191–200 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you don't personally need guns, but you do need physical safety at each end of the communication. Physical safety is provided by people with guns.
Those people can be policemen.
If you buy that argument you could also argue that govermnets should be trusted as a holder of cryptogrphic keys.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
and as the original intent went, it made sense. but owning a gun doesn't really protect one from a modern intrusive government, but it does raise the risk of gun related death to those around you by a significant margin
I think it dies give some protection. Sure when swat comes to your house, guns will not save you. However in a extrem case were masses of people feel threatened by government and their is real civil unrest, the cost for the govemnet to put this down by force will be massivly higher. In that sense its the same as encryption, it all boils down to an argument of economics. When the NSA wants to hack you, you are fucked.…
It didn't seem to stop them at Waco. Since they're getting army surplus from actual warzones I'm not sure the civilians can put up much resistance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gun and encryption are two completely different beast. With guns you can execute a crime, with encryption you cannot. It is true that you can plan a crime with the use of encryption, but we don't punish on intentions but only on facts. It is not illegal to plan how to kill someone, while it is illegal to actually kill somebody or to try to do it.
> With guns you can execute a crime, with encryption you cannot. What about the ransomware that encrypts your data and makes you pay money to have it decrypted? With both guns and crypto, I think we're all better off to focus on keeping the tool legal and selectively outlawing certain human behaviors that use the tool.
This is a legal problem, not a technical one, we should stop to find technicalities...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it dies give some protection. Sure when swat comes to your house, guns will not save you. However in a extrem case were masses of people feel threatened by government and their is real civil unrest, the cost for the govemnet to put this down by force will be massivly higher. In that sense its the same as encryption, it all boils down to an argument of economics. When the NSA wants to hack you, you are fucked.…
> However in a extrem case were masses of people feel threatened by government and their is real civil unrest, the cost for the govemnet to put this down by force will be massivly higher. It didn't seem to stop them at Waco. Since they're getting army surplus from actual warzones I'm not sure the civilians can put up much resistance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is almost irrelevant?
WhatsApp does not give an indication of what software the remote party runs, as far as I know. You'd have to trust the third party in order to rely on the encryption.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure that is the aim, but is it unconstitutional? How much can you degrade the killing power of a bullet before it becomes unconstitutional?
I don't know. How much can you impede the ability for minorities to vote before it becomes unconstitutional? How much torture can you get away with before it becomes unconstitutionally cruel and unusual? How much can you restrict the abortion rights of women before it runs afoul of the constitution and pre-existing precedent? It's people asking questions like that, and failing to respect the spirit of the constitutio…
As for the second amendment it has basically been totally gutted long ago since people have no access to true arms.
What does "undue burden" mean? Wouldn't it be very simple for WhatsApp to remove the encryption in the app? (Anyone can write an unencrypted app.) Could they be forced to do that? IMO that would be awful.
I find it disturbing how the intelligence and law enforcement community seem to think there is some kind of natural right for them to snoop on people. In case of the good old phone system, the very way that worked maked wiretapping very easy. The same was true for physical mail (one major reason why most states created and held on to the monopoly on mail for so long). With email and IM this is - again due to the way…
You're correct to point out that this debate is about a change in the staus quo: law enforcement used to be able to access the dominant communications system with a lawful order, proper crypto removes that capability. It is inevitable that this change, lwft unchecked, will increase citizen privacy AND decrease law enforcement effectiveness. The HN community is very aware of these privacy benefits, but skeptical about…
We have few ways to hide metadata and those are of major imprtance. Investigating crime is now far easier the it was at any time beore 1995 and the world did go to shit then.
The only reason the government "gave up" in the previous crypto war was because they decided to find ways to break or weaken crypto to their needs. I don't think this time will be any different, one way or another they will get access to our data.
Modern standards like SHA3 are designed far better and in a way that make it way harder for anybody to build in a backdoor.
This is one of the few areas we dont have to worry to much about.
What we need to worry about is addoption of good defaults by the large majority.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interpret the first amendment to mean we have a right to make sounds come out of our mouths. The content of those sounds, however, is not protected. Since there are an infinite number of combinations of sounds, banning political statements does not impact that right. You are still free to make infinite sounds. The amendment also does not cover the right to record that sound or to write thoughts down on paper. And w…
Thank you for this. This guy is either a supporter of Nanny States or has a massive lack of understanding of basic U.S. constitutional law.