Illegal Math • Hacker News Board

Re: Illegal Math

#61

Post by Zigurd » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 6:03 AM UTC

yoklov wrote: post #55

dbpokorny wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our government has been prevented from knocking down whichever door it has wanted to by things like guns and revolutions. The elite have been revealed as perverts and mass murderers. Rip their genitals out. Kill their children. Fuck government. There will be blood in the streets.

At the risk of invoking a meme... That escalated quickly.

"Let's have a dirty war on authoritarians" is the mirror image of Comey's threat that Congress will enact some horrible law if a terrorist uses encryption. A more palatable description of that threat would not be out of place in this debate.

Re: Illegal Math

#62

Post by dang » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 6:35 AM UTC

dbpokorny wrote: post #53

slg wrote: post #14

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a ve…

Our government has been prevented from knocking down whichever door it has wanted to by things like guns and revolutions. The elite have been revealed as perverts and mass murderers. Rip their genitals out. Kill their children. Fuck government. There will be blood in the streets.

This breaks the HN guidelines badly, as have some other of your recent comments. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. Instead, post civil and substantive comments, and if you're not in a civil and substantive mood, please wait until you are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Illegal Math

#63

Post by cft » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 6:45 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #14

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a ve…

It used to be possible to destroy evidence: shred letters, burn receipts. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do it. If the encryption is crippled, in the cloud based world the evidence of all your electronic communications will be indestructible, for the first time in history.

Re: Illegal Math

#64

Post by forrestthewoods » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:01 AM UTC

Analogies are stupid. It's perfectly constitutional for a law to be passed to ban encryption. It'd be a stupid, terrible law with horrific consequences. But there's nothing unconstitutional about bad laws. We have more than a few as is.

Re: Illegal Math

#65

Post by cyphar » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:02 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #14

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a ve…

> >Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government.

> I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.

Well, there was nothing stopping someone from writing their journals or notes in code so nobody could understand them. There is a question of whether someone would be forced to explain the code used for the notes. But the current scheme would be akin to the government requiring schools to spread misinformation about how to make a secure cipher and making it illegal to write a book about how to make a secure cipher without making the cipher broken.

This is a huge shift in how we think about information and learning. There appears to be a general mystery about software as though technology has changed our underlying morals. It hasn't. If you reframe moral questions about software as moral questions about other things, the answers become more obvious. For example, the morals behind free software become immediately obvious if you consider mathematics or even things like blueprints (since a software program is both the design and implementation in a way).

Of course there's the danger of a false parallel (and you might argue that I've drawn such a parallel), but I think my argument holds.

Re: Illegal Math

#66

Post by thwarted » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #14

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a ve…

Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime.

They only think that information is locked away behind encryption. There is no proof that the information they seek actually exists in the white-noise they claim it does unless the plaintext is recovered.

Re: Illegal Math

#67

Post by marklgr » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #50

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. But it hasn't been able to trawl for evidence mechanically and automatically. Now it has the technology to do that. The default has always been privacy, for practical reasons. Encryption simply continues that tradition by continuing to make evidence gathering non-trivial.

The mechanical and automatic nature of evidence gathering is a real difference, and goes well to argue against NSA-style warrantless crawling. I think for warrants, though, we're looking at a different beast. By their nature they are targeted. And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law(See [0]). The right against self-incrimination is relatively narrow, so as to not hinder the government'…

> And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law

You can have encrypted data that accept two different passwords, producing different decrypted data of your choice. This is like the 2nd code that mute the home security alarm when you are forced to do it, but still calls the police.

Re: Illegal Math

#68

Post by natch » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #13

natch wrote: post #12

Buried in the article below the clever though not original point that encryption is not math, is a much more important point: This debate should really be about whether or not people have the right to have secrets. If your answer is "no" then you ought to explain how you square that with the fact that many of our everyday activities can be considered criminal in some jurisdictions.

I understand where the sentiment is coming from, but the point you are making here is incoherent . Your argument is literally this: people need encryption so that they can conceal evidence of crimes . I think next time you pose this argument, you should remove the bit about how your actions might be illegal in some jurisdiction or other. It isn't doing the work for you that you think it is.

Ugh, I have a bad typo in the first line, and unfortunately can no longer edit: "not math" should have been "just math."

But that doesn't seem to be what you're remarking on.

I'm not sure what you see as the problem with my argument. Some people, if private messages were read by people around them or by their local law enforcement, could be sentenced to death, in certain jurisdictions. For "crimes" like being Christian, Muslim, atheist, Gay, etc.

How is that a good thing?

How is it a bad thing that people want to protect themselves with encryption?

Or if you're saying you get the argument and I'm just doing a bad job of making it, yes, maybe so, but maybe it's a hard side of the argument to take. Any suggestions on how to put it better?

Or maybe you're saying it's entirely the wrong argument to make, tactically. I'm still not sure why. Having not heard a reason for not making this argument, I think it's good to make it because it seems to be discussed too little.

Re: Illegal Math

#69

Post by threatofrain » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #14

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government. I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a ve…

I think the problem is that while the consequences of encryption on society has enough pros and cons to be gray, the sides that people choose are not at all gray. One side wants a backdoor and the other side doesn't. There's absolutely no way to draw a compromise on that. What does meeting down the middle between these two sides even mean? Law enforcement will always want as much power and legal protection as possible. It's the people who may or may not yield. It's the people who are going to budge on this issue.

I also think that the effect sizes on the pro vs. con debate of encryption has been overblown, and that it will be many years before we get a body of literature on which to anchor claims of magnitudes in our debate.

That being said, I think that leading the discussion on anti-encryption with discussions of terrorism and child porn is dishonest on its face. They're dishonestly exaggerated in effect size, and terrorism is the worse of the bunch, as the war on terror has costed mountains more than terrorism itself, both in money and in life. Unfortunately, these are often the top discussion points for any encryption debate.

Re: Illegal Math

#70

Post by banku_brougham » Thu, Mar 17, 2016, 7:56 AM UTC

What happens if the government succeeds? When manufacturers and software shops are required to leave keys for the FBI, NSA, etc for all encrypted storage and communication, what will happen to our technological world?

Has anyone written about the probable unintended consequences? I think it could happen and I am concerned.