On 1/7/14 4:28 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote: > Hi Stephan, [ ... ] >> I¹m personally convinced that, on balance, the >> world would be a much worse place without ³attacks² than with. > > I see. So you're all for hacking into Belagcom then? I'm sure they'll > be a little sad to hear that. Esp. if the next attacker is not a > government agency. I think that it's pretty clear to most of us that, whether or not we think that government eavesdropping should be trivially easy, that thinking that the ability for them to do so is not the same thing that thinking that attacks from other malefactors would be a good thing. It'd be somewhat more compelling to argue that enabling trivially easy eavesdropping by one party enables it for another, which I also think is a more correct argument. If I were Stephan I'd be reading what you wrote and thinking "No, that's not what I think - Stephen's wrong" rather than "Stephen has a point." At a minimum it might be good to argue what's been actually written rather than to impute all sorts of views to someone and then argue against those. At any rate I do think that we can probably discuss this without people who disagree with you being characterized as naive, enthusiasts of various sorts of attacks, etc. At any rate I don't agree with much of what Stephan has written but I do agree that there appears to be some risk that consensus is likely to be asserted despite what seem to me to be some significant disagreements over publication status. Melinda