Why aren't cryptographic ring signatures used as a solution to the "fake news" problem?

Why aren't cryptographic ring signatures used as a solution to the "fake news" problem?

More specifically, I'm referring to the recent troubling trend of news stories breaking with some crazy sensational story where there's a key detail that's attributed to an "anonymous source familiar with the matter" or whatever.

I sometimes look up why these journalists insist I should trust an anonymous source and it always boils down to some varation of "trust the journalist to trust the source" Essentially blind faith with all the discretion at the hands of the journalist. How can I be assured that an someone unscruplous isn't just making it up to make a name for themselves? We have no way of verifying that an anonymous source even exists.

Wouldn't cryptographic ring signatures be a more transparent solution to this? Why shouldn't something like this be a completely trustless process?

Say, for political leaks, what if twitter implemented public GPG keys and included it on every teitter profile? You could easily sign a ring signature and verify to the public that yes, it is actually a "high-ranking goverment official" who sad that.

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i dont know but DRUMPF RAPED ME IM A GIRL BTW if you dont trust me your a sexist pig gimme media attention and money

Why would anyone sign up for such a scheme. That would immediately indicate that you intend to leak.

Based and redpilled

Not if it became the norm and everyone began doing it.
Only problem is that ain’t gonna happen.

>I sign up for your scheme
>boss leaves me in a blacksite
>mfw they get the car battery

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We already have CSPAN. No politician will take time to verify everything he/she has said this way unless they're typing it through computer with some fancy text to speech for everyone they are speaking to.

Well, barring some law that says people who hold office must have an asymmetrical public key pair, just make it integrated with social media already used. Hence, part of standard twitter sign up that you get a private and public PGP key. Politicans like to tweet about stupid shit, right?

And I'm sorry for being a brainlet, how does in any way certify that the person is actually a high ranking official?

Wouldn't just a good old video statement work better?

Another boner that you've made is assuming they will verify everything they say and not just what they want other people to hear while whistling a different tune behind closed doors. It's completely unenforceable.

Ring signatures basically work like a one-way mathematical function, similar to normal asymmetric crypto.

But ring signature systems take a list of public keys, combine it with a secret key of one of those public keys to create a message digest. The message digest can be checked against the public keys to verify that it was signed with one of the private keys of those public keys without revealing which one it is.

If you're talking about whether or not the leaker is leaking in good faith, that's not really relevant to the problem at hand: how do you credibly leak a secret while remaining anonymous without requiring people to put their trust in a third party actor with nebulous motives? And how can the public verify that these leaks are true and not just the equivent of "my dad works for nintendo"?

>non-repudiation
>anonymous practice
brainlet

>a·non·y·mous
>/əˈnänəməs/Submit
>adjective
>adjective: anonymous
>(of a person) not identified by name

selecting a single word without context is not how communication through a common language works, brainlet

The entire point of ring signatures is that they ARE repudiable you fucking mong. With a ring signature, you can say "that could've been any of the other 500 people in that ring. Not me" That is the exact definition of repudiability

Imagine being this much of a brainlet and thinking you're smart. Yikes.

So you want the leaker to be anonymous, but the group from which he is from to not be anonymous?
Sounds like a dangerous way to troll.
In the case of a politician ring, you will start seeing politicians deliberately trolling the system and pushing false information.
The main problem with fake news isn't implementation, it's people.

I wasn't speaking of leakers at all. You're getting into a completely different discussion. Do I give a shit if Snowden has a key that I can use to verify something he said? Does the key mean he's telling the truth? It does not.

You misunderstand then. I am not speaking to the veracity of what the leakers are saying, I'm talking about the people who act as intermediaries for leakers and how a member of the public can verify that a person who claimed to have spoke to an "anonymous high-ranking government official" actually did speak to someone without implictly trusting the intermedary's word on it. Nothing about the content of the leaks.

In your Snowden analogy, it's more like: imagine if Snowden chose to remain anonymous (somehow). Glenn Greenwald still reports on it. How do we verify that the person Glenn Greenwald talked to actually was NSA beyond just trusting Glenn Greenwald?

Most sources are just made up to match the narrative. Even if you had a real key you can still just make stuff up. Or you gave your key away.
Technology isn't the answer to this issue. Personal credulity is.

Beyond using this as a rubber stamp given by the person that made the statement, it still would not prevent fake news. You must consider the source as well as the key. A better solution would be to have CSPAN put their entire archive and any future recordings online for everyone to see. This way you get it directly from the horses mouth.

The US government has a vested interest in not having any of its shit leaked. Why would they adopt a ring signature when they could instead make everyone use an individual GPG key so that they couldn't anonymously leak information?