Continuing my rant from last week, what does this headline:
have in common with this one:
New York Times provides new details about NSA backdoor in crypto spec
other than that they're both from Ars Technica?
They're both reports about the abuse of power in the pursuit of lofty goals (national security). Next the abuses will be in pursuit of base goals (the preservation of power), if history is any guide. I'm not saying there's anyway back-I believe we're already over the precipice. I'm just pointing out the road signs as we slide by, into a dark and ugly future. The wheel turns.
Or maybe not: NIST: "we are not deliberately... working to undermine or weaken encryption." At least one government agency, and it's still one of my favorites, doesn't appear to be in the League....yet.
Maybe I'm a cynic, or have read too much dystopian sci-fi, but I'm reminded of this poem, by William Butler Yeats:
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
To paraphrase the poignant words of Edward R. Murrow, "Goodnight and goodluck"--to all of us.
Mark V2
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