Questions to the public should be phrased: “Do you want Chinese style surveillance to be advanced in the United States?”
DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
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Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#22I’ve posted plenty of times on HN about the danger of the government being overly involved in tech and the last thing you should want if you value your liberty is more government involvement. I’ve also warned that giving government more power to “protect” people from big tech would come back to bite the very people who for some strange reason trust government. Every time I’ve been downvoted to oblivion. Now the chick…
So, you can't trust the government to oversee the tech companies. You can't trust companies to protect privacy. You can't trust voters/users to make good decisions on voting for the government or choosing the "right" companies to support. That doesn't leave a lot of options, unfortunately.
It’s called free will.
You can logout of Facebook
You can not use Google and use an ad ad blocker.
You can buy online from some place besides Amazon
You can not buy a mobile phone running an operating system written by an ad company.
What you can’t easily do is change your government.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad they just went with it? I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
> why people would say mathematical functions are bad. People don't think 'encryption' is a mathematical function. They think it's like a radar detector in your car. "Why would you have it unless you intend on speeding?" [goes their thought process] "Oh I use this frequently and things I do every day would be totally broken without it? Really?!" [is the realization we hope dialogue could bring]
Then again, given speeding is so widely accepted, radar detectors are legal to use in 49 out of 50 states. It would be nice if encryption was viewed the same way.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#24A small anecdote. A few years ago in an undergrad business class, we were having some discussion and the topic of encryption came up during one of my presentations. A student asked a question related to the ethics of encryption (I don't recall exactly what), and I was clearly confused by the question. To clear up confusion, the professor asked those who thought encryption was "bad" to raise their hand, and at least 6…
It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad they just went with it? I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
That's such a naïve way of putting it. People don't care about the mathematics behind it. They think it's "bad" because they think it enables terrorism and the spread of child sexual abuse imagery or whatever politicians have led them to believe.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#25Are there any concrete proposals on the table that can be looked at?
This feels to me like one of the typical debates where people are shooting at each other but nobody understands what they really are talking about.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#26[deleted]
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#27MITM-as-a-business has been nothing but a slow motion train wreck destroying individual liberty. FAANG may bicker with the DOJ/NSA (and Ma Bell) about who is in control of all the surveillance data, but none of them are fighting for we the people . They're all just jockeying over who gets to rule. The sane response to corporate totalitarianism is most certainly not government totalitarianism. Sadly with how the two p…
Very true. Nobody cares for the individual citizen. It’s just a power struggle by large players on the backs of the little guy.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#28Why does this say that the DOJ has been pushing for this since 2016? They have been pushing for some variation on this since basically forever. I first became aware of it back under Clinton with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip . And the debate has been essentially the same since. Law enforcement wants to be able to break security, and promises that their super secret, super safe system will provide eve…
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Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#29A small anecdote. A few years ago in an undergrad business class, we were having some discussion and the topic of encryption came up during one of my presentations. A student asked a question related to the ethics of encryption (I don't recall exactly what), and I was clearly confused by the question. To clear up confusion, the professor asked those who thought encryption was "bad" to raise their hand, and at least 6…
It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad they just went with it? I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
> I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
Encryption is more than just mathematical functions, it's the application of mathematical functions.
And the application is what matters, because it would be easy to say a Nuclear weapon is just physics or that a bio-weapon is just chemistry.
Clearly, how you use basic principles matters.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#30So terrorists will use one-time pads and other strong encryption and everyone else will have their information exposed on a massive scale when the backdoors inevitably are exploited.