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Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

wsj.com

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Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#51

Post by robomartin »

jeffdavis wrote: post #41
robomartin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

> The typical cry is "We should do the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that right. No, we can do that. The government can merely assume the power, as governments so often do. Paper is not a defense. A "Bill of Rights" containing only a single right would be of zero value. What is a defense is the bundling of recognized rights, as in the Bill of Rights. It's like an alliance: an assaul…

No argument there. I never understood the obsession with AR-15's when their contribution to crime, over, say, the last 20 years, is basically a rounding error. The only answer is: politics taking advantage of emotion for political gains.

The best example of just how stupid the whole "assault ban gun" idea is found in Chicago, where the weekly carnage has not relented in years and the weapon of choice is nearly 100% handguns.

The problem politician have with these issues is that they can't actually get behind the reality of the problems because reality goes against their political power and invalidates all of their vote-gathering tools. If the fear-mongering about "assault rifles" was honestly matched to crime data in the public square they would, at a minimum, look like fools and if portrayed honestly, as liars and manipulators.

We humans are really funny species. Imagine what we could do if we could bring more reason, common sense and honesty into our affairs.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#52

Post by graycat »

> WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William Barr returned to the Justice Department last year, law-enforcement officials briefed him on how encryption and other digital-security measures were hindering investigations into everything from child sex abuse to terrorism.

> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved?

So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"?

It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of digits.

Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct public key infrastructures. The math and corresponding source code became readily available.

So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital information that only intended persons can decrypt and read.

This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),

Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.

etc.

In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.

So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996.

LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well!

So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996?

I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So, maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating?

Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are cinema noir of crime dramas. In general it's interesting to use those old movies to get insight into what US pop culture was like, and how different it was from the present, those several decades ago.

In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier!

So, if Apple wants to use unbreakable encryption to sell smartphones, around the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those old movies!

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#53

Post by joe_the_user »

ohazi wrote: post #43

The differences in opinion on this topic are almost entirely defined by whether or not the person has the most basic understanding of what cryptography actually is. Comment #1: > This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the government mandat…

I sympathize with your position but I think we need to imagine the counter argument the state would make. That argument would be "you don't understand the determination of the state. If you are correct and the threat exists in basic arithmatic and if we determine the threat is too great, we outlaw basic arithmatic. That is the level the state will go to." See O'Brien's speech in concerning "if we determine that 1+1 equals 3, we will make 1+1 equal 3", etc.

IE, yes, it's impossible but that still doesn't mean they keep trying harder and harder and more and more destructively.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#54

Post by graycat »

robomartin wrote: post #51
jeffdavis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The typical cry is "We should do the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that right. No, we can do that. The government can merely assume the power, as governments so often do. Paper is not a defense. A "Bill of Rights" containing only a single right would be of zero value. What is a defense is the bundling of recognized rights, as in the Bill of Rights. It's like an alliance: an assaul…

No argument there. I never understood the obsession with AR-15's when their contribution to crime, over, say, the last 20 years, is basically a rounding error. The only answer is: politics taking advantage of emotion for political gains. The best example of just how stupid the whole "assault ban gun" idea is found in Chicago, where the weekly carnage has not relented in years and the weapon of choice is nearly 100% h…

AR-15's?

They don't look like your grand father's deer rifle or duck hunting shot gun and instead look like a military weapon, e.g., the Russian AK-47.

With the usual technical and US legal description, the AR-15 is just a "semi-automatic rifle". But due to looks, they get called "assault weapons" like the fully automatic AK-47.

Sooo, some people get headlines talking about "assault rifles".

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#55

Post by jeffdavis »

joshuamorton wrote: post #40
vageli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > All individual rights are carved out from the default government > Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. > Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require govern…

Prohibition didn't require an amendment, except insofar as the people pushing for it wanted to make it hard to overturn. State and local governments had outlawed alcohol since the founding. If outlawing alcohol were somehow special, that wouldn't have been possible.

"State and local governments had outlawed alcohol since the founding."

That's because the scope of state power is very wide in the Constitution. The federal government is much more constrained (or was intended to be), and outlawing alcohol with an act of Congress would be a violation of the 10th Amendment.

Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally prevent states from infringing on the freedom of speech. It begins "Congress shall make no law...". Later the 14th Amendment changed that through "incorporation", which is a process I don't fully understand.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ohazi wrote: post #43

The differences in opinion on this topic are almost entirely defined by whether or not the person has the most basic understanding of what cryptography actually is. Comment #1: > This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the government mandat…

[deleted]

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#57

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

robomartin wrote: post #34
javajosh wrote: post #19

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

> Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them.

Imagine a bakery puts out a sign that says "the bread you can buy here was not baked by a bakery, it was only recognized to be bread". Does that mean that the bread that comes out of their oven that they earlier stuck dough into was indeed not baked by them?

How does the fact that a piece of paper says something make what it says a fact? It is obviously nonsense that rights could exist without a structure to enforce them. Whether you call it "recognized" or "granted" is completely irrelevant, the fact of the matter is: If the government decides to act as if the right did not exist, then the right does not exist, and governments in general are very well capable of acting as if rights did not exist, and the fact that some piece of paper says "recognize" does not inherently change that, governments in general are also very well capable of ignoring pieces of paper.

The only thing that protects rights is sufficiently many people acting to protect them.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#58

Post by jeffdavis »

roywiggins wrote: post #49
robomartin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All organizations seek to expand their influence and power over time This is true. IANAL, but my guess is that a lot of this mucking around with firearms regulations is because people have not said "enough!" and taken it all the way up to the US Supreme Court (except for a few cases I am aware of). In other words, can California (or any State) really prohibit magazines with more than 10 rounds? Can they really proh…

> In other words, can California (or any State) really prohibit magazines with more than 10 rounds? Can they really prohibit any kind of carry (concealed or not)? Where exactly is it that they --the government-- acquired the right to do such things. The tenth amendment?

The 2nd Amendment specifically refers to "the people", therefore the power to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms is "prohibited by it [the Constitution] to the States", and therefore the right to keep and bear arms is reserved to the people.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#59

Post by whytaka »

robomartin wrote: post #34
javajosh wrote: post #19

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

And yet all it takes is a terrorist attack to change all that.

I think OP didn’t mean to discuss the philosophical difference between grant and recognize though. Just that for each individual right, recognized or granted, we take a step away from totalitarianism on the spectrum of political freedom.

Re: Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

#60

Post by bananocurrency »

robomartin wrote: post #34
javajosh wrote: post #19

Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning, executing, and avoiding detection of a crime. All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were lik…

> All individual rights are carved out from the default government Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US. Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government i…

I sure love when people compare lethal force to encryption because it's definitely a great analogy for free speech that isn't disingenuous in the slightest.
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