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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

It's this kind of stuff that really scares me.

1) Some government agency builds massive computer system containing lots of information about the general public.

2) There are numerous obvious holes in the "massive" computer system for obvious reasons (government's haste, lack of oversight, etc).

3) The government's computers get hacked.

In my opinion, numbers two and three are inevitable when number one takes place.

Something similar just happened in Canada a few years ago with all of our driving information: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/11/06/service-ontario-kios...

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Author Frank Herbert imagined at least one response to what might these days be referred to as "frictionless (government) sharing": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage

And this is one of the reasons why the argument 'got nothing to hide' doesn't count. When a hacker can access all this information it becomes easy to steal someones identity.

Can you imagine the level of backlash any government would receive if it was discovered identities were being stolen directly from them?

Something like that would be grounds for a complete loss of trust in my books.

And it will always be happening, as long as data gets stored.

The only way to prevent it is to not store data.

That's not entirely true. Take for example, passwords. If your requirement is "store passwords securely, so they can only be used to check logins", then you implement that as salted, one-way encryption. But if you add the shadow requirement "and be able to retrieve anyone's password when the government requests it", then your password storage will inevitably be much more vulnerable.

Short of a one-time pad, there's no such thing as truly secure, only theoretically secure according to time and processing constraints.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just saying, it's not mathematically impossible to crack a salted encryption without the cipher key.

Agreed, data not stored is more secure than data that's stored, but I stand by my point that data stored in such a way as to provide the minimal necessary access can be substantially more secure than data stored in such a way as to provide that access, plus additional back-door access for spooks.

The only way? I beg to differ.

There is always more than one way to skin a cat.

You're missing:

0) Your personal hardware has lots of holes in it. which changes the equation quite a bit, doesn't it?

My head has no trouble keeping my name, address, social, and other pertinent information safe from prying eyes.

I don't really know what you're getting at with this comment.

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