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Old 9th November 2010
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
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This just in from Bruce Schneier's blog, regarding a talk by Whitfield Diffie at a recent ACCU conference. Highlights mine.
Quote:
The third watershed is cloud computing, or whatever you want to call the general trend of outsourcing computation. Google is a good example. Every organization uses Google search all the time, which probably makes it the most valuable intelligence stream on the planet. How can you protect yourself? You can't, just as you can't whenever you hand over your data for storage or processing -- you just have to trust your oursourcer. There are two solutions. The first is legal: an enforceable contract that protects you and your data. The second is technical, but mostly theoretical: homomorphic encryption that allows you to outsource computation of data without having to trust that outsourcer.

Diffie's final point is that we're entering an era of unprecedented surveillance possibilities. It doesn't matter if people encrypt their communications, or if they encrypt their data in storage. As long as they have to give their data to other people for processing, it will be possible to eavesdrop on. Of course the methods will change, but the result will be an enormous trove of information about everybody.
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