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Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

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

#61

Post by corporate_shi11 »

rcoveson wrote: post #47
corporate_shi11 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oftentimes systemic crime manifests more as an erosion of trust in institutions and the healthy functioning of a society than as something which impacts individuals in a direct way on a regular basis. For instance, consider Mexican organized crime (cartels). Cartels wield a huge amount of illicit influence and generally make everyone's lives much worse, but most people aren't being kidnapped or confronted by cartels…

> Law enforcement not being able to access encrypted data severely limits our ability to prosecute and convict criminals who use these secure communications to conduct their business, and brings the creeping threat of social decay ever closer. The impact of organized crime pales in comparison to that of authoritarian regimes. The "creeping threat of social decay" argument gives me chills; it's exactly the slogan I im…

And yet, just last year over 100 Mexican politicians were murdered by cartels. The Mexican army itself has lost battles to the cartels as their influence steadily grows. Many municipalities in Mexico defer to the cartels in which true power and influence resides.

So while you speculate on some made up authoritarian movement subverting democracy in America, I look on in horror as democracy in Mexico is being subverted in real time by organized crime and the creeping social decay and corruption that comes with it. 100 politicians assassinated in a single year!

This is happening right across our border and if not for our robust law enforcement both at the border and throughout the country, it would be much worse here too. That is what I fear, and it is why I don't want criminals to be able to hide behind encryption.

Everything good in our society comes from law and order. Without it, there is only chaos and destruction.

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

#62

Post by leeoniya »

robomartin wrote: post #44
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…

> 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…

> That's another common misconception. You can say whatever you want. And you can enjoy the full consequences of what you said.

if the government can make these rules and bring these consequences, then what exactly is free about this "free" speech?

north koreans are free to say whatever they want, too, and enjoy the full consequences of what they say.

the only difference is what kind of speech can bring what severity of consequences.

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

#63

Post by njharman »

rcoveson wrote: post #11

There's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards the latter, and I think this is the reason: My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history. So why is it that there is so much suppo…

Why? Because evolution has made us fear for our children. Rational self-interest is not evolutionary useful after reproducing. Expendind all your resourses ensuring your offspring grow and spread is.

Irrational overprotection such as feel good tough on crime is popular. Were as, more abstract measures which would actual ell but aren't directly relatable to threatening your child are not.

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

#64

Post by graycat »

rcoveson wrote: post #11

There's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards the latter, and I think this is the reason: My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history. So why is it that there is so much suppo…

> So why is it that there is so much support for tough-on-crime policies that decrease popular freedom in obvious ways?

A standard answer:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

~ H.L. Mencken

from

https://www.peakprosperity.com/2019-year-in-review-part-1/#c...

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

#65

Post by Klathmon »

rlucas wrote: post #21
olliej wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But encryption doesn’t have “mostly safe”. It has safe and not safe. There isn’t a meaningful in between.

Unclear why this was heavily downvoted. Modern encryption is, eventually, either effectively unbreakable, or effectively worthless. Or is there widespread knowledge of exploits that can recover, say, 25% of a plaintext reliably, but no more?

I'd argue that there are levels of security and encryption, mostly around what data is secret.

If I make an encrypted phone call to you, there are a few "levels" of information. There's the exact information exchanged on the call, the amount of information exchanged but not it's value, the identities of those in the call, the date and time and duration of the call, perhaps the hardware used to make the call, etc...

Encryption isn't an all or nothing thing, it often involves tradeoffs and giving up some security for convenience or the other way around. And in some areas there are laws about what must be kept secret and what must be visible to the government (like in anti-money laundering laws).

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

#66

Post by esoterica »

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.

This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected. In the absence of such an arrangement the phrase "I have the right to do X" has as much meaning and validity as Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". It's not a wrong statement, it's just a completely semantically empty one.

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

#67

Post by njharman »

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…

There's no correlation between how easy or widespread knowledge on something is and it's illegality.

Everyone knows how to strangle someone. Every one can trivially learn what to use to poison someone. Murder is still illegal.

We outlaw things we don't want to happen.

If we don't want privacy. We should outlaw encryption. If we do want privacy, encryotion must remain legal.

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

#68

Post by joshuamorton »

jeffdavis wrote: post #55
joshuamorton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Commerce clause, among others. There are all kinds of federal regulations and bans that have been upheld as constitutional. Claiming that they aren't really is wishful, not legal, thinking.

> Interestingly, even the 1st Amendment did not originally prevent states from infringing on the freedom of speech

This isn't correct. It's the due process clause that is operative, and the supreme Court has ruled that states can't remove rights, including those technically protected only from the federal gov, without due process.

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

#69

Post by speedplane »

esoterica wrote: post #66
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…

> 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. This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected. In…

>> Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT

> This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected.

The OP is clearly being sloppy with their word usage (and their all-caps usage), but I think what they may be trying to say is that the constitution generally prohibits the government from doing something, rather than granting an individual the right to do it.

For example, the first amendment doesn't say you have an affirmative right to free speech, just that "Congress shall make no law .. abridging the freedom of speech". Most constitutional "rights" are actually rules prohibiting the government from doing something (e.g., prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures).

On a practical level, the distinction may seem semantic, but there are important moral implications: all people inherently born free, and government/society restricts that freedom. Some of those restrictions are more acceptable than others, and that's what the constitution tries to delineate. If it was the reverse (i.e., the government granted you rights), then it would imply you were not free to do them in the first place.

Although the two approaches are similar on a practical level, the former approach emphasizes freedom to a greater degree.

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

#70

Post by rcoveson »

agumonkey wrote: post #46
rcoveson wrote: post #11

There's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards the latter, and I think this is the reason: My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps more true now than ever in history. So why is it that there is so much suppo…

You could argue that the whole gun carrying ethos in the USA is flawed for the same reasons. There was a time when it made sense, and now it's driven by other forces (nation scale emotions?)

What causes you to say that guns make less sense today than they did when the second amendment was written? Their effectiveness in guerrilla warfare continues to be proven, and their negative impact as an instrument of homicide has trended steeply downward over the years.
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