
Barr’s Encryption Push Is Decades in the Making - jonbaer
https://www.wsj.com/articles/barrs-encryption-push-is-decades-in-the-making-but-troubles-some-at-fbi-11579257002
======
javajosh
Go through each of the Bill of Rights, and for each produce a scenario where
that right would be used by a criminal to protect him or her from planning,
executing, and avoiding detection of a crime.

All individual rights are carved out from the default government, which is the
one that takes absolute authority over all within its domain. North Korea is
closest to this ideal today, but most vanilla monarchies were like this in the
west.

Law enforcement officers (and politicians) must confront the simple fact that
they must accept the restraints that the law places on them, even if it means
letting the bad guy get away with it. Getting the bad guy at any cost ("Tango
and Cash" style) makes a fun movie but it undermines the freedoms that our
ancestors (by both blood and principal) fought and died for.

~~~
robomartin
> All individual rights are carved out from the default government

Not sure this is how you meant it. If you mean to say that rights come from
governments that is not quite correct, at least not in the US.

Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the
US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis
only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to
exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it
other than to respect and protect them.

This is a massive difference with other systems that lots of people, both
inside and outside the US are not aware of.

Take the right to bare arms as an example. In most other nations, if it
exists, this is a right granted by government to the people. In the US this is
a right recognized by the constitution to exist despite and outside of
government.

Here's the key difference between "grant" and "recognize": The government
can't take away that which it does not own, did not and cannot grant.

An example of a right (well, a privilege) government can take away is your
driver's license. They grant it and they can take it away.

In the case of firearms, the US government does not have the ability to
confiscate weapons because that is not a right the government granted and,
therefore, they don't have unilateral power to cancel that right with a simple
bill. In fact, it takes a tremendously complex agreement across all States and
the federal government to make any changes to the US Constitution (2/3
majority in the Senate, House and all 50 State Legislatures). Even that does
not guarantee government to have the right to eliminate rights.

This is good. This means, among other things, that the government can't take
your freedom of speech away because they do not own it, they did not grant it.
It is recognized as a fundamental right. All rights in the Bill of Rights are
equal in this sense (as far as I know). If we weaken one of them (as many want
to do with firearms) you run the risk of opening Pandora's box and exposing
the people to government control of rights.

It's an interesting problem.

Coming from this perspective it is hard to understand why people in any nation
would want to live in an environment where the government owns and grants
rights --and can take them away at will. If the idea is that government works
for us --they are our representatives-- why in the world would it make sense
that they would be able to take away our rights? Imperfect analogy: It's like
a project manager hiring a worker and then having that worker fire the project
manager.

PS.: A lot of anti-gun activists keep pointing at places like New Zealand and
their gun confiscation and buy-back programs. The typical cry is "We should do
the same". Well, we can't. Government did not grant, nor does it own that
right. And it can't take it away. In many ways this kind of activism is
nothing less than futile and even nonsensical. It's almost like demanding that
we change the gravitational constant in that it is about as likely.

~~~
joe_the_user
I think it's unfortunate to leap from the right to privacy to the right bear
arms. These are both good topics for debate and I actually support gun rights
but they are different, large questions and this leap is effectively a thread
derail.

~~~
salawat
They are more intertwined than you think.

What is gun control but the government asserting a right to pierce your
privacy to the putative end of arms control?

People don't look at it that way because people are used to looking at X and
calling it X, Y and calling it Y, but not realizing both X and Y are subtypes
of Z, so chipping away at X is chipping away at Z, even if you want to swear
up and down the street it's only -X and not -Z. It is -Z and it is -X. Period.

It's why I've begun to fear the legislator that is seemingly able to break the
law by making laws they are not empowered to make, and a politicalized
judiciary that doesn't spend their time enforcing a strict obeyance of
legislation to common language, and administrative lawmakers in the executive
that are never double checked.

The world passed on to the generations after us will be a grim place indeed if
we keep leaving them more and more shackled by the overwhelming detritus of
the legislative hooliganry of our age.

~~~
wavefunction
You and I have a natural right to self-defense, I don't know that you or I
have a natural right to firearms.

I'm a firearms owner and I love to hunt but I am not sure that people have a
natural right to firearms, and from observation many people should not possess
them due to personal negligence surrounding the awesome responsibilities
attendant with firearms usage/mis-usage.

~~~
jeffdavis
Although responsibility is important, firearms aren't an "awesome"
responsibility. Millions of kids use firearms safely; some quite young. It's
in the same ballpark as other ordinary responsibilities like driving,
maintaining a swimming pool, using power tools, etc. As far as recreational
activities, those involving guns aren't particularly dangerous
(statistically).

There are something like 400M civilian-owned guns in the U.S. If it were an
awesome responsibility, then we'd all be dead by now. But murder rates are low
and either steady or declining.

It's easy to say that other people seem irresponsible, but we need to look at
the data. Firearm accidents resulting in death are very rare.

------
rcoveson
There's a balance that must be struck between the efficiency of law
enforcement and the freedom of citizens. Personally, I lean heavily towards
the latter, and I think this is the reason:

My life and the lives of those I know are affected by criminals or terrorists
with absurdly low frequency. I'm sure this is true of many Americans; perhaps
more true now than ever in history.

So why is it that there is so much support for tough-on-crime policies that
decrease popular freedom in obvious ways? Why does it seem like the less
people are affected by crime, the more they abhor it and feel the need to root
it out to the last, no matter the cost? There are diminishing returns here.
The price we pay to track down the last criminal on Earth will be
_everything_.

~~~
olliej
But encryption doesn’t have “mostly safe”. It has safe and not safe.

There isn’t a meaningful in between.

~~~
rlucas
Unclear why this was heavily downvoted.

Modern encryption is, eventually, either effectively unbreakable, or
effectively worthless.

Or is there widespread knowledge of exploits that can recover, say, 25% of a
plaintext reliably, but no more?

~~~
Klathmon
I'd argue that there are levels of security and encryption, mostly around what
data is secret.

If I make an encrypted phone call to you, there are a few "levels" of
information. There's the exact information exchanged on the call, the _amount_
of information exchanged but not it's value, the identities of those in the
call, the date and time and duration of the call, perhaps the hardware used to
make the call, etc...

Encryption isn't an all or nothing thing, it often involves tradeoffs and
giving up some security for convenience or the other way around. And in some
areas there are laws about what must be kept secret and what must be visible
to the government (like in anti-money laundering laws).

------
cs702
This is a terrible article. There are ZERO mentions of the risks and tradeoffs
inherent to mandating or requiring backdoor access. Here is a good summary of
such risks:
[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690)

~~~
robbya
There's an HTTPS version too:
[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690)

~~~
cs702
Thanks. Updated!

------
ohazi
The differences in opinion on this topic are almost entirely defined by
whether or not the person has the _most basic_ understanding of what
cryptography actually is.

Comment #1:

> This argument is pointless. No government has jurisdiction over the laws of
> mathematics. No government can prevent encryption. No government can keep
> people from layering their own encryption over whatever flawed system the
> government mandates.

Comment #2:

> Encryption is an issue that Congress needs to resolve. However, there has
> not been any leadership on this issue for several decades. Apparently, there
> is no lobby and fundraising money to be made by either party and it does not
> win any votes, so Congress is not interested. Until the leadership vacuum in
> Congress is resolved this problem and many others will not go away.

It's obvious where Barr falls:

> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the
> meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first
> served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had
> they not been solved?

Maybe we should be teaching this stuff in high school. The pseudocode for RSA
is like twelve lines. Outlawing it is not practical.

~~~
joe_the_user
I sympathize with your position but I think we need to imagine the counter
argument the state would make. That argument would be "you don't understand
the determination of the state. If you are correct and the threat exists in
basic arithmatic and if we determine the threat is too great, we outlaw basic
arithmatic. That is the level the state will go to." See O'Brien's speech in
concerning "if we determine that 1+1 equals 3, we will make 1+1 equal 3", etc.

IE, yes, it's impossible but that still doesn't mean they keep trying harder
and harder and more and more destructively.

~~~
ohazi
You're right of course, but theory and practice look very different.

The "I don't care how cryptography works, why can't we just have a backdoor?"
crowd is imagining that a magical piece of "common sense" legislation is
capable of solving this problem. Yes, they can pass _something_ , but it isn't
going to _work_.

Because two days after it passes, they'll have courts full of obstinate people
who refuse to provide keys for their homebrew encrypted messaging systems.
Sure, you can jail them indefinitely, but that just highlights how obviously
unsolved the problem remains.

~~~
karmelapple
Why does jailing someone for breaking the law show how unsolved a problem is?

Marijuana use is something thousands (millions?) of people have had jail time
or other significant repercussions that have negatively impacted their life.

If encryption is outlawed, I see no reason why jails wouldn’t fill up if
people started wrapping their own backdoor-less crypto around whatever else is
used.

~~~
ohazi
Jailing someone for refusing to reveal a secret doesn't cause that secret to
be revealed.

What is the problem they're trying to solve? They claim to want a "reveal
secrets" button, but for any determined person or for any secret of
consequence, the button won't work.

Yes, jails _will_ fill up, war-on-drugs style, but my argument is that filling
up jails isn't a good goal given what they claim they wait. So my only
conclusion is that they're either lying about what they want, or they're
idiots. Both seem plausible.

------
martamoreno2
There is nothing in the making. Some government moron came up with this
nonsense 30 years ago and now they just can't move past this stupid, self-
defeating idea.

~~~
xenospn
See: war on drugs.

~~~
djohnston
Damn war on drugs is almost 50

~~~
hyperbovine
48 years and 7 months, according to Wikipedia!

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "He views the current conflict as similar to one that was emerging when
he led the Justice Department in the early 1990s, they said, when law
enforcement’s wiretapping efforts were disrupted by newly emerging digital
technology."

Translation (also this can be viewed as a resume for entire article): The
powers in charge are pissed off because they lost a tiny percent of their
control and want it back.

------
bradleyjg
The entire "going dark" narrative presupposes that the era of the wiretap is
the one true background from which to judge the present. But long before there
was a wiretap a warrant was mostly useless for listening in on private
conversations because there was nothing to wiretap and nothing to wiretap
with.

Was the pre-telephone and pre-microphone era some kind of lawless hell on
earth where law enforcement was completely helpless to do anything?

------
clamprecht
[http://archive.is/Zz6zx](http://archive.is/Zz6zx)

~~~
matheusmoreira
> You’re going to find a way to do this or we’re going to do this for you

How? By decreeing that use of encryption is evidence of guilt?

------
mewse-hn
I still remember Comey saying that only criminals need encryption

~~~
choward
That's pretty fascinating. Do you have a reference?

~~~
mewse-hn
[https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/comey-say-apple-
encryption-b...](https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/comey-say-apple-encryption-
bad-bad/)

------
dependenttypes
These are must-read and very relevant:
[https://cr.yp.to/export.html](https://cr.yp.to/export.html),
[https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-
justice](https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice),
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-
estab...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-
code-speech)

Cryptographic software is protected under the 1st amendment.

------
throwaway846657
Reminds me of the time some politicians thought it would be a good idea to
establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)

~~~
0xff00ffee
In the US, tomato sauce counts as a vegetable when assessing school lunch
health. Thanks GOP:

[https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-
sauce-p...](https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/tomato-sauce-pizza-
vegetable-congress-gop-healthier-school-lunches-expensive-article-1.978339)

------
wyxuan
encryption regulations by people who don't understand encryption.

this is encryption export ban 2.0

------
throw7
PCR (paywall couldn't read). Barr should hook up with these academics instead:

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-
failed-t...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/tor-hidden-services-are-failed-
technology-harming-children-dissidents-and-journalists)

Then he can get the pols to push the ever popular "for the children" narrative
and have legislation slipped through the child protection act bill to mandate
backdoors to encryption.

------
graycat
> WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William Barr returned to the Justice
> Department last year, law-enforcement officials briefed him on how
> encryption and other digital-security measures were hindering investigations
> into everything from child sex abuse to terrorism.

> Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the
> meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first
> served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had
> they not been solved?

So, Barr wanted to know why "not been solved"?

It's simple, really just dirt simple: All the king's horses and all the king's
men mostly can't hope to factor an integer of a few thousand digits into a
product of prime numbers. For some more, there are some good means of
generating prime numbers of at least hundreds of digits that can be multiplied
to give numbers of thousands of digits with prime factors of hundreds of
digits.

Based on this difficulty of factoring, it's possible to construct _public key
infrastructures_. The math and corresponding source code became readily
available.

So, now anyone can construct relatively solid means of communicating digital
information that only intended persons can decrypt and read.

This has been the situation since Rivest, Shamir, Adelman of RSA, Zimmerman of
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP),

Bruce Schneier, _Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms,
and Source Code in C_ , ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley and Sons, New York,
1996.

etc.

In particular, some gang can have their own software that they wrote
themselves and, thus, not rely on Apple, etc.

So, as in Schneier's book, that has been the situation back to before 1996.

LOTS of people here on HN know this stuff and much more since 1996 quite well!

So, somehow Barr has been uninformed at least since 1996?

I HAVE to believe that by now Barr has been given a clear, solid, fully
authoritative briefing by some world class experts from CIA, NSA, etc. So,
maybe this WSJ article was exaggerating?

Here is a point about the past: Just for relaxation, say, when some code that
should work doesn't, via DVD I watch some old movies. Some of these are
_cinema noir_ of _crime dramas_. In general it's interesting to use those old
movies to get insight into what US _pop_ culture was like, and how different
it was from the present, those several decades ago.

In particular it gets really surprising how in those movies the police
struggled terribly when current technology -- DNA matching, cameras, facial
recognition, and much more -- would have made their work much easier!

So, if Apple wants to use _unbreakable_ encryption to sell smartphones, around
the world, the police might have to return to some of the techniques in those
old movies!

------
hanniabu
Anybody have a non-paywall link? Every one I try just links to WSJ.

------
blackflame
I’m a republican and I totally disagree with Barr’s push. I honestly believe
that once enough people explain to Trump the implications of unlocking one
phone he’s pragmatic enough not to unbottle that genie. He’s been much more
reserved than many would have expected given the loudness of his bark.

~~~
A4ET8a8uTh0
I guess that may be part of the issue. For better or worse, I check
president's twitter feed from time to time and one of his recent shares
includes a talking point about Apple not helping with the phone.

One would think he would want to not let goverment have this power, but, well,
perception of things depend on where you sit. Right now he sits in the WH.

~~~
blackflame
If you recall, this situation happen before with Barack Obama as president.
Eventually he dropped it because something new and more important will come up
a sure as sunrise. It seems to be bipartisan if you ask me. It boils down to
do the ends justify the means and that doesn’t split among party lines.

