
Responsibility and the Encryption Debate: A Response to DAG Rosenstein - cratermoon
https://www.justsecurity.org/46036/responsibility-encryption-debate-response-dag-rosenstein/
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berbec
Didnt we try this before
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper)
chip) and it was determined to be a Bad Idea?

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craftyguy
Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible.

(This is what you meant to post, please don't kill me:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip))

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duncan_bayne
> Wow, TIL clipper ships (your link) were so extensible.

The real problem is that they were highly vulnerable to piracy ;)

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c54
"By Rosenstein’s definition, all of those things should be considered
“warrant-proof,” yet he is not advocating that Congress should outlaw people
throwing out or destroying papers"

Isn't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the
context of a court case? What're the subtleties of this-- does it need to be
an already-ongoing case?

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deathanatos
> _Isn 't this considered destruction of evidence and already illegal in the
> context of a court case?_

IANAL; my understanding is that it is only destruction of evidence if you're
being investigated (or perhaps have reason to believe that you will be
investigated; again, IANAL and this it not legal advice), at which point you
ought to know better. Otherwise, the result is ridiculous: any piece of paper
I throw out _could_ be evidence in some future, yet unknown, unfathomable to
me trial — how am I to know now? If I toss _anything_ , then how could it be
used as evidence? I'd need to keep _everything_ to be sure, which is absurd.
And, like the article continues: what about conversations? That _could_ show
wrong-doing, but I'm not recording it.

The point the author is making is that there have long existed things that
_could_ be evidence but that have always been possible to destroy prior to
anyone knowing that something is afoot. In that regard, those things are
"warrant-proof": by the time you know to issue a warrant, you can't find the
item that would incriminate the person. But we're not getting legislation
crazy about those. A warrant is permission to take a look, not a guarantee to
find what you're looking for.

Frankly, I think that opponents of E2E encryption are greatly overstating
things; I think a fair amount of the time, LE will be able to work around it:
criminals will set stupid passwords, they won't use the tech at all, they'll
be caught by other means (hey, we found printed records, your buddy's drive
wasn't encrypted, we found a non-technical smoking gun, like a literal smoking
gun).

(Ideally, I'd like to see my data essentially being an extension of my mind
that perhaps LE can look at; but I shouldn't be compelled to help them do so.
But the current gist I get from politicians is that they'd essentially like to
outlaw E2E encryption, and you'd never even get a warrant for your data,
because BigCo provider would get it.)

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danenania
This is 100% about mass-surveillance.

Targeted individuals can already be endpoint hacked in countless ways, which
completely nullifies any form of encryption. But that doesn't scale to whole
populations.

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filleokus
I guess that the broken URL in

> A detailed response to the technical requirements and feasibility of his
> proposals is best left to technologists and cryptographers.

is [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-
wont-f...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-wont-fix-
whats-most-broken-nsa-internet-surveillance), that might be of interest to the
HN crowd.

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upofadown
Rather than using the example of evidence that used to exist but no longer
exists, I think a better preexisting example is evidence that has been
deliberately hidden. After all, encryption is just a method of hiding data
from everyone that does not know the key.

If law enforcement knows that the plans for the bank heist exist they still
might not know that those plans are currently located in the suspects ex-
boyfriends garage. The garage is not warrant proof, the police just don't know
where to apply the warrant. The exact same thing is true in the case of
encrypted data. Law enforcement needs the key to apply the warrant.

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cratermoon
If they can get a warrant, they should get a warrant. LE does _NOT_ need a
backdoor key exercise the warrant.

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shmerl
Responsible backdoor is an oxymoron.

