

[julesh]

Ahem wrote, "... the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

Could it really have ended any other way?

No, it couldn't. For those who missed the significance, the basic structure of the story was copied from 1984.

Re:Fiction?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Actually, not true. The 4th Amendment holds "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

That's why NSLs were struck down - any legislation that allows for searches and seizures that bypasses judicial review is unconstitutional.

You did ask what part of the USA PATRIOT Act (notUS PATRIOT Act - note that it is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001) was being commented on. I just responded.

Re:DES

[rjh]

According to the IBM design team, this is not so: while the NSA made technical suggestions, not one wire in the S-boxes was dictated by the NSA.

Other people have noticed that the "technical suggestions" involved the NSA sending back DES hardware with rewired S-boxes, and assumed the IBM DES crew simply used the NSA's new S-boxes without understanding what was going on. Quite the opposite: the IBM team refused to use anything they didn't understand, and thus independently discovered differential cryptanalysis by reverse-engineering the NSA's changed S-boxes.

Once they understood differential cryptanalysis, they came up with their own S-boxes.