To establish our understanding of why privacy and encryption are so important we need to learn from the events of history, this week we’re diving into the crypto wars. More specifically the US government’s attempts to restrict strong encryption being exported internationally.
I hope you all enjoy the video and also learn something!
Let us know what you think of this different style of video, we have some more similar videos lined up!
Such a sick video, it’s always crazy how close we seem to come to losing basic things like encryption.
I really enjoyed the video, I knew a bit about the subject but still ended up learning things.
My only remark:
While the goal of the video isn’t to explain encryption, it should be explained what the difference between a 40-bit encryption and a 128-bit encryption is. The former was easily breakable ,the EFF had even made available a tool to do that.
Yeah that’s a reasonable critique, I was trying to keep it approachable for non-technical viewers, maybe I could have gone into that a bit more but it felt largely out of scope for the video.
That’s totally fine, I wouldn’t have explained why 40 bit was not secure, just that it was.
@jordan there are some that argue that because the government considers encryption a weapon, the US can't legally ban encryption because it would violate, of all things, the Second Amendment 🤯.
They didn’t ban encryption per se, they just banned exports of it. But with the World Wide Web, anything posted on it can be accessed from anywhere - therefore it qualifies under ITAR. Also, even foreign students weren’t allowed to take encryption classes, so crazy…