Saturday, February 28, 2015

Should Germany, Britain, China & others share computer backdoors?

The question needed to be asked.

Okay, maybe not needed, but should in light of the arguments between the US and China on the matter. Anyhow, after Britain, the US, France - we end the list out of environmental considerations*** - voiced the desire for backdoors in communications and software to fight bad guys, why not make one big backdoor and share it?

Didn't it work in the fine old days of nukes, in the nuclear bipolar world?

It was called MAD, mutually assured destruction, and it may sound mad to us younger people, but why not try it?

Every participating country would get a set amount of data sucking each year, like when they agreed on a set number of nukes.

The quota would be based on population and several other criteria. The other criteria would ostensibly be based on rational reasons, but all of us would know that they were meant to make the smaller countries feel good.

We even have a name for the set of "other" criteria. Taken together, they could be called NAPOLEON, NAtional POLicing Excellence Orifice Notion, and enable former empires and would be empires to save face in a complex and medically bipolar world. What exactly these criteria would be should be the subject of negotiation, which themselves could be backdoored, and there are many potential parameters, for example, the number of top tier terrorists a country has produced, or the movie audience numbers from Shades of Grey and its sequel. There will be one.

Distractors would rush to claim that criminals would benefit from a unified backdoor, but that position - backdoor and position really go together well, don't you think - would be wrong.

With only one way in, criminals would compete with the states, the states would just sit there, stare at the backdoor, watch the pulsating flow of bits, and nab any non-state intruder.

A single backdoor also provides plausible deniability for the populace of sensitive countries. Any government's most valued statement, No, it was was not us, would continue to be utterly believable with the new addition "it was one of the other one hundred and fifty signatories to the common backdoor protocol, really".

Voila, problem solved.

MAD.

We presented the idea to the K-Landnews TheEditor, and it** said: if they did this, I'd actually buy a smart phone.

** TheEditor insists on gender neutrality, hence the it.
*** Entropy is it.

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