

On the enforceability of laws - drewcrawford
http://sealedabstract.com/rants/on-the-enforceability-of-laws/

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donaldc
_Of course, this will cause every civilized government to fail, because
governments depend on tax dollars._

If governments find it impossible to tax income as they lose their monopoly on
cash, they will still be able to tax tangible property: land, buildings, cars,
airplanes, etc.

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lhnz
As others have said, this is a little flawed. The invention of a pain gun is
really disturbing no matter what way you look at it.

However, I loved the quote at the end: "Technology bestows rights in a way
which is true and real far beyond the law. The law can be changed, but you
cannot undiscover AES. The law gives you rights as a fiction, but technology
gives you rights as a fact."

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westicle
i may be misinterpreting the article, so correct me if i'm wrong.

is the author suggesting that there is nothing to fear from the possibility of
a "pain gun" being used against civilians because sooner or later the steady
march of technology will ensure that we all have pain guns to use on
eachother?

that doesn't sound too comforting to me.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes, the flaws in logic and generalizations are legion.

 _Until about the 1970s, if you wanted to send a secret message you needed to
employ a small army of mathematicians_

No you didn't. You used a one-time pad. Computers were not first used for
battle, they were first constructed for pure math:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine>

And I eagerly await the day my M-1 Abrams battle tank arrives in the mail.

I won't list all the problems in this article. If you want to read it, it
might be entertaining to try to find as many as you can. Sort of a rhetorical
Where's Walo

~~~
drewcrawford
> You used a one-time pad.

A OTP assumes you have an off-channel secure messaging system.

It's like the cryptographical equivalent of begging the question: it's easy to
send a secret message! Just already have sent a secret message first!

> Computers were not first used for battle, they were first constructed for
> pure math

The difference engine wasn't actually constructed until the 90s. You might
have an argument for the Z1.

~~~
bitwize
All you need is a source of truly random numbers.

Make a pad from those numbers, make an exact duplicate of it, give one to your
field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission and keep one at
home base. Now you two can communicate over a guaranteed secure channel
(provided you don't reuse the pad).

~~~
drewcrawford
> give one to your field agent before he goes off on his super-secret mission

This is cryptography's version of "begging the question". A OTP means that
"Given that you already have a secure communications channel (to exchange the
one-time-pad), you can send secure messages over other channels." Of course if
you already have a secure communication channel, why wouldn't you just use
that? Perhaps you think that your "real world example" offers an explanation--
remote communications can be more advantageous than local ones. However, as
soon as we enter "the real world", we see that the OTP you wrote down can
easily be captured along with your physical self, and the message compromised
or even modified. This happens often enough in practice: see the "Exploits"
section of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad>

Modern cryptography (specifically I'm thinking of public-key-based exchange of
a private key) doesn't depend on having a secure channel to communicate with
in the first place. In addition, private keys can't be captured on your person
like a OTP can. So it is both theoretically and actually better than a OTP by
multiple orders of magnitude.

For these reasons, I think comparing a OTP to modern public or private key
cryptography is pretty silly.

~~~
bitwize
Private keys are just as vulnerable to rubber-hose cryptology as OTPs.

~~~
drewcrawford
Not in practice.

If you're talking about private keys in public-key-cryptography, those are
usually encrypted with another private key, which exists only in your head.

If you're talking about private keys in private-key-cryptography, they are
either encrypted with a private key that only exists in your head, or they
only exist in your head to begin with, or they are a "one-time" random private
key, i.e. for a key exchange algorithm, that is not re-used.

An OTP is not usually encrypted. We can AES it _now_ , of course. But the
point of the article is that encryption has gotten two orders of magnitude
better. That point is still valid.

------
notmyname
I like the quote "technology seems to be giving us back our rights even as the
law fails to protect them."

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madair
This is a very weak contribution to the question of whether science can truly
consider itself amoral, as in, does the march of progress outweigh all other
concerns, which many people believe is the case.

In this case the author wants us to see pain guns as we see computers, as
progress that helps us more than it hurts us. A better analogy may be nuclear
weapons, let's see him try to argue the positive effects of bomb which can and
has been used to vaporize cities.

~~~
bitwize
The mother of all Rooseveltian big sticks.

------
kragen
People have been writing stuff like this as long as I've been on the 'net; see
Tim May's thing about how the Spectre of Crypto-Anarchy is haunting the world,
or the manifesto about how the weary giants of flesh and steel have no place
in cyberspace.

18 years in, it doesn't seem any closer.

