He won a case against the government representing himself so I think he would be on good footing. He is a professor where I graduated and even the faculty told me he was interesting to deal with. Post QC is his main focus right now and also he published curve25519.
Personally my favorite part of the history is on the “Dishonest behavior by government lawyers” page:
https://cr.yp.to/export/dishonesty.html - the disclaimer at the top is hilarious: “This is, sad to say, not a complete list.” Indeed!
Are you implying that he didn’t contribute to the first win before or during EFF involvement?
Are you further implying that a stalemate against the U.S. government is somehow bad for self representation after the EFF wasn’t involved?
In my view it’s a little disingenuous to call it a stalemate implying everything was equal save EFF involved when the government changes the rules.
He challenged the new rules alone because the EFF apparently decided one win was enough.
When the judge dismissed the case, the judge said said that he should come back when the government had made a “concrete threat” - his self representation wasn’t the issue. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?
To quote his press release at the time:
``If and when there is a concrete threat of enforcement against
Bernstein for a specific activity, Bernstein may return for judicial
resolution of that dispute,'' Patel wrote, after citing Coppolino's
``repeated assurances that Bernstein is not prohibited from engaging in
his activities.'' - https://cr.yp.to/export/2003/10.15-bernstein.txt
Yeah, terrible idea, except this is Daniel Bernstein, who already had an equally terrible idea years ago, and won. That victory was hugely important, it pretty much enabled much of what we use today (to be developed, exported, used without restrictions, etc etc etc)
seems like they just need a judge to force the NSA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, its just part of the process
I'm stonewalled on an equivalent Public Record Act request w/ a state, and am kind of annoyed that I have to use the state's court system
Doesn't feel super partial and a couple law journals have written about how its not partial at all in this state and should be improved by the legislature
This is part of a class division where we cannot practically exercise our rights which are clearly enumerated in public law. Only people with money or connections can even attempt to get many kinds of records.
It’s wrong and government employees involved should be fired, and perhaps seriously punished. If people at NIST had faced real public scrutiny and sanction for their last round of sabotage, perhaps we wouldn’t see delay and dismissal by NIST.
Delay of responding to these requests is yet another kind of sabotage of the public NIST standardization processes. Delay in standardization is delay in deployment. Delay means mass surveillance adversaries have more ciphertext that they can attack with a quantum computer. This isn’t a coincidence, though I am sure the coincidence theorists will come out in full force.
NIST should be responsive in a timely manner and they should be trustworthy, we rely on their standards for all kinds of mandatory data processing. It’s pathetic that Americans don’t have several IG investigations in parallel covering NIST and NSA behavior. Rather we have to rely on a professor to file lawsuits for the public (and cryptographers involved in the standardization process) to have even a glimpse of what is happening. Unbelievable but good that someone is doing it. He deserves our support.
> This is part of a class division where we cannot practically exercise our rights which are clearly enumerated in public law. Only people with money or connections can even attempt to get many kinds of records.
As someone with those resources, I'm still kind of annoyed because I think this state agency is playing chess accurately too. My request was anonymous through my lawyer and nobody would know that I have these documents, while if I went through the court - even if it was anonymous with the ACLU being the filer - there would still be a public record in the court system that someone was looking for those specific documents, so that's annoying
Even though I broadly agree with what you've written here ... the situation in question isn't really about NIST/NSA response to FOIA requests at all.
It's about whether the US government has deliberately acted to foist weak encryption on the public (US and otherwise), presumably out of desire/belief that it has the right/need to always decrypt.
Whether and how those agencies respond to FOIA requests is a bit of a side-show, or maybe we could call it a prequel.
He won a case against the government representing himself so I think he would be on good footing. He is a professor where I graduated and even the faculty told me he was interesting to deal with. Post QC is his main focus right now and also he published curve25519.
He was represented by the EFF during the first, successful case. They declined to represent him in the second case, which ended in a stalemate.
The full story is interesting and well documented: https://cr.yp.to/export.html
Personally my favorite part of the history is on the “Dishonest behavior by government lawyers” page: https://cr.yp.to/export/dishonesty.html - the disclaimer at the top is hilarious: “This is, sad to say, not a complete list.” Indeed!
Are you implying that he didn’t contribute to the first win before or during EFF involvement?
Are you further implying that a stalemate against the U.S. government is somehow bad for self representation after the EFF wasn’t involved?
In my view it’s a little disingenuous to call it a stalemate implying everything was equal save EFF involved when the government changes the rules.
He challenged the new rules alone because the EFF apparently decided one win was enough.
When the judge dismissed the case, the judge said said that he should come back when the government had made a “concrete threat” - his self representation wasn’t the issue. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?
To quote his press release at the time: ``If and when there is a concrete threat of enforcement against Bernstein for a specific activity, Bernstein may return for judicial resolution of that dispute,'' Patel wrote, after citing Coppolino's ``repeated assurances that Bernstein is not prohibited from engaging in his activities.'' - https://cr.yp.to/export/2003/10.15-bernstein.txt
5 replies →
Yeah, terrible idea, except this is Daniel Bernstein, who already had an equally terrible idea years ago, and won. That victory was hugely important, it pretty much enabled much of what we use today (to be developed, exported, used without restrictions, etc etc etc)
seems like they just need a judge to force the NSA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, its just part of the process
I'm stonewalled on an equivalent Public Record Act request w/ a state, and am kind of annoyed that I have to use the state's court system
Doesn't feel super partial and a couple law journals have written about how its not partial at all in this state and should be improved by the legislature
This is part of a class division where we cannot practically exercise our rights which are clearly enumerated in public law. Only people with money or connections can even attempt to get many kinds of records.
It’s wrong and government employees involved should be fired, and perhaps seriously punished. If people at NIST had faced real public scrutiny and sanction for their last round of sabotage, perhaps we wouldn’t see delay and dismissal by NIST.
Delay of responding to these requests is yet another kind of sabotage of the public NIST standardization processes. Delay in standardization is delay in deployment. Delay means mass surveillance adversaries have more ciphertext that they can attack with a quantum computer. This isn’t a coincidence, though I am sure the coincidence theorists will come out in full force.
NIST should be responsive in a timely manner and they should be trustworthy, we rely on their standards for all kinds of mandatory data processing. It’s pathetic that Americans don’t have several IG investigations in parallel covering NIST and NSA behavior. Rather we have to rely on a professor to file lawsuits for the public (and cryptographers involved in the standardization process) to have even a glimpse of what is happening. Unbelievable but good that someone is doing it. He deserves our support.
> This is part of a class division where we cannot practically exercise our rights which are clearly enumerated in public law. Only people with money or connections can even attempt to get many kinds of records.
As someone with those resources, I'm still kind of annoyed because I think this state agency is playing chess accurately too. My request was anonymous through my lawyer and nobody would know that I have these documents, while if I went through the court - even if it was anonymous with the ACLU being the filer - there would still be a public record in the court system that someone was looking for those specific documents, so that's annoying
1 reply →
Even though I broadly agree with what you've written here ... the situation in question isn't really about NIST/NSA response to FOIA requests at all.
It's about whether the US government has deliberately acted to foist weak encryption on the public (US and otherwise), presumably out of desire/belief that it has the right/need to always decrypt.
Whether and how those agencies respond to FOIA requests is a bit of a side-show, or maybe we could call it a prequel.
2 replies →