Comment by ButlerianJihad
4 days ago
djb has always been as outlandishly activist and combative as he is intelligent and competent.
Anyone who attributes public motives or activity or blame to "the NSA" automatically gets dropped into the "conspiracy theorist" bin, as far as I'm concerned.
DJB is the same person who created qmail, the mail transfer agent which was ridiculously secure because of a series of over-the-top design decisions; for example, each file in the mail queue was named after the inode it was stored in, meaning you couldn't copy your mail queue to another server if your original one was having issues (unless you cloned the whole filesystem). Also, all configuration was done at compile time, including what UIDs and GIDs to run as, meaning it was very difficult to build it once and re-use it on multiple systems unless you were very careful to make them identical, which is fine because you weren't allowed to distribute compiled binaries.
He maintained that it was the most secure option available, which was technically true until the technology around mail transfer started improving with things like SPF records. qmail didn't support them and wouldn't support them, patches weren't accepted, and the only way to use things like SPF (to reduce spam) was through unofficial community patches that could never be upstreamed.
qmail was far better than sendmail at the tiume, and honestly it probably still is to a large degree, but, like forcing users to change their password every week, it was a case of security being so tight that users had to break it in order to make the system functional.
All this to say that, while DJB is undoubtedly insightful and intelligent, I'm wary of any of his claims of 'this isn't secure enough' because of his past history of making things so secure as to be inflexibly unmanagable.
Funny thing about conspiracy "theory" is that a lot of the time the theory turns out to be true. In my view, the impulse to dismiss any suggestion of clandestine group activity (except if it's China's government, or Russia's, or Iran's, or...) as a "theory" is most likely the result of a psychological operation.
The Dale Gribbles of the world are not a particularly common character to meet in real life but that's the image evoked by "conspiracy theorist" no matter who the pejorative is aimed at, no matter the arguments they make nor the evidence they present. "Conspiracy theorist" is a thought-stopping, ad hominem cliché, with no place in serious discussion, yet it is widely used in exactly that; the possibility of conspiracy itself is what is eschewed in such discussions.
> Funny thing about conspiracy "theory" is that a lot of the time the theory turns out to be true.
I would love to see any sources on this claim.
A lot of "conspiracy theories" end up being true in some vague way; "the NSA is spying on all of us", yeah, that was true. The NSA is using satellites to read our thoughts? Not so much. Still, people will point to things like the Snowdon leaks to prove that the US government cannot be trusted (which is true) and therefore all the other claims that people make are also true.
The reality is that most conspiracy theories are impossible, either from a technical sense or a logistical one. The extreme examples, like "the earth is flat and the governments are hiding it" or "COVID isn't real and the vaccine is going to kill everyone but every government and doctor on earth is secretly in on it" get shrugged off as "well, not THOSE ones obviously", but most of the rest I've ever seen are also completely unbelievable.
Here's the thing: anyone can come up with a theory and stitch together the most circumstantial "evidence" to "prove" it, combining misinformation, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation to produce something that feels like it could be true on its face if people don't do any real digging, and most don't. I've yet to see a "conspiracy theory" backed by any actual hard evidence; they seem to entirely spring from an overactive imagination and are then "justified" and "proven" by finding other facts to fit the narrative retroactively.
Is there clandestine activity? Absolutely. Are there groups of people trying to manipulate situations and lie to the public for their own gain? Almost certainly. Do people with unsourced, unproven conspiracy theories make it easier for governments to get away with whatever they want because the rampant proliferation of crackpot theories allows for a convenient smokescreen whenever the truth starts to come out? Also yes.
Even if only 10% of conspiracy theories are true, which they are not, the people repeating them do more harm than good by doing so in a way that discredits themselves and others.
The idea of the conspiracy theorist is a hyperbole fabricated in the public mind by the "almost certain" activity of "groups of people trying to manipulate situations and lie to the public for their own gain". It's not that a reasonably plausible theory being discussed will logically lend credence to less plausible and unrelated ones, it's that the public is conditioned to believe that it does. That way, public discussion of any conspiracy in theory is verboten by the "conspiracy theory" thought-stopper, regardless of the theory's plausibility. Because, as you say yourself, it makes it easier for conspiracy in practice to go unnoticed in the public sphere. From a Bayesian perspective, the problem is less likely caused by the crazy people who have a poor grasp on reality than the people who not only have a reason to emphasize the crazy people (because it de-emphasizes themselves), but also the means.