Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 18,668
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Yeah, enough honest people will data-hoard and defend at least enough of old signed versions of the documents.I think you’d be surprised. More important, it means that all skullduggery related to the alterations or omissions done to the original, leave a specific record of such action.That is a big assumption at this point.
Consider what WOULD have been done with the Epstein files if that was not the case. It would have meant that every lie Pam Blondi told would have/could have been “made true”. I suspect that she thought that it could be done, just as you did.
It doesn't matter if those documents are found sitting on a laptop in Trump's bathroom for the last decade, or even located in a deleted file reference region on an otherwise broken hard drive. It doesn't matter if every dubious hacker in the world has had access to the laptop. All that matters is that the signatures match and the document itself is "intelligible" (there MAY be a document that produces an identical signature, but due to probabilistics, the only "readable" version is going to be the document of interest).
This is in fact what we need to be doing with regards to camera hardware btw, making the capture chip with an onboard signing enclave and a reliable clock that is also difficult to mess with and which would be tamper-evident.
The problem is that any such schema will be strategically weakened by government or corporate interests to force monitoring capabilities to exist (such as tracking camera purchases and signing keys to track anonymous sources), and so any such technology that doesn't ship with the ability for users to generate and establish their own signing keys, technology that allows the company to retain or control the keys a device automatically signs with, should be fundamentally rejected.
In this way, you could take a picture with a camera and then any reasonably incapable actor can be trusted that whatever went through that lens came through the physical lens as an image of light at that date and no later (so, anyone short of government or a Rosthschild would have a reasonable expectation of honesty when presenting such a signed source image).
This has been and will remain the only viable solution for digital trust going forward: people actually hinging their claims on their established reputation for honesty.
This will lead to the "one good lie" phenomena wherein people capable of figuring out how to lie even once in a situation where lying is difficult will be able to occasionally perpetrate great injustice, but it will overall be less injustice than we experience today with an inability to validate due to a total absence of signing/trust infrastructure for such images.

