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Aaron Swartz's Bubble City  (View post)

olivier [PersonRank 1]

Wednesday, November 28, 2007
16 years ago2,987 views

"With this backdoor, Jason suspects the government can influence which kinds of stories will end up prominently featured in news aggregators... which turn out to be trivialities (like Tom Cruise’s marriage) instead of important world news."

Third paranoiac there, after Noam Chomsky and Stephen King...

Markus Runzell [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Interesting post! Thank you for this!

Seth Russell [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

I'm don't think saying that the "secret backdoor" was introduced by a "US government agency" can be justified by actually reading the text.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Seth, OK, maybe I should have used the word "perhaps" or "as the protagonist suspects" somewhere in there. Here's the relevant quote from Aaron's text:

<<"The NSA said they liked it but they just had one little change. And they fiddled with these things called the S-boxes – big lists of numbers that your message was run through as it was encrypted. The NSA claimed they just were helping make sure the S-boxes were as secure as possible, but they never explained how or why they picked the numbers they did. So, although it's never been proven, a lot of people assume the S-boxes are the NSA's backdoor into the private conversations of DES users – that there's something about the S-boxes that makes it easy for them to decrypt people's messages."

"What are you saying, Eric? That someone put a backdoor into NNA?" "Hey, I'm not saying anything. I mean, I'm sure there were perfectly good reasons that DES needed S-boxes; it's just that the NSA got to choose them that was suspicious. Maybe the same thing is true with NNA; maybe there's some good reason it needs S-boxes, although nothing springs to mind.">>

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