211–220 of 312 posts
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If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down/narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?
Maybe, but I'd rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.
The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.
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I don't think so, as far as I know encrypted data doesn't really have a signature that can be easily spotted
It does, it looks random (hight entropy). Yes, measured data and unmarked compressed data have this same property, as do actual random data. But is does not look like 9 nines of false positive rate are a concern to those people.
We are told that if we stop going to the mall or sporting events out of fear, then the terrorists win. They also win if we lose our privacy rights in response to this or any other attack.
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Maybe, but I'd rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.
You wouldn't. The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.
Secret services should consider decrypted communication as a nice to have, but they should be completely capable of being effective without decrypting communication channels and listening on private citizens.
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If (almost) everyone who is not a terrorist were to give up encryption, then it would be much easier to track down/narrow down the terrorists if they keep using it, no?
Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message. And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with t…
Even without having encryption in main stream applications, like WhatsApp, it's child's play to communicate secretly. There are so many open source applications that allow you to do this, it wouldn't even be a speed bump for criminals. Targeting main stream applications only hurts main stream users. NYT should write an article about that.
Or to put it another way, "If you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will have encryption"
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I don't fully understand this line of thinking. To me, it's like saying "The belief that seat belts save lives might come as a surprise to these people who died in automobile accidents while wearing seat belts." It may indeed be that this kind of signals intelligence isn't actually helpful, but I don't think this is a very good argument either way. If there was a massive disruption of planned terrorist attacks, it is…
Exactly. Same reason you have locks on your doors even though they are easy to defeat. Tech types want to believe that the government is always overreaching and everything is a slippery slope to some other loss of freedom. Mixed in with a bit of overcooked paranoia thinking the government has enough time and energy to track down everyone and whatever laws they are breaking by reading their emails.
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You seem to be overlooking the obvious argument that if a small group of people use encryption, then you greatly reduce the number of messages that you need to flag. Furthermore, if someone on a Watch List starts using encryption then perhaps you have an imminent problem. I'm not on the side of reading messages but you missed the real argument being made. Typical HN. How about someone answering the argument that will…
> Typical HN. How about someone answering the argument that will really be made by governments instead of the pointless one the NSA, etc have already answered. You can downvote me but you don't get a downvote in governments around the world when they outlaw real encryption. I was ready to up-vote your argument because I agree with the first two paragraphs but the snark turned me off from supporting you. Leave it out…
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You wouldn't. The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.
Kind of like the TSA approved locks for your baggage. Those are very secure and can be opened only by the government officials, last I heard. The only downside is that those TSA master keys might become available to the third party somehow, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, since we can always trust the government to keep such information secure.
Someone posted a photo of master keys and Internet was, as usual, the Internet.