Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 189 posts

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

#71

Post by esoterica »

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…

> The rights which are in danger need to be bundled so that the whims of a particular time and place do not permanently sacrifice a right.

If the people who wrote the constitution had such a good grasp of what the correct fundamental rights were, why did they allow slavery to happen? Why did they only allow land-owning white males to vote? If they were not morally infallible, and we accept that their opinions on those issues were justifiably superceded by future generations, then why are we not allowed to critically examine the rights enumerated in the constitution and question which of them are no longer tenable today, instead of a priori dismissing any possible challenge to the constitution as a stupid "whim of a particular time and place".

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

#72

Post by esoterica »

speedplane wrote: post #69
esoterica wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> all people inherently born free

All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.

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

#73

Post by anon463637 »

I'm surprised he's not joining the Starr/Dershowitz impeachment defense. BTW, Dershowitz wrote a book that boldly, intellectually-dishonestly conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In his mind, Godwin's law doesn't exist and anyone who's critical of Israel must be silenced by waving around dishonest, duplicitous, hasty generalizations for purely political purposes. Also, pro-Likud college groups (who are often funded and staffed by Likud) also do this very effectively to nonviolent, peaceful BDS supporters; they want no debate, just banning, canceling and expelling anyone who's against their crusade to keep the Christian evangelicals giving them carte blanche in the West Bank and giving them billions.

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

#74

Post by jacobolus »

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…

> Take the right to bear arms as an example. In most other nations, if it exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of government.

In the US, the “right to bear arms” is a right to own a weapon as part of a “well-regulated militia”, with the idea that the nation was not originally intended to have a standing army, because it was believed that standing armies were a threat to the security of a “free State”.

It goes directly along with the third amendment against the quartering of soldiers in private houses.

A maximalist personal right to carry weapons everywhere all the time was invented post facto by gun manufacturers and pro-gun activists in the recent past. Notice that the same pro-gun activists are uninterested in the “well regulated” part, and are generally military enthusiasts uncritical of the most expensive and lethal standing army in the history of the world.

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

#75

Post by speedplane »

esoterica wrote: post #72
speedplane wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> all people inherently born free All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.

> All people are born vulnerable to being beaten up and coerced by the guy with the biggest club. There is no "inherent" freedom in nature.

Well humans don't live in traditional Darwinian nature, our brains have evolved beyond that. A key distinction between humans and animals is our ability to think and imagine. Freedom, at it's root, is based on the idea that people have an inherent right to "think" and believe.

If "thought" is an intrinsic right, then it follows that freedom to think should be protected. It further follows that to protect thought, we need to protect speech, religion, certain aspects of privacy (i.e., you can't freely think if you're constantly being watched). A whole moral code can be built from the basic concept of the right to think.

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

#76

Post by salawat »

joe_the_user wrote: post #50
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…

I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread derail.

They are more intertwined than you think.

What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your privacy to the putative end of arms control?

People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear up and down the street it's only -X and not -Z. It is -Z and it is -X. Period.

It's why I've begun to fear the legislator that is seemingly able to break the law by making laws they are not empowered to make, and a politicalized judiciary that doesn't spend their time enforcing a strict obeyance of legislation to common language, and administrative lawmakers in the executive that are never double checked.

The world passed on to the generations after us will be a grim place indeed if we keep leaving them more and more shackled by the overwhelming detritus of the legislative hooliganry of our age.

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

#77

Post by matheusmoreira »

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?)

There will never be a time where it won't make sense. Governments can and do become tyrannical and the population should always have the right and the means to wage war against it instead of suffering helplessly under its boot.

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

#78

Post by blackflame »

I’m a republican and I totally disagree with Barr’s push. I honestly believe that once enough people explain to Trump the implications of unlocking one phone he’s pragmatic enough not to unbottle that genie. He’s been much more reserved than many would have expected given the loudness of his bark.

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

#79

Post by ohazi »

joe_the_user wrote: post #53
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 e…

You're right of course, but theory and practice look very different.

The "I don't care how cryptography works, why can't we just have a backdoor?" crowd is imagining that a magical piece of "common sense" legislation is capable of solving this problem. Yes, they can pass something, but it isn't going to work.

Because two days after it passes, they'll have courts full of obstinate people who refuse to provide keys for their homebrew encrypted messaging systems. Sure, you can jail them indefinitely, but that just highlights how obviously unsolved the problem remains.

Post reply on HN