221–230 of 299 posts
How can they prevent this? What if I secure my messages with a known passphrase inside a picture of a rainbow using steganography? Are they just talking about decrypting the big players like Facebook Messenger and iMessage? Because you can't "prevent" encryption.
I disagree with the tone of the comments here. Encryption is scary. Of course law enforcement is dismayed by the possibility that certain kinds of crimes could leave behind no trace at all. What these people, who want to regulate encryption, don't seem to understand is that this is the downside of living in a free society. In a free society, people can commit crimes, and sometimes they can get away with them. We've m…
No, what they don’t understand is that the cryptography that protects your bank account is the exact same cryptography that (supposedly) makes law enforcement difficult. There’s no way to separate the two, any more than you can separate the arithmetic that is responsible for updating your bank account from the arithmetic that is responsible for updating the bank account of a Colombian drug lord.
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I for one are ready to give up my encryption when the politicians do it first and we see how well that works.
Next time someone tells me "Why would you need encryption if you have nothing to hide?" I'mma just answer with "Why do you need clothes then?"
I've seen politicians. I know why they need clothes.
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Sure. I wouldn't mandate it. There would be no incentive to mandate it, when the owner remains in legal, practical control all the time, even in court. I think most of us would still use it. To record our lives so you can review or share the good parts or prove something you said, heard or seen. It's already happening with phones (they just don't record all the time but that's mostly to technical limitations) and I t…
Then it is off-topic for the current discussion, is it? I thought you are making an argument, but it is just a distraction.
Surely the analogy would break down quickly on closer inspection, but politicians live and die by sound bites, not by thoughtful consideration and debate of all points of view.
So to fight fire with fire, when faced with the "protect the children" argument that stifles debate, counter with "a government who takes away everyone's encryption is one step away from taking away everyone's guns". Then see how that plays out with their constituents.
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Many years of reading on HN, I used to just accept that encryption is the best thing. And from a point of view of what will happen, that’s what will happen. But should we as a society want this? I would argue these days that it is far better to be able to reconstruct a conversation and prove someone said something. In case things go wrong, we have to have a way to establish truth, and prove things, so we can have fai…
> I would argue these days that it is far better to be able to reconstruct a conversation and prove someone said something. In case things go wrong, we have to have a way to establish truth, and prove things, so we can have fairness in outcomes. I'd love to have that capability. What matters is who controls it. If everything about me was constantly recorded but I was the person that decides if and when make some of t…
However, when you engage with another party and make promises, and then break them, the other party should have a way to prove what you said in a dispute. I think the default mode should not be “off the record”. Because most parties aren’t savvy enough to demand that you go “on the record” right before you talk. Instead, you can ask to go “off the record” so that will be the alert that none of your promises will matter during that period.
If being “on the record” is the default for all conversations, that’s what I’m talking about. The concept of “privacy” still applies to non-participants in the interaction.
The main question is, can we extend this expectation to other interactions not just conversations online? What if one of the participants had been carrying tiny body cameras and microphones, which has become more and more feasible to do?
You know how many rape crimes could be solved? Or police altercations? Imagine if everyone KNEW they were being recorded.
What if the cameras were not on the person’s body, but in the room? Surely we wouldn’t know, so the laws have to allow for it. But suppose we COULD legislate what these cameras did. One is to outlaw all cameras. The other is what if the video footage was always encrypted and it would require two keys:
1) M of N of the participants
2) a judge saying this is an active dispute / trial
It is in the interest of both parties to unlock the video once there is a court case, to help resolve what happened. Refusing to do so may be seen as an admission of guilt. The main reason for 1) is to allow people the option to be presumed guilty / held in contempt of court but not reveal the evidence against them. The problem is that they may be protecting some mob boss etc. so we may have to relax the condition 1) to just one of the parties. But recording entrapment still won’t be legal in two-party states.
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This like saying, what good of having a law against murder if there is still going to be murder.
Murder itself is wrong and causes harm to society. Using encryption by itself is not wrong and does not cause harm to society.
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> Now, if we have governments that punish people for being dissidents or engaging in victimless crimes, the answer is to fix the government and the laws, and not to sneak around. You might as well be saying that instead of having democracy and elections, the answer is to fix the government and the laws. You are putting the cart before the horse here: Sufficiently powerful individuals are the precondition for fixing t…
Perhaps it is the opposite — we would gradually replace all functions of government with technology :) We already have, to a large extent. The post office. Printing and letters patent and many kinds of licenses. Many kinds of clerks. And so on.
The post office is obviously not a central component of the government, it simply was operated by the government in the past because it was useful to have as a basic service to serve the economy.
The weirdest part of this argument is that law abiding people get no encryption while people who break the law will still have access to encryption, so how does it help you catch pedophiles? I don’t really understand how this will work in reality for things like SSL or ssh.
I think that's how it should be argued. Strong encryption software exists. It's on the internet. You can't make it disappear. If you outlaw it, law observing people won't use it. But how would you force a criminal not to use it if you can't force him not to abuse children?
First assume that a random-looking message is sent only by criminals.
Second, ignore the theoretical problems with measuring kolgomorov complexity of a message. That's just academic mumbo jumbo - "can I zip the message?" is good enough.
Third, buy $80 car battery at HD with $20 booster cables.
This is a good time to remember that police forces work for governments and not the other way around. Of course it would be easier for the police to catch bad guys if they had full-text search access to all conversations and content, worldwide. That doesn’t mean it is a good idea. They’re asking for something to make their job easier... can’t blame them for trying, and of course who doesn’t want to catch people who h…
So children weren't harmed before 1995? Of course a police state makes it easier for them but who will watch the watchers? I want one of these people to give me 24/7 access to their unlocked phone. I promise to not share the information with anyone.
It seems like we have better tools to fight some of these things. How about huge whistle blower rewards (millions) with lifetime witness relocation packages for people who come forward? There are lots of people who are adjacent to lots of these crimes but to come forward would mean threats, loss of income, loss of housing and more. If we made it easy and safe for them with the promise of a new life in a better situation, I think we'd see lots of these crimes go away.