The mere fact that the encryption ban is being discussed and bringing it up doesn't instantly end one's political career is frightening. Access to all individual's communications is a level of trust reserved for closest family members if that. And here government nonchalantly goes on to assume this level of trust from every citizen. Yet everyone except a handful of techies is completely oblivious to how monstrously perverted that is. The future looks really dark right now.
I hope it's obvious that I don't support crypto bans of any sort†.
But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand.
The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence".
Access to all an individual's communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn't carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule.
The norm for centuries has been that if you're being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn't even the law of this country that the government couldn't intercept and monitor your communications by fiat, without a warrant. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn't choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them.
When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they're generally not talking about the status quo. What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen.
I think the big difference between the 1700s and today that seems unacknowledged in your post is that most communication happened face to face and was not documented for the government to intercept.
You and your wife could not be forced to testify against each other(Spousal privilege), but your private sms conversation absolutely could be. (What was possible as only a private conversation is now easily sent across the world, and as a consequence is sniffed and stored by potentially many parties.)
This is not a surprise for anyone who understands that they are sent in plain text, but from the context of people, those conversations would still be considered private communications between spouses.
I am not saying the law gives a shit about the distinction, but persons absolutely do. I hope you now understand the sentiment a bit more.
I agree with this! I think the law is going to need to change, too.
The problem is, no matter how we change the law, the law is going to demand a balance of interests. We can outlaw coerced production of personal communications between relatives and friends, but there are still going to be communications the public has a right to access.
The technology is not going balance those interests. It's morally neutral, and incapable of concerning itself with the needs of society to stop organized criminal enterprises.
Again: for me, the wins of strong crypto clearly beat out the losses. But it's not insane that people --- especially people who don't work in technology --- might weight the factors differently.
Back in the 1700s, if you wrote a private letter (on paper/parchment, with a feather ink pen as they had back then), in a foreign language, and the court system wanted to use this as evidence, could the government compel you to translate it?
Or, suppose you developed your own cipher (they had ciphers back then, I'm sure). Could the government compel you to decipher the message back then?
The use of encryption really isn't much different from this.
I don't think that's an appropriate analogy. You may as well just say "In the 1700s, if you wrote an enciphered letter..." since cryptography isn't a new concept. Various schemes have been used to protect military and diplomatic communications for centuries. If you did so then or now, you wouldn't be under any obligation to reveal the contents, but you take on the additional burden of actually performing all of the necessary calculations, securely destroying the scratch paper you used in the process of encrypting the message, handling key management and distribution, securing the areas where the encrypting/decrypting is taking place (you wouldn't want the redcoats barging in the hour or so while you're in the middle of converting the plaintext to ciphertext), etc.
Nobody does that anymore. You're instead using a tool that someone else made, and either that tool or the other person is handling all of the hard work. Tools definitely can be regulated - I need a license to drive; I need to register my car; I need to go through a background check to own a gun; I can own a gun, but if I misuse it I go to jail; felons can't purchase guns legally; I can't buy a nuclear weapon or the fissile material needed to make own.
The questions that policymakers are fumbling through right now are things like "how (if at all) do we regulate tools and the companies that make/distribute them if those tools allow people evade law enforcement?"
I think you are not wrong, but the point I was trying to make is that the whispered conversation of romantic partners is now something that is recorded and written and sent, the reality is that the law didnt change to become more draconian, the people's behavior changed so that the law FEELS more draconian.
Basically, when most of your society is illiterate, they are not creating evidence for LEO to subpoena in the first place.
But with backdoored encrypted communications the government would have instant access to ALL enciphered letters at once, regardless of the seeming guilt or innocence of the sender or recipient.
To me that seems like the key difference. If all but face-to-face communications are electronic, and no electronic communications can be strongly encrypted, then the private sphere is greatly reduced and many things once considered private become public.
But on the other side of things, with strong crypto many things once considered public would become private.
There doesn't seem to be an easy way around this choice.
Hold on. With status quo electronic communications in the 80s and most of the 90s, the government retained instant access to communications for investigative purposes, and no serious objections were raised --- just as nobody objects to the idea that the police, searching your house with a warrant, get instant access to letters you've left on your desk.
Instantaneity can't be the fulcrum of this debate, because it's been the norm since the beginning of English common law.
There has to be some other principle at stake that can argue against decryption backdoors. And I think there are such principles! But I think it's important that they be articulated carefully.
Yes, in previous decades the government could access electronic communications under the third party doctrine[1] that says the fourth amendment only applied to "papers" held by the individual / in their home, not to communications voluntarily placed in the hands of a third party. On the other hand, far less of people's lives was conducted online. I expect that's why no real objections were raised.
Because much intimate communication has moved from in-person/on-telephone/other-instantaneous communications to asynchronous platforms hosted by third parties, in effect much that was "private" is now effectively "public". What once required a warrant now does not. Many things previously subject to protections against unreasonable searches are no longer so protected.
I take a pretty extreme stance when it comes to these arguments: That social contract of which you speak, is routinely ignored and shit on by Federal, State, and local authorities when it suits their interests.
For them to play loosey-goosey with it and expect the normies to abide by it without question is ludicrous.
Cases of mistaken identity, action based on bad information, and people losing their lives or being incarcerated incorrectly as a result are in the news every day.
So, IMO, they're not entitled to fuck all anything ala this "social contract".
Why wouldn't the government just get a warrant to have you decrypt whatever communication they'd like to see (if you're being investigated) and if you don't you are held in contempt of court?
Of course if all communication is encrypted it would be harder for a government to get a warrant but I think that's probably more in line with the 4th amendment.
I don't think that what was established 3 centuries ago, when the world was completely different, should necessarily hold true today, regardless of the best intentions at the time. The only method of recording facts at the time was by writing it on paper.
Given technology evolution, we must constantly re-evaluate what is still legitimate and should be transposed to today and what is off-limits.
Let me give you what is (for us today) a ridiculous example to prove my point: imagine that in a couple hundred years, it becomes possible to scan anyone's brain with some sort of machine and determine what a person is thinking about?
Also, having backdoors into encryption is akin to the Government having a remote kill switch that would render your legally owned gun useless. But that is a whole other debate.
So, the many downsides of implanting backdoors into cryptography are most of why I oppose them, and support the global deployment of default-unbreakable communications, so that people don't even have to think about whether their communications are electronically protected but simply always are.
But that's not what I'm taking issue with. What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence, as part of the social contract that animates the country, and that technology is in fact poised to overrule that entitlement without due process of law or politics.
It's a simple and sensible issue to have with crypto. Crypto is important and valuable technology, but that doesn't mean everything about it is good. It has downsides, too. We should be honest about them, and less shocked when people weigh the downsides differently than we do.
> What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence
I don't think many people have any significant objection to the state acquiring evidence, as long as proper procedure (warrants/etc) is followed.
While the repulsion is primarily over breaking encryption (key escrow nonsense, etc) and the damage that would cause, there is another problem with the Government's desire for "access" that I haven't seen much in the reprisal of the Crypto Wars compared to the previous round in the 90s.
The government is implicitly demanding additional work be done on it's behalf. Managing a key escrow system (or part of it) isn't free. There is a labor cost and a cost in damage to a business's market position and reputation (their product will be seen - rightly - as less valuable).
A warrant isn't a guarantee that a search will produce the desired evidence. It is unreasonable to demand that we (everyone, before any warrant is involved) should change our behavior and try to preserve evidence or compromise our own security to make it easier for the government at some hypothetical time in the future.
I think government interference in the engineering decisions of private companies are a valid reason to oppose crypto backdoors. I don't think it's the strongest reason --- we ask private companies to expend extra effort to comply with engineering requirements in all sorts of other products. But I sympathize with the argument.
A warrant isn't an engineering technique or a mathematical axiom. It's a directive from a court that its recipient must comply with a demand to produce some information. Warrants are, in some sense, about people.
If you encrypt some piece of information such that you retain the ability to decrypt and recover it, then as far as the law is concerned, you're capable of responding to a warrant for that information. Technology is going to make it possible for everyone, not just the tech savvy, to refuse to comply with those kinds of warrants. Public policy will need to adapt. As I said, we may not like how it adapts.
I think most people have repulsion, as you say, towards the idea because a lot of them consider crypto a weapon (the only one actually) to defend themselves from unprecedented violations of privacy that are possible with today's technology.
Well, if the government actually can get the evidence when they have legally-valid reason to do so, then they don't have to violate everyone's privacy all the time in order to get evidence for when they might need it. So there's a basis for a truce here.
Unfortunately, you'd have to trust the government to keep their end of the deal...
That same argument could have been used to ban wiretaps, which after all synthesize permanent evidence from ephemera. But it didn't: instead of banning wiretaps, we systematized and legitimized them, and refined that understanding over and over again for 50 years.
No, tape recorders are not part of the normal operation of phone networks.
The point is that even if a user intends to have an ephemeral conversation over an internet service all kind of middle-boxes may keep more persistent copies.
Something that normally does not happen with either face to face or telephone conversations.
With unencrypted digital communication on the other hand past conversations can be dredged up from all kinds of places.
End-to-end encryption basically abstracts ephemeral communication over channels with some sort of persistence.
There will be. Of course there will be. Encrypting phone calls isn't a particularly hard problem; the hard problem has been getting the audio frames of a phone call into the clutches of software to begin with, and we've already just about killed that problem.
Absolutely. But my only point is that we can't directly transpose the legal experience over 50 years in wire taps since there was never an equivalent debate over it's privacy. Wiretaps weren't really questioned because there wasn't a real expectation of privacy on phone calls since we started out with human switchboards.
Wiretaps were really questioned in court. Maybe there was less public debate about them at the time or less awareness of how widespread wiretapping could become; I'm not sure.
The 3rd, 4th, and 5th amendments say otherwise. While you're right in the narrow implication-following sense, you're wrong in the general big-picture sense. Similar to how the 4th amendment was broken with mass adoption of the automobile, and the 6th/7th were broken by commercial law (have you ever been able to get a jury trial for a speeding ticket?)
In the past, ephemeral day-to-day communications were not accessible to the courts, because they were carried out face to face. These days, those same communications are carried out electronically. Similarly with storage - due to the complexity brought on by computers, there is simply much more to correctly remember in today's world, necessitating the use of auxiliary storage for one's brain.
The attack on encryption is a direct attack on whether individuals' computers should function as their personal agents (akin to lawyer and priest professional confidentiality), or whether individuals are prevented from personally wielding the amplifying power of computation and left at the mercy of powerful groups who do.
I'm probably not wrong about this. As I've said: the Supreme Court has more than once confirmed that the common law principle of the state's entitlement to evidence is, in fact, the law of the land here as well.
We limit the state's access to evidence through judicial oversight. We do not, as a general rule, allow individuals to further overrule that access.
Sure, but the Supreme Court also uses narrow implication-following. Existing rules or precedents generate another precedent. And society is doing the same thing with path-dependent adoption of technology.
As computer scientists, we know this can only lead to eventual contradictions. Old concepts are subsumed with new definitions in different abstractions. "Plan to meet up for dinner" used to mean a face-to-face talk when you bumped into someone on the street or, later, over two direct analog wires that were equally ephemeral as long as nobody was a priori recording. Now it means digital messages that are automatically stored indefinitely.
The right to privacy should apply generally to each definition, but when you analyze with local reasoning of course the latter message is voluntarily stored on a bazillion servers and sent over tapped fibre.
Which is why I gave some other concrete examples. Do a plain reading of the 6th and 7th amendments, and wonder why a speeding ticket does not result in a jury trial. But follow the path of legal reasoning that got us to the present condition, and you can see how the ideals were subsumed and discarded.
I'm pretty sure the concept of petty or mechanical offenses for which you aren't entitled to a jury predates the Constitution, so I'm not sure I see the erosion.
Because judges have an abundance of faith in their judgment being balanced, and so presume themselves autocratic?
Historic violations don't really counter my point - even in the past the map was not the territory. Finding one non-erosion (by virtue of it never have been applied) doesn't change the rights that have eroded.
We had a mini-debate about this with rayiner in another thread pointing out that people have always been allowed to use cryptography in America and have always done so, and that it's often made it harder and occasionally impossible for the government to figure stuff out. It's true that it was always a very deliberate decision and effort in the past, rather than something particularly convenient or automatic, but people have had ciphers for centuries, and some of those have been successful at obscuring communications from governments, and in the U.S. there was no apparent suggestion that this was legally improper.
* Everyone is going to use encryption by default, without trying or even knowing what cryptography is.
* That cryptography is going to be unbreakable, not just by today's investigators but possibly for millennia. Even if quantum attacks on crypto are possible, we have ciphers that will hold up, and computers are already small and fast enough to make their added expense a rounding error.
This is a very different situation than the Barksdale crew using a keypad code. 70 years ago, military grade crypto was crackable (and doing so helped us win World War 2). That isn't going to happen in 70 years, ever again.
In this case I think the strength of my argument is just about whether people are allowed to try to conceal their communications from the government, and the historical legal answer is yes, not no!
I agree that they're likely to do a dramatically better job of it in the future than they could have before and that it will be easier.
And from that thread it seems per-state ("CA did away with jury trials for infractions long ago"), while the US constitution is country wide. Apparently some states that I'm unfamiliar with allow the option to better preserve their illusion.
Also witness how the officers gleefully go about trampling the 5th amendment:
> Rejoice in the fact that, win or lose: ... It's still going to cost the violator more for the attorney than the fine will be.
Yet another example of the effect I'm describing - de jure it makes sense as it's one's own responsibility to pay for an attorney. de facto it constitutes an extrajudicial punishment that police directly acknowledge.
>where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen.
I think it's a good thing too, but if you think that technology is going to overturn a foundational principle of our judicial system, you're going to be disappointed. Public policy is going to account for this change, and we may not love the way they solve it.
That's absolutely the case, and although I might daydream about this reverse baby/bathwater scenario r.e. the judicial system and encryption - we well know that always on e2ee will be circumvented, by hook or by crook.
Tangent, but: giant NSA data centers are such a red herring. The inevitable outcome is one of two things:
1. We've been missing something fundamental about computer science for many decades and all the encryption we use everywhere is going to be broken.
2. Everything is going to be unbreakably encrypted by default and no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single emoji from a single IM.
Again: don't think about the status quo; think about 15-20 years from now.
Trying to brainstorm random scenarios about what could make there be a future "3.", "4.", etc...
3. "Enabling" (some kind of sabotage, infiltration, or collaboration) means a lot of things with a theoretically sound design are broken or backdoored in a way that is somehow hard to notice.
4. End-to-end encryption has a lot of UI inconveniences around key management, so it will only used for a small minority of communications.
5. The "Going Bright" paper's world in which it continues to be easy for governments to hack people. (However, the connection to the data centers isn't very obvious -- maybe for archiving stuff that was transferred with a non-forward-secret protocol, but why will things be transferred with such protocols?)
6. The fear about quantum computers is justified because they only cost about a billion dollars to reduce to practice at a level that can attack deployed systems. For some reason, the transition to post-quantum crypto is especially slow, difficult, or error-prone.
7. Crypto developers continue not to do Cryptopals and, for decades, continue to make frequent implementation mistakes that allow passive adversaries to defeat their systems.
8. There's going to continue to be an easy covert way to get in proximity of servers and read their session keys, but that way doesn't allow covert exfiltration of plaintexts from the servers so attackers need to record the ciphertext elsewhere.
9. The data centers are for recording metadata events, which are expected to become incredibly voluminous.
10. The Internet of Things industry still accepts second-class cryptographic mechanisms supposedly because of technical limitations of their devices, so uses smaller keylengths, no PFS, inadequate RNG, obsolete or custom ciphers...
11. People still use GSM phones with Kᵢ physically generated by their carrier as a basis for confidentiality of a portion of their communications, and it's still possible to attack the carriers' generation and distribution of these keys.
These are all interesting points but I think they're not going to matter much. I think that whatever device most people carry around to communicate with in 2030 will be unbreakably encrypted by default, even against attackers so advanced that their quantum computers are handheld.
Forget about what random developers do with crypto. I agree: generalist developers will probably never get reliable crypto right. But they won't have to, just like they don't write their own TCP congestion control algorithms. Every programming environment available will provide unbreakable crypto by default without asking. You'll have to go out of your way not to have it; it'll be like raw sockets, where the environment sort of looks at you weird for even asking.
There are UX issues with strong crypto, but:
1. They're getting sorted out quickly.
2. They tend not to apply to the simplest and most common cases, which are actually the ones that matter most to public policy.
NSA data internment is not a red herring, its one of the raisin darts [sic] for crippling encrypton - the goal is to keep everything forever and mine it later. strong encryption presumably breaks that use model (save quantum computing and the miniscule possibility that p v np is somehow solved ).
In the coin you've presented, certainly [1.] is the option we should all be expecting, sadly.
Option 2 sounds damn near utopian. I'll continue, as i mentioned before, to daydream about that one.
> What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted ...
Encryption is basically a branch of mathematics. Outlawing all mathematics that can be used for the purpose of encryption, requires to accurately describe the precise boundaries of this branch of mathematics. It is trivially easy to prove that this cannot be done:
You cannot construct a predicate function that accepts as argument another function and returns true/false if the argument is an encryption function, because it means that this function implicitly claims to be able to determine if such function will halt. The theorem of the halting problem precludes that a predicate function could exist that returns true/false if the function supplied as argument will always halts. Therefore, no function could ever be constructed that can generally determine if another function is an encryption function.
This means that encryption cannot be defined. Without definition, it is not possible to outlaw it.
> no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them ...
Warrants and judicial orders are just verbiage while encryption algorithms are machine-executable instructions. It is simply not enough to mumble verbiage. They will also have to speak in terms of machine-executable instructions, in order to overcome the encryption measures that they are facing.
Why would it be necessary to preserve the power of people who are only capable of mumbling non-executable verbiage? If their jobs have become obsolete due to progress in technology, they will not be the first nor the last ones that this happens to. Join the club.
This has nothing to do with my argument at all, but I'm game for pointing out that I think it's an incredibly weak argument. All sorts of things that we rightly agree are fair game for public policy decisions can be boiled down to "just math" or "just basic chemistry" or, whatever.
This is the computer science version of the weed farmer's argument that the government can't regulate marijuana because it grows in the ground, man.
I find it a bit disturbing that people don't realize that a court must have the power to gain extraordinary access to information in order to pursue application of the law. This is necessary. I'm sure it's hell on Earth when you are subject to it, but I can't think of a way around it.
That's true, but the state does have the power to outlaw commercial devices that provide default-unbreakable encryption. People who really want encryption will get it anyways, but it's the default state that animates the "going dark" concern.
What's important to public policy is what Apple and Google, and whatever their analogues in 2030 might be choose to do, and how they're regulated.
Secure endpoint software has to be non-commercial in that it has to be open source or otherwise trust-able by the public. Because it can't be proprietary, it would be hard to sell under any circumstances. The major portals could create this software, or they could just provide documented interfaces.
To provide default-unbreakable encryption requires a combination of commercial services that enhance the UX of using strong encryption, like web-of-trust features in communications software that make it impractical to MITM communications and key exchange, and non-commercial software that secures communications payload.
So any effective ban would ban not only an Apple proprietary system that was secure, but also those non-commercial components that are a necessary part of a truly secure communications system. That's where the overreach happens.
The other thing is that cryptography doesn't make a conversation completely private forever.
I remember a conference where old crypto algorithms were mentioned. Unbreakable in the 80s or 90s but now trivial to decipher. The speaker implied that both Russia and the US would have carefully recorded and stored all of each other's communication and that we can bet that the content of these communications is still interesting today, not just for their historical interest.
We live old. Much older than the technologies we use. Now our gvt is doing to us what they would only do to foreign embassies.
I think it's important to keep in mind that crypto is probably not on a Moore's-Law-like track, so that the ciphers we're relying on today will probably be trivial to break in 20 years. In fact, the things that make 80s-90s crypto breakable mostly aren't algorithmic weaknesses but rather implementation flaws that weren't well understood then but are now.
Quite a bit of 90s crypto remains unbreakable, because the data is at rest and will never be put back into a circumstance that exposes the weaknesses of its cryptosystem.
> The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence".
One of the big drivers behind the American revolution was John Wilkes' diaries being seized by the government in 1763. This was done with a legal warrant, but it's still the reason why we have the 4th amendment today. So the idea that we have a tradition of the government being able to seize whatever they want with a warrant isn't entirely accurate.
That's an interesting argument. What historically have been the exceptions to what the government can seize with authorization from a judicial warrant?
The "every man's evidence" principle isn't just an English thing; it's been repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court, it's baked into our rules of evidence, and can easily be read out of both the text of the 4th Amendment and the actual actions of the framers once they actually put the Constitution into action.
The Wilkes thing in particular is a little more complicated than you're acknowledging, though I think you must know much more about it than I do. The warrant the King used against Wilkes was a general warrant, the kind the 4th Amendment was intended to forbid: those "warrants" were like a cross between a search warrant and eminent domain, allowing the government unrestricted access to all the property and possessions of its target. They were instruments of harassment, and their unpopularity was definitely a driver for the revolt.
So your contribution to this discussion is the suggestion that having cited Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, discussed the distinction between search warrants and general warrants, and pointed out Branzberg v Hayes, maybe I was unfamiliar with the text of the 5th Amendment?
If the 5th Amendment doesn't protect your personal diary --- and it doesn't --- and it doesn't prevent the government from wiretapping your phone --- and it doesn't --- it's unlikely to bear heavily on this discussion either.
You claim there is no special allowance by the founders for an individual to conceal evidence.
Yet, the fifth amendment allows an individual to not be a witness against their self; if an individual is a witness to evidence against their self, they may conceal it, per the fifth amendment.
The Fifth Amendment was intended to prevent torture and coerced confessions. It doesn't hide a general right to conceal evidence, which is itself a crime in many places in the US.
So, what do you do when the only valid evidence would be a confession, or other testimony that evidences the testifier's involvement in crime? As you said, the fifth amendment prohibits the use of violence in such cases.
I never argued for the existence of a 'general right to conceal evidence', only that, contrary to your very specific claim, the founders did allow for individuals to conceal evidence.
If I understand what you're saying correctly, this happens all the time: for instance, it has happened every time an answering machine tape has been entered into evidence.
If I understand what you're saying correctly, this happens all the time: for instance, it has happened every time an answering machine tape has been entered into evidence.
No. An answering machine tape is not a person at criminal trial.
> nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
You are talking about physical evidence; an answering machine tape, presumably recording some prior conversation, is a physical artifact that already exists. In no way can you construe examining a pre-constructed physical artifact as compelling a criminal defendant to witness against their self [It would imply criminal defendant is somehow the physical artifact itself.].
If I am not mistaken, 'witness' refers to making real claims about events at trial. Making real claims that one performed criminal activities at trial can be construed as evidence. An individual may conceal that evidence by not revealing it, and I don't believe US law allows any way to reveal such evidence.
> it's unlikely to bear heavily on this discussion either.
Why so much snark anytime someone disagrees with you?
> If the 5th Amendment doesn't protect your personal diary --- and it doesn't --- and it doesn't prevent the government from wiretapping your phone
You're interpretation is flat out wrong. Let me quote a few sections for you:
> nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
Seizing someone's electronic communications certainly does make a great witness against oneself, especially when the communications were seized without a warrant.
> nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
Again, seizing communications en masse without a warrant for each communication is expressly against even the most rootementary interpretation of the 5th Amendment. There is no due process of law here. In fact, we know some people are in prison thanks to Parallel Construction - the exact opposite of due process.
This is such a weird argument. You clearly can be compelled to produce private documents as evidence. A private document you wrote is in the exact same sense self-testimony. I don't doubt that you can conjure a first-principles argument that the law says otherwise, but the reality you'll end up in won't be the one we share now.
I got snarky because of the "sir" in the parent comment. I SAY GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR.
Totally fair game to ding me for doing that, though.
> You clearly can be compelled to produce private documents as evidence.
You are correct - but only via due process (court order/warrant, etc..).
What we have here is not due process - but rather systematic bulk collection and inspection of all electronic communications from every citizen. These private communications are then sifted through, looking for anything of interest... and if found, we then (sometimes) go get a warrant to retro-actively wiretap your communications. That's not legal, but it's what's going on.
Regarding full-device encryption - it's the same thing. You need a warrant to compel me to turn over my device. No law makes it legal for the government to "hack" into your device remotely and inspect it's contents (unless you have a specific warrant). If the individual refuses to turn over the device or decrypt it, it's no different than someone refusing to turn over a written letter... and we have punishments for these actions. We don't need to ban encryption for this, we already have mechanisms in place to handle these situations.
Again, who are you arguing with? Abuses of systematic collection are a great reason to support universal encryption. Certainly, it's the primary reason I support it.
We have essentially a decade of evidence to show having access to electronic communications (both encrypted and not) has little to zero effect on law enforcement's ability to do their job.
Just recently, the Paris attackers use unencrypted cell phone text messages to coordinate and plan their attack. Nobody detected it...
Before that, the FBI successfully caught Ross Ulbricht, through good 'ol police work (because they couldn't beat his encryption and proxy usage).
We don't need access to private communications (both encrypted and not) in order to conduct lawful law enforcement -- we just need better law enforcement practices.
All this anti-encryption rederick put forth by the government is really just smoke and mirrors, covering up systematic failures of law enforcement.
This seems far-fetched. Encryption has historically had zero effect on law enforcement, but collection of electronic evidence has made thousands of felony cases. Meanwhile, the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years.
> the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years
Everything everyone does will be encrypted in 15 years -- and that's a good thing. It makes it harder for the bad guys to be, well, bad.
Identity theft happens to far more Americans every year than the number that have been involved in a terrorist attack since the founding of our nation.[1] Backdooring/weakening/banning encryption will literally make stealing people's identities far easier. We want to make the government's job marginally easier to spy on everyone at any time, but we're ignoring the major side-effects of doing just that.
I'm confused as to why you keep bringing terrorism up. I haven't brought it up once. I am not especially concerned with terrorism, and I'm not especially concerned about identity theft --- at least, not to the point where I think we need to address it with regulation on consumer devices.
> Meanwhile, the issue isn't simply what criminals encrypt today, but the fact that everything they do will be encrypted in 15 years.
No, everything they do will not be encrypted in 15 years. Most relevantly, except when the crime at issue itself is an act of communication, the crime won't be encrypted, or even subject to encryption, so all the usual police work that enables solving crime based on the actual criminal act and the evidence naturally attaching thereto will remain available.
The argument being laid out is that electronic surveillance, in whole, has played a very minimal (close to zero) role in law enforcement. None of the NSA programs can be attributed for stopping some plot on their own[1] - the few they did lay claim to already had mountains of other kinds of evidence collected through regular law enforcement means.
Coming back to the encryption debate - if we cannot stop plots and crimes from taking place that were orchestrated over clear-text communications[2][3][4] - then there is practically zero hope of success by forcing everyone to not encrypt communications.
To say that better - if we can't stop crimes that are communicated in clear-text, then having the ability to decrypt messages does not change our probability of success.
Yes, encrypting all the things will provide some level of convenience for the "bad guys", but it also provides immense levels of security for the "good guys", as well as us regular people. Going back 15 years - we did not have capabilities to intercept and decrypt mass communications - yet we still caught the "bad guys". September 11th happened, and now we're all still whipped into a frenzy thinking somehow if we could just backdoor encryption, we would have prevented that attack (which is absurdly false).
The big point I'm making - backdooring/weakening/banning of encryption makes nobody more safe. Maybe we catch one or two plotters before they do something - but we also expose all citizens to online attacks on their identity, finances, privacy, and more.
Please stop doing this. My argument isn't that bulk electronic surveillance has been valuable for law enforcement. I don't think it is. I don't think most law enforcement agencies do either, because relative to the enormous amount of foreign SIGINT work the US does, it does virtually no evidence collection for domestic cases through dragnet surveillance.
My issue is that universal default unbreakable encryption doesn't just break dragnet surveillance, but also breaks discovery and evidence recovery done under a warrant in routine investigations. It is in fact hard to break dragnet surveillance without harming routine law enforcement, and I think people should be clearer about that tradeoff.
It also isn't my contention that harming routine investigations means that crypto should be backdoored. Despite what you said upthread, I'm going to hazard that I've done more work to help foil attempts to break crypto than you have. My bona fides here are established, no matter how you choose to misread my comments. It really bothers me when people erroneously suggest that I support crypto backdoors. It doesn't help that the first thing I wrote on this very thread said exactly that.
> My issue is that universal default unbreakable encryption doesn't just break dragnet surveillance, but also breaks discovery and evidence recovery done under a warrant in routine investigations.
I don't think it affects discovery at all: discovery relies on turning over responsive materials, not breaking encryption.
Anytime evidence doesn't exist or is difficult to interpret because it hasn't been deliberately created in a form which is readily interpreted by uninvolved third parties, it can impair the utility of search and seizure warrants to collect evidence. But this is unavoidable, and compelling affairs to be conducted in a manner which provides the most convenience for law enforcement after-the-fact is simply untenable in pretty much every area of life (encryption is not special this way.)
In the case of data/communications, if an untrusted third party can access your data/communications without your consent, many untrusted third parties can. A ban on secure end-to-end encryption (whether it take the form of mandatory MitM/backdoors, restrictions on parties that can be endpoints in secure end-to-end links, or whatever other form) means exposing everyones data to many potential attackers, just so that law enforcement might have convenient access later.
The development of pervasive electronic communication and data storage/consumption technology means one of two things, either:
(1) people are far more exposed to both criminal exploitation and government abuse of power, but routine, rights-respecting law enforcement is not burdened and, in fact, somewhat eased, or
(2) people are able to do far more without additional vulnerability, and perhaps with a net less vulnerability, to various forms of criminal exploitation and government abuse, but routine, rights-respecting law enforcement is made more difficult.
And the former option requires curtailing substantially the freedom of speech in electronic media (or perhaps all media) in ways it never was curtailed in other media.
I risk getting a little too "meta" here, but I feel it will be constructive for us all, and I hope it's ok this one time.
> Please stop doing this
Most of your responses to myself and others begin with a line similar to this. It's meta in itself, but also puts people a little off. We're debating things here, and we seem to disagree on some points... but that's OK since that's really what we're here for. You can't ask people to stop disagreeing with you, but if you feel strongly, you may choose not to respond.
> It really bothers me when people erroneously suggest that I support crypto backdoors.
You have stated this several times, and I do believe you. The problem here is that we're not (and the government's not) just discussing backdoors, but other means such as purposefully weakening encryption, outright bans, or other methods of subverting strong encryption. Stating you don't support backdoors is only one small component of what's at stake here. It's almost a level of misdirection or a half-statement to throw this in whenever someone attacks your argument. In addition - you have made good arguments which seem to illustrate the problems with having universal default unbreakable encryption. This leads one to believe you are in opposition of such.
> My issue is that universal default unbreakable encryption doesn't just break dragnet surveillance, but also breaks discovery and evidence recovery done under a warrant in routine investigations.
This is an example of one argument that seems to favor subverting strong encryption by some means. If you do not support universal default unbreakable encryption, then you must be against it on some level. If you're against it on some level, then the logical conclusion is you support one or many of the government suggested solutions, such as banning/backdooring/weakening. As mentioned, you do not support backdooring, but that leaves two other options that are being actively pursued by the government.
> I'm going to hazard that I've done more work to help foil attempts to break crypto than you have. My bona fides here are established
This is largely irrelevant information. I am aware of your background - however one's professional view is not always the same as one's personal view. Being a security professional and thoughts on encryption are not mutually exclusive.
> no matter how you choose to misread my comments
I think this issue isn't really a misread, but rather the half statements about backdooring. I probably didn't articulate that difference properly, but I submit you failed to do the same.
In any event, it seems we mostly agree on this subject really, although we both argue it differently.
My meta argument is that we will all fare better in the policy debate to come if we are honest and careful about the opposing side's arguments. Our arguments should be honed to beat their best arguments, seen in their best possible light.
I'm not making half-statements about backdoors. There is no daylight that I can perceive between "backdoor" and "weakened encryption". When I say "universal default unbreakable crypto", that is exactly what I mean.
> we will all fare better in the policy debate to come if we are honest and careful about the opposing side's arguments
I think we agree on this point. The largest problem faced is making policy makers understand the ramifications of tampering with encryption in any form, be it backdooring algorithms, weakening the encryption, outright bans or some other method to subvert encryption attempts. It would be foolish to do any of the above, since the result is a less safe technology infrastructure for the country in whole.
> There is no daylight that I can perceive between "backdoor" and "weakened encryption"
When I say "weakened encryption", I'm referring to mandates on maximum key size, etc... similar to what we had back in the 90's. We learned through trial that purposefully reducing encryption strength has short term benefits, but leads to long term security problems (there's still a need for some to use SGC certs!)... why repeat this nonsense?
You mentioned something about due process and discovery in another post -- Me refusing to give the decryption key to my phone is no different than me setting fire to my "evil secrets" notebook... or refusing to give the combination to my safe. We already have laws in place that deal with this, and they work. The government doesn't need a secret key that can open any safe or door no more than they need a secret key that can open any encrypted file. Our problem is we have policy makers who fundamentally believe the government should have a master key to everything.
We should also remind our policy makers we're only discussing this now in the open because we caught the NSA red handed doing all of these things in secret, plus more. They paid RSA to deliberately weaken algorithms, they actively captured and attempted to break encrypted files without warrants, they engaged the private sector in both subvert and overt attempts to remove encryption, and when all else failed, they just circumvented the entire thing.
The public reaction to all this was to make the NSA's attempts to violate individual's privacy much harder. If the NSA had been a good citizen, people and companies may have been more receptive to working with them (although end-to-end encryption was still going to happen, because it's the right thing to do with a customer's data).
The biggest problem with the government's desire to weaken or ban encryption is the "bad guys" will still use strong encryption methods -- they don't follow the law by definition. Other nations will still develop and use strong encryption, so it won't disappear. This leaves only normal folks vulnerable to both government overreach, as well as to the "bad guys".
Nobody who knows anything about me thinks that I'm OK with deliberately weakened cryptography of any sort. I'd like to ask you again to stop implying otherwise.
It's fair to argue that he overstates the benefit of surveillance to law enforcement or that it wouldn't be bad if law enforcement got harder or more expensive in various ways or that it's unfortunate that law enforcement ever came to rely on electronic surveillance in the first place, but I think he made very clear that he did not support limits on encryption, which makes it kind of unfair to challenge him on that aspect. He has been saying that he wishes fellow opponents of crypto restrictions would be more sympathetic to the view that easy availability of crypto has some disadvantages to society, so maybe it would be more helpful to engage on that point. :-)
It's because everyone can understand someone listening in to their phone calls, but computers are magic. What we need is computer literacy and for people to be educated of their rights as users of the world wide web.
I think it's more generally "what you can't see doesn't exist".
If there is a dodgy-looking guy staring at you when you go home, you get frightened. If he watching you through the CCTV then it's all fine. A bit like if you have a video of a guy getting killed on youtube it's horrible, but if it's a one liner in a newspaper about a drone bombing a house then it's ok. If there is a video of a guy killing someone with a knife in the street of London, it will be remembered for years as a horrendous terrorist attack. But if the police publishes statistics about knife attacks in your neighborhood then it's just a bunch of boring numbers.
When I discuss the issue of mass surveillance with older people, it's in the context of phone conversations. A lot of times they bring up the idea of a "click" on the line. If only.
> That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
It's a completely valid argument in both cases. Banning only the scary-looking guns has no productive effect. And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no.
Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you.
If you ask whether large numbers of government employees and contractors should be able to know everything about your business and sex life if it would have the same effectiveness in catching terrorists as a variety of alternative methods that would shovel fewer tax dollars into the pockets of large government contractors, you get a different answer.
> And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no.
Disagree. The person imagines a constrained government, which would only be reading private messages when there is reason for suspicion. The only time another human would be invading their privacy is in an exceptional situation that happens to others (since they themselves are good), which can be just-worlded to the required degree. And of course mass media distorts their priors to think that suspicion strongly implies guilt - a TV show would be quite boring if there were no wrongdoing.
I suspect tech is so (relatively) resistant to mass surveillance because we've perceived how horribly wrong group dynamics go and, rather than accepting being compliant herd followers, found our own outlets and created our own kingdoms. We are the outliers - we will never have the majority on our side.
> The person imagines a constrained government, which would only read private messages when there is reason for suspicion.
That's the point. People who support mass surveillance or encryption bans only do so because they're uninformed (or have been purposely misinformed by others). You teach regular people how it actually works and they change their tune.
My parents are okay with mass surveillance. I've tried running them through how it actually works, but it turned out that they really don't seem to care about this kind of privacy. They are very much about the idea that "if it even saves just one person" it's worth it.
On the subject of encryption bans and backdoors, I explained that this would make it easier for them to be the target of hacks and fraud. This concerned them, but ultimately they are under the impression that the people handling it know more than me and I can't be correct.
I don't think they are particularly out-of-the-ordinary, so I don't think the solution is a simple act of informing people. I think people who do care about this stuff largely need to accept the possibility that this isn't important to the majority of the population, and that it never will be (no matter how informed the public is). Instead, we need to continue build the tools and the infrastructure to secure ourselves regardless of policy and legislation.
The problem with the encryption conversation, is that they believe people more knowledgeable than myself are dealing with it. I demonstrated its importance, and they see how necessary it is.
But when I say the kinds of changes being proposed would fundamentally undermine the security encryption provides, they think I'm wrong. Like most of the current presidential-hopefuls, they believe in a magic-bullet that will give the government access but no one else. They think someone smarter than me will implement it, and that my concerns are misplaced.
Again, I don't see this as a strange viewpoint. I think, to some degree, it's what most people believe.
Except the chance of a human seeing those messages is still constrained. I don't think your 'average' person is creeped out by a computer analyzing their messages. To the extent some might be, they have so little digital autonomy (gmail etc) that the only way they can change that is to avoid electronic communication for the things they'd like to keep private. And the majority are clearly not doing that for the bulk of their communication.
People in tech are suspicious of mass surveillance because most people in tech got here by way of Science Fiction, which was in a dystopian phase when we were highly impressionable.
Banning only the scary-looking guns has no productive effect.
That's rather disingenuous, I am all for banning people buying howitzers and other artillery even if there just big guns. Yes, you can make them with a decent machine shop, but just because some nutjobs are highly capable does not mean they all are.
I think he's talking about "assault weapon" bans. I don't think whether or not a rifle has a pistol grip is going to b the determining factor in preventing a mass shooting.
<Playing devil’s advocate or in this case Angel’s advocate?>
It is easier to carry out a door to door mass shooting with a pistol grip. This is why assault weapons have them in the first place. Sure, it might only save a few lives, but that would be meaningful for those who lived. ;0
</enough derailing>
IMO, none of that stuff was going to get passed, it's all about the political football. I am starting to think encryption may be the same game as it's a great way to drum up donations.
You have a point there: pistol grips do have a small but useful function.
Now, change it to "bayonet mounts", which is another feature that was listed on the "Assault Weapons Ban" law. How does having a bayonet aid someone in a mass shooting? In fact, when has a mass shooter ever had a bayonet mounted on his rifle? I'm not even sure why they bother with them any more; I've never seen any pictures with US military servicemen in combat in the last 20 years with bayonets mounted in their M-16s or M-4s.
Another thing was flash suppressors. How is banning those going to prevent mass shootings? The whole point of a flash suppressor is so the enemy on a battlefield can't tell where gunfire is coming from exactly. Someone walking into a movie theater isn't all that worried about return fire, and in a room that size when he enters through the emergency-exit door, it's not like he's going to be well-hidden.
But seriously, the whole thing is pretty dumb IMO. They tried to ban very, very minor features (pistol grips, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, etc.), but ignored the things that really made these weapons good at shooting lots of people, namely semiautomatic operation and easily-swapped magazines. If you want to make mass shootings hard, ban magazine-fed ammunition and semiautomatic operation. Of course, that'll bring you right back to Old West 6-shooters (well, modern .357 Magnum revolvers would still be legal too, but you could also ban that style of revolver where the cylinder is easily opened and reloaded with a speedloader; the Old West revolvers didn't have that, you had to reload them one at a time, very slowly). But of course they know that'll never work since people have had semiauto guns for a century or more now and aren't going to turn them all in, so they go for a feel-good measure that'll make ignorant anti-gun voters happy without actually changing anything substantive.
"Assault weapons" are a fictional category consisting of "scary looking" cosmetic features on guns that are mechanically identical in every way to the oft-mentioned "normal hunting firearm" that politicians are always careful to claim they have no interest in banning.
Historically, "Assault weapons" is a useful category. They where designed for close combat where shooter mobility was more important than holding a lower prone position.
Granted, it's like banning the ergonomic snow shovel. Sure, it's slightly better, but it's generally not a huge difference.
>Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you.
Yep, this is why so many polls are BS: the questions are worded in such a way to coerce people to answer a certain way, or options are left out.
It may not even be intentional; if you use the OKCupid dating site, they have thousands of questions you can answer so that it can match you up with people. I think a lot of these questions (probably most) were actually submitted by users, and many times they have terrible choices. For instance, there's one question about dogs: it asks if you want to own a dog or not. The choices are (I don't have the exact Q in front of me here) "yes, I do or would love to own a dog!", or "No, I dislike dogs". WTF? If you pick the latter, it makes you look like you hate dogs. But what if you like dogs just fine and are generally an animal-loving person, but you just don't want to own and care for a dog? I like horses well enough too, but that doesn't mean I want to buy a horse farm and fill the barn with horses. I think iguanas are cute, but I don't really want one as a pet. I think parrots are beautiful and interesting animals, but I really don't want to live with all that squawking (plus I think they should be left in the wild). But somehow because I don't want to take care of a dog, I'm suddenly a dog-hater according to this poll question.
The way a poll question is designed really reflects a lot on the bias of the person writing the poll; the only way to mitigate it is to have every poll question thoroughly scrutinized by a diverse committee. But they never are, they just run the poll, collect the data, and assume it to be gospel truth.
Apologies if this devolves, but I have to comment: Except that many gun control advocates do argue as they do because they don't understand guns and the processes around them. Not so silly.
I'd like to echo this and add additional comments. The original post states that it should be career ending, but the truth is that while many government officials and Tech companies say they are interested in privacy, the ideas being presented about backdoors are basically incredibly desirable to the majority of government agencies and major tech businesses.
Even your average citizen understands encryption on the basic level and what the backdoor means. No, they don't understand the technical underpinnings of how it works, but they know it means privacy that cannot be bypassed, and many are willing to give up that privacy if it means getting what they want elsewhere. You can lob the scares of "are you sure you have nothing to hide?" to any proponent of encryption as much as you like, but in all honesty they've made the assessment already and have decided that it's worth the gamble. Proponents of encryption aren't the victims of some massive disinformation campaign, they're just making a really bad decision despite the available evidence, and it's turning out to be an overwhelmingly popular decision.
We should equate encryption banning with antisemitism. That should help end politicians careers for attacking encryption as it does if they come out as big antisemitic. I am only half kidding.
There's a more fundamental problem at stake. Law enforcement has gotten used to requesting our data from third-party providers instead of us directly. So now they act as if that's normal.
But it completely bypasses the 4th amendment either directly or in spirit. In most cases they don't even need to serve a warrant to the companies, and even if they do, I think that warrant should always be served to the individual.
It shouldn't be served to companies just because "it's easier" and because it happens that in the 21st century the data about our lives is stored on a third-party company's servers. If we just wanted to make things as easy as possible for law enforcement we'd have to do away with many more of our rights.
It's not frightening at all. This is the standard nation-state insouciance.
To see how out of touch governments can be, I think there are two stories, both unfortunately of a military nature.
One is Eisenhower's trek across the US in the interwar period, the thing ( along with the Autobahn ) that inspired the Interstate, and the story of the squad-level light machine gun in WWI, especially related to the Lewis gun.
Machine guns were not embraced until the Germans showed how effective they were in WWI. This really happened. Commanders were optimizing for damage per bullet long after they should not have been.
Be wary, but don't be frightened. I at least find it relatively easy to conduct my affairs such that I don't have to live in fear. So it can be done.
At least consider the possibility that the Snowden and Manning stories are stories about people who really didn't think it all the way through, if they didn't want to be hunted. There's an element of martyrdom and hubris to those stories.
In a way, much of the Nixon cases were about interpretations of telephone technology and wiretapping roughly 100 years after the advent of those technologies. The timescales here are glacial.
Actually, with a warrant the police should be able to get through your encryption.
The debate is not about whether or not the state can look at your communication, the debate is how. When the state wants to look at your communications and has a warrant to do so, do they:
Demand your keys and lock you in jail indefinitely until you provide them?
Or retain permanent access to every communication and promise to never use it unless they have a warrant.
Demanding keys would conflict with the 5th Amendment; in the few cases that I'm aware of[1][2] where a defendant was successfully compelled to decrypt their files, the suspect had either already demonstrated that the evidence was in their possession and thus given up their right to self- incriminate or been granted immunity. Also, with end-to-end encryption law enforcement won't be able to decrypt regardless of whether or not they have a warrant, and they need a warrant to initiate a wiretap to begin with.
I don't want to live in a world where encryption is banned. I also don't want to live in a world where one's political career is instantly ended by bringing it up. Those are just two different flavors of fascism.
The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that's the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surveillance leads to mass demand, and therefore mass markets, for privacy products (e.g. VPNs, secure messaging). And a product will only be used by the masses if it is easy to use.
Can't these people see that they're shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the 'terrorists/communists/lizard people' hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned 'enemies of the week' have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that's no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you've just created!
Now they're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle by banning encryption. Banning encryption? What does that even mean? How are you going to enforce that? I suspect the answer to the latter is: "selectively".
It feels like we're only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone's homes, to ensure they don't use any of that 'godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use'.
After all, if you're doing nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide.
Any time something is banned, it becomes more prevalent and governments lose any semblance of control that they may have had on a thing. Such a ban would also force people to re-think security. There is a false sense of security if a thing uses an encrypted transport, or has an encrypted disk. This only partially hinders accessing data by people that are not supposed to have it. I should not have to start documenting the ways to side-step current implementations of encryption, right? This is the Hacker News, so most of you should already know at least some of the methods.
OK, back to reality. A ban would legalize what is already being done. There would be no more need for individuals to risk their own safety by breaking gag orders, NSL's, court orders, et al. Everyone would be painfully aware of what is being monitored.
BTW, I am being partially sarcastic here. The 3 letter agencies are nodding their heads as they read this. A ban on encryption would be highly detrimental to their operations. Such bans would be dead in the water or have their teeth removed before seeing the light of day.
Prohibition is a good analogy. Brewing, vinting, and distilling in commercial quality requires capital equipment and a continuing source of supplies. A lot of money changes hands in the real world to make that happen. And yet, Prohibition enforcement failed.
A strong encryption ban would make math into contraband. That's going to be a lot harder to stop at the borders than a rum runner's boat. But, then again, the government could be looking for an opprtunity to wage an unending war against a phantom. There's a lot of money to be made from that, starting with a thick slice of that $19 billion for computer "security." The "security" business has always been good at selling purported protection out one door and surveillance out the other.
A strong encryption ban would not make math into contraband. It might make implementations of some small subset of math into something that's illegal under some constraints. SFAIK, you can encrypt away all you want so long as nobody needs it to comply with a court order or summons.
"Computer security" embraces that ELINT now includes hacking type activities. The most "Dude, epic" version is the STUXNET story.
You are minimizing the problem. Just as the drug War has brought with it absurdities like making "fake drugs" such a bag of powdered sugar illegal, it's a lead pipe cinch that files full of random numbers will become illegal because they might be making it more difficult to spot encrypted content. This, along with the ham fisted tactics to blackmail people into becoming informants will lead to the same toxic enforcement environment found in the Drug War being imposed on software.
I think you're projecting the present state of affairs forward. Honestly? I don't know enough to think that's likely.
The WOD happened, by one story, because Nixon figured out that some of the heroin the CIA was transporting with Air America was finding its way to troops in the field. That met with general approval so they generalized it. For the Greatest and Silent Generations, the sheer lack of adequate information about drugs was impossible to explain.
It's not clear to me that a mechanism related to encryption is in the wind. Sure, there's overreach. And then there isn't. just being an encryptyor isn't enough - you have to also be affiliated with something they consider Nasty.
After all, look how the blacklisting thing worked out. It was all hell for people like Dalton Trumbo. But in a reasonably non-ideological way of looking at it, Trumbo was an actual Stalinist.
It wasn't you mean we tried temperance it and didn't take over the globe are use sure? Hum maybe that is why we gave up on it we are such quitters here in the US.
People vastly underestimate the power of the US government to ban encryption within its borders. It simply can stop the sale of all offending devices, confiscate said devices, and even go after the profits from sale of the devices both new and old. If pushed they could theoretically go after those who run the companies.
It really depends on who is behind it and how much political power they have relative to their next election prospects.
You're talking like encryption is hardware. It's software. You can confiscate eight billion copies but miss one and tomorrow there will be nine billion more.
And it doesn't come from companies. Originally it comes from academics, but nobody actually gets their copy of AES from Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. It's software on the internet. You can get it from Mozilla or Google. If you can't get it from them then you can get it from anyone at CCC or Debian servers in France or Brazil or your cousin in Russia or the Venezuelan government that loves any excuse to stick it to the US.
But let's pretend they're willing to cut all the fiber and close all the borders to keep encryption from crossing in from other countries. Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?
Now mind you, that doesn't mean banning encryption would have no effect. It would mean that your bank and your doctor couldn't use it to protect your finances and medical records, and they're the type of organization that could be compelled to comply with such a thing.
All you need to do is ban general purpose computing first.
And smartphones are pretty close to that. If vendors enforced their walled gardens a bit more and disallowed cryptography apps you would already have a crypto-free zone on billions of devices.
It would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every law abiding company would have to instantly shut down. All the stock markets would go to zero. The whole country would basically be reset to nothing. Millions would die.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That it may not be attempted? The step from walled gardens to demanding that the the gatekeeper keeps out certain crypto apps is small. Especially if they start with a small blacklist and contiously expand it. Similar to domain blocking (first child porn, then piracy, then leak sites...)
Mandating that they (or carriers) should not turn a blind eye because terrorists/think of the children is not a big leap either, because ostensibly rooting is a security flaw anyway.
That way only apps compliant with government regulation (read: backdoored) would run on most devices.
Sure, a small percentage of people might still find their way around it. But should we only care about the most tech-savy while leaving everyone else exposed to a snooping government?
> The step from walled gardens to demanding that the the gatekeeper keeps out certain crypto apps is small.
The step from walled gardens to demanding that the the gatekeeper keeps out certain crypto apps is what causes the walls to fall.
If you can't get secure messaging on an iPhone but you can get it on Android or Ubuntu phone and many people start buying competing hardware because of it, Apple would sooner give up the walled garden than lose that much business.
And you can't draw any kind of meaningful distinction between a phone and a 7" touchscreen laptop, so the only way this would actually work is to ban PCs.
Javascript is Turing-complete. Microsoft Office is Turing-complete. So you would have to stop people from running Javascript or Office or shell scripts or Minecraft or graphing calculators.
And you would obviously have to ban anything that resembles a REPL, which might create some difficulties for software development or anyone trying to learn it.
It's not possible for the enemies of general purpose computing to win the war. What is possible is that they be allowed to make the attempt and end up killing lots of innocent people, both figuratively and literally.
That sounds more like they cannot eradicated all enclaves of rebels, but they can control mouch of the territory. Namely the higher-privileged rings.
If you try to run your "free" software stack inside a javascript engine inside an approved browser inside an approve operating system then your data is neither secure nor do you actually have control over the execution.
If they can blacklist apps they can also blacklist domains from which you load javascript. It cascades down and you're basically retreating to the position where you say "as long as I can do some computation everything is fine".
It's not fine if you lose control over more and more parts of your computer.
You think laptops are safe? Think about secure boot and those Windows RT devices which do not boot linux despite being capable ARM devices.
Now you're making a completely different argument. You can't ban general purpose computers so now you want to backdoor them all.
But people currently buy iPhones because they want iOS. When there is a jailbreak vulnerability in iOS, they install the patch that closes it because they want to keep using iOS. And if they want to run Android or Ubuntu, they don't buy an iPhone, and they don't have to.
If tomorrow the only hardware you can get runs iOS or Windows RT then people who want something else will keep using today's hardware, in exactly the same way and for the same reasons as normal people keep using Windows 7 and nobody buys Windows RT. And they'll keep doing that until there is a jailbreak vulnerability in the new hardware. Then they won't install the patch, they'll use the vulnerability to wipe the unwanted OS and replace it with something else (or have someone else do it, but the more common it becomes the easier it gets).
The other obvious problem is that today Apple doesn't want you to jailbreak iOS. They try really hard to prevent it and still people can do it, and those people don't even have a huge incentive because you can still buy hardware that doesn't need a jailbreak. You try to impose that requirement by law on all the vendors who don't care and are selling to customers who are being forced into it and see how well it stops even everyday people from removing the backdoor or installing free software.
>Your proposal is that they're going to go house to house and search your attic for the last of those t-shirts the EFF printed the last time this happened?
As every comms is under surveillance its vastly easier than that. You just need to look for traffic you can't read. And then go after the sender. If you make encrypted communication a criminal offense, that's an easy task.
> You just need to look for traffic you can't read.
And what precisely is that supposed to mean?
If I send you a spreadsheet purporting to be "the latest numbers for the current period" but the low bits of each field (which would reasonably be statistically random) are really encrypted data, how do you propose an observer can figure that out?
It's not that simple. There may also be covert channel traffic that you don't see, encoded in packet timing. You can only use maybe 1% of "carrier" throughput. But that's easily enough for text messages hidden in HD video streams.
Then people resort to stenography. And activists start throwing binary chaf into emails and webpages. Or they do weird things like setup a weak encryption channel that encapsulates a stronger encrypted tunnel.
I do believe that the U.S. can't "ban encryption", any more than it could "ban mathematics".
That doesn't mean the intelligence value to legally enforced backdoors in popular US-created or US-marketed products isn't significant.
For one thing, your target might not be sophisticated or suspicious enough to avoid these products, or they may be communicating with folks who aren't (for example, if you're studying recruitment).
For another, requiring anyone desiring to hide their communication to eschew popular products itself provides a signal that may be of interest. And a diversity of smaller encrypted products may end up being more vulnerable to subversion and exploitation, vs. widely used, deeply studied systems.
I am not arguing that this value is worth the massive privacy and civil liberties tradeoff of giving the government access to products like iMessage. But it's not, I think, as simple as saying, "the bad guys will just switch to using other tools".
They absolutely can ban encryption if they want. Just like they can ban mathematics. What makes you think it's impossible?
It wouldn't immediately eliminate all encryption, but it'd be easy to go after any corporations operating in the US and either force them to follow the ban or throw their execs in jail. After that, they could put up a Great Firewall and block downloads from foreign servers. They can use the Great Firewall to snoop on internet traffic, doing deep packet inspection, and look for unrecognized traffic, VPNs, encrypted emails, any markers of common unauthorized encryption protocols, etc. They don't have to catch every single person, they just have to catch some and then make an example out of them.
You're probably thinking that this is just too extreme. Has everyone forgotten what life was like in East Germany under the Stasi? That lasted until the late 1980s!
Now of course, you can debate how unlikely this scenario is to play out, but I'm just pointing out that it isn't impossible, not at all, and we've seen a society much like this in the very recent past.
The US government can backdoor all the products they want. The only thing they will achieve is to destroy the tech sector in the US. That's no big deal right? Who cares if no one outside the US trusts US companies because all their software is backdoored? Of course, the tech sector will be only the first to suffer. The rest will fall like dominoes.
And all for what? So the FBI can catch some people smoking weed and the NSA can perv out to citizens' pics, that's what for.
What's sad/funny to me is that people are making a bigger deal about this because Harvard study.
Encryption is like a knife. It's not good or bad. It just is. I find that using that analogy helps a lot especially when talking to lay people. Banning one/one kind of knife means a bad actor is just going to use something else. Ergo, it isn't a fix.
I often argue this point, however I wonder how other people on HN discuss this issue with their non-technical "real politik" (actually just Political Science majors) friends that suggest that prohibiting encryption for non-sanctioned private entities (for example allowing bank transactions, online shopping, but disallowing encrypted chat protocols, emails, etc) is not terribly detrimental for the state barring "morality" concerns and our commitment to the principals of democracy, free speech, and the like.
I often resort to, "You can't ban math!", but wonder if there are more outlined resources for explaining this.
You are sorely misguided if you believe a foundational principle of our judicial system is deliberate and systematic invasion of innocent citizens' private communications.
> no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single emoji from a single IM
This is fine and how it should be. Historically there has been no way to intercept communications on this level ever before - so why claim it's suddenly necessary now? Especially since all of it has amounted to exactly nothing thus far...
This analogy has been beaten to death - but the parallels are almost exact when compared to Stasi Secret Police steaming open citizens hand-written letters for inspection... As others have already mentioned, one of the driving forces behind our nation was desire for private communications that the government didn't have entitled and unrestricted access to.
So first you're going going to put words into his mouth claiming he supports things he explicitly disavows and then you're going to be condescending and rude about it.
That's, well, condescending and rude, beside being an outright misrepresentation of someone else's views, whatever you may think of them.
Sorry, nobody gets a free pass or special treatment here, no matter how many points they may have.
Making contradictory statements, or provocatory statements without giving "the other side" argument is going to be perceived as support for that one particular viewpoint. That is what happened here, in many occurrences (you are encouraged to go read the thread in full). Those statements are what my posts, and those by others, sought to argue against.
So don't come around, way after things have settled, and attempt to reprimand someone for doing precisely what was intended while simultaneously exhibiting the exact behavior you perceived as inflammatory.
I think what you're asking for is the special treatment of 'right to misrepresent someone's views because you don't agree with them' and then being a jerk about it. That's what I read in the thread.
