I have given this stuff a lot of thought. I have spent $1M and years to build a company that builds decentralized social networks (
https://qbix.com/platform) and now a company that uses crypto to secure payments and elections (
https://community.intercoin.org)
So I have spent a long time thinking about, and spoken to a lot of prominent people about, encryption and
I have come to a seemingly contrarian type conclusion that perhaps flies in the face of what HN typically says, but I hope that, instead of knee-jerk downvoting it, you think about it and let’s have a discussion based on substance.
There is a difference between using crypto primitives for signatures and zk proofs to secure everyone’s TRUST in a resilient, decentralized system, and using encryption to hide content from others.
To be honest ... I no longer think that end-to-end encryption is the right solution to human rights problems. If citizens are reduced to sneaking around and denying their activities to survive, their governmental system is way past due for fixing. This is like the “good slave owners” delaying the abolition of slavery. You’re solving the wrong problem.
I believe that crypto is needed to secure decentralized byzantine fault tolerant systems like Ethereum etc. to be TRUSTED, not to hide information. Signatures, not encryption, if you will. If anything, it is the government who doesn’t want encryption to be broken (eg of copyrighted DVD content etc.) and there is an inherent contradiction since anyone who consumes unencrypted content can reshare it.
What we really need is to decentralize the personal data in many places, and use zero-knowledge proofs for attestation, but that is different than encrypting and hiding information.
Should we make bulk collection of data infeasible in huge amounts? Sure. But let’s see if there are any uses of encryption — as opposed to signing and securing data - that are truly indispensable to society and are the right and best solution to solve the problem.
Within organizations, auditing and accountability are very much desired. Banning users and so on. Even though I am a libertarian, there is no simple solution to “just always have a flat system” - hierarchies always form due to efficiencies of scale (eg to gang up on people and defend against that, etc.)
What we should instead focus on, imho, is programming incentives from the beginning to promote checks and balances among the most powerful entities in the system. Look at the US Constitution and how the system has endured. Look at Bitcoin miners, Ethereum miners and so on. That is what we need - to have benign rules for everyone and make sure it’s super hard to maintain a collusion for long to overturn these rules.
Otherwise you can geek out on encryption all you want while the AI-enhanced government will track all of your physical movements and speech with cameras, gait recognition, speech recognition on vibrating potato chip bags through windows, will figure out what you’re all planning through network analysis and precrime, and nail you with parallel construction and social credit score penalties, and if anyone tries to help you they’ll get nailed too. Think it’s far fetched? China and Palantir are already doing it. Social credit systems are actually more benign, jailing and physical coersion and brainwashing are worse. Encryption won’t save the Uyghurs from re-education camps, nor profiling of Black youth in USA, nor will it help foil the next terrorist attack or mass shooting, so it doesn’t help either side of the equation that exacerbates the other in endless escalation and reprisals. And if you really don’t want those things to happen, you need to focus on architecting the governmen’t technology to be more benign in its rules, rather than facilitating sneaking around and delaying the need for the real solutions!!
Don’t listen to me only. Listen to the venerable Randall Munroe: https://xkcd.com/538/