Skype Crypto Unbreakable by German Police

Slashdot is running this article today. It's about how the German police is having difficulty breaking the cryptography used by the popular voice communication software Skype.

Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

My first reaction to this was "so, any and all other forms of encryption are easily breakable to you then?". This is, hopefully, not true, but it was phrased in such a way.
There was an especially good comment, with a really good finisher, and it was this one by hanssprudel:

This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.

Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.

The bold face is mine. (If hanssprudel doesn't like me reprinting this, he's welcome to talk to me about it, and I'll fix it).
I think it's a good thing that the police should have to earn their keep. Sure, the beat cops are out there getting shot at, and they earn their paycheck, but in the age of digital surveillance, it has become to easy for organizations (governmental or otherwise) with clandestine agendas to spy on what other people do.
Granted, it has become easier to hide what we do as well (we as in normal people, not clandestine organizations), but that doesn't mean that the intelligence community should get carte blanche for spying on us.
Regardless of what technology you use, there should be checks and balances in place to make sure that the rights of the individual are not being violated. We should not regulate technology. That is useless, because it changes faster than the laws do. We need to regulate what can be done to people rather than how.

Facebook

So, I guess I'm on Facebook now. I figured, since I had already gotten 3 invitations, they had my email address already. I hear Facebook is all the rage, so I might as well check it out for myself.
They do request a lot of information about you when you set up your profile. Thus far I've only entered my blog address. They ask me about my sexual orientation, my political views, my religious views, who I'm dating and a sea of other very private stuff.
Now, I don't mind sharing these things with anybody, but I do know that in the hands of the wrong people, a database like Facebook is a marketing (and pseudo-anti-terrorism) gold mine.
I mean, anybody could perfectly tailor their message based on this information, and creating a no-fly list is a snap, just sort people based on religion (I wish I was kidding about this, but I fear that I'm not).
At least this information isn't required. The thing with privacy isn't so much what your beliefs and values are, but that you choose who to display them to, and under what circumstances. Bruce Schneier wrote a piece not long ago about data re-use, and it highlights some of my fears with systems like this. Sure, most people "promise" to not use the data for anything like that, but it does end up being used for other things every now and then. Hopefully not as often as my paranoid mind fears though.

Things are not as they Seem

I might have been a bit off the mark the other day when I claimed that the laws the British passed raped our collective civil liberties less that the American counterparts.
I believe I wrote something like:

The US pass laws that are disgusting violations of our civil liberties, the UK does the same, but on a smaller scale.

Well, I stand corrected. It turns out that unless you are willing to surrender pretty much every piece of information available (or not available) about yourself to the government, you will not be allowed to leave the country, except as a boat refuge. Great Britain will, from March 26th, stop issuing passports to anyone who refuses to bend over and take surveillance so far up their ass that the metal casing of the cameras tickle their mouths.

It turns out that my home country isn't much better. A recent bill proposes to let the communications arm of the military (FRA - Försvarets Radioanstalt) wiretap anyone they damn well please with absolutely no judicial oversight. It's not clear who proposed this bill, other than "the government", but there seems, luckily, to be many vocal critics of this bill such as the head of the Bar Association, the head of Säpo (Swedish Secret Police), and others. I doubt it will pass, but the very idea to propose something like this is atrocious as best.
As if this wasn't enough, it was discovered when this bill was proposed that FRA has been doing these sorts of things without oversight for decades anyway. Apparently up until the point when the telephone company became privately owned.

I will admit that I don't know what goes down behind closed doors here in the Netherlands, but I can't possibly imagine that it could be as bad as any of the atrocities I have just described.