Both avenues must be pursued. One without the other is useless. Pursuing the technical-only approach will fail if the use of such technology is made illegal.
That's actually a worry. I wonder if the NSA's reaction is not going to make backdoors mandatory. But in a way the genie is out of the bottle. Most of the crypting technologies are freely available and the US can't de-invent and de-distribute them.
SecurityAwareCustomer: "I've noticed that my VPN and ssh connections have started to lag & disconnect frequently"
Comcast: "We've gotten several reports on this issue. To better serve our customers we've implemented a software designed to optimize network traffic routing. To do that, the software must do some deep packet inspection. Unfortunately, if a traffic is encrypted this software must go through all its known packet types before determining that it's encrypted. This takes time and also because the incoming buffer might fill up before it's done determining the packet is from an encrypted stream, said packets might get dropped entirely."
SecurityAwareCustomer: "So, encrypted traffic's performance is severely degraded then?"
Comcast: "We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause"
SecurityAwareCustomer: "Couldn't you check if it's known encryption first, then try other packet types?"
Comcast: "The software vendor has been made aware of the issue. Due to net-neutrality laws & regulations, the vendor was assigned to us by the USGov and they must review any proposed changes to the software. This legal process could take a long time."
