17 ms·

U.S. can't ban encryption because it's a global phenomenon, Harvard study finds

130 points by chewymouse 11y ago

f3llowtraveler 11y ago
Same reason no one can stop cryptocurrencies. So far I don't see any reason why Bitcoin's exponential adoption rate would suddenly grind to a halt.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Have you been hit in the knees with a wrench by government thugs? Just asking.
  - 2close4comfort 11y ago
    Rubber hose crypto is an issue but one that can be solved.
- mcv 11y ago
  I do. It doesn't scale well, and that will slow down adoption.
2close4comfort 11y ago
Hey we banned liquor once too, which I am thinking was somewhat global at the time. Don't underestimate the US! USA! USA!
- NietTim 11y ago
  That wasn't even somewhat global by any stretch of the imagination.....
  - 2close4comfort 11y ago
    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.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  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.
  - 2close4comfort 11y ago
    The only thing that is as dangerous as ignorance is greed.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    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.
    - chopin 11y ago
      >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.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  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.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    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.
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      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.
      - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
        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.
austerity 11y ago
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.
- cooper12 11y ago
  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.
  - 2close4comfort 11y ago
    This is brought to you by an intelligence community that thinks that using your AOL email address is good enough for classified information.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      To be fair, the intelligence community is outraged. It's their bosses that are downplaying the issue.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    The government can tap pretty much any call, and has been collecting meta-data on all calls, and the public does not seem to mind. I think you're overestimating how much the public's indifference has to do with computer illiteracy. That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      > 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.
spangry 11y ago
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.
LinuxBender 11y ago
I support a ban on encryption. /s 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.
justaman 11y ago
The thing about encryption, you can always roll your own if you are advantageous enough.
s_q_b 11y ago
Trying to ban encryption is like trying to ban a triangle.
twoodfin 11y ago
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".
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  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.
joesmo 11y ago
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.
such_a_casual 11y ago
But if they ban encryption, there won't be any more bad guys.
Alupis 11y ago
> a foundational principle of our judicial system 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.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me.
  - Alupis 11y ago
    > I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me. Those quotes are from you... And coupled with the general tone in majority of your posts in this thread... it's painfully clear you fundamentally believe the government not being able to intercept and access all private electronic communications the world-over is a major problem... Taking this to it's logical conclusion, you support weakening, backdooring, or somehow subverting generalized end-user encryption in order to "aide" law enforcement (to whatever end). This is an absurd stance for anyone who works in technology to take. The government is not just kicking around the idea of banning/backdooring full-device encryption, but even run-of-the-mill encryption such as SSL/TLS because it can be used to mask communications just the same. In this world, you wont even be safe purchasing goods online, let alone conducting banking, etc. It literally is incompatible with the technology we need to drive today's world. So please get off the "government needs this to stop bad guys" high horse and come back down to reality. There is not a world where anyone is safe without strong encryption.
fakhar50 11y ago
i agree
newman314 11y ago
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.
perks 11y ago
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.

130 points by chewymouse 11y ago

Same reason no one can stop cryptocurrencies. So far I don't see any reason why Bitcoin's exponential adoption rate would suddenly grind to a halt.

venomsnake 11y ago
Have you been hit in the knees with a wrench by government thugs? Just asking.
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  Rubber hose crypto is an issue but one that can be solved.
mcv 11y ago
I do. It doesn't scale well, and that will slow down adoption.

2close4comfort 11y ago

Hey we banned liquor once too, which I am thinking was somewhat global at the time. Don't underestimate the US! USA! USA!

NietTim 11y ago
That wasn't even somewhat global by any stretch of the imagination.....
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  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.
Shivetya 11y ago
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.
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  The only thing that is as dangerous as ignorance is greed.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  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.
  - chopin 11y ago
    >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.
Zigurd 11y ago
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.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  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.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    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.
    - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      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.

austerity 11y ago

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.

cooper12 11y ago
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.
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  This is brought to you by an intelligence community that thinks that using your AOL email address is good enough for classified information.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    To be fair, the intelligence community is outraged. It's their bosses that are downplaying the issue.
- hodwik 11y ago
  The government can tap pretty much any call, and has been collecting meta-data on all calls, and the public does not seem to mind. I think you're overestimating how much the public's indifference has to do with computer illiteracy. That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > 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.

spangry 11y ago

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.

LinuxBender 11y ago

I support a ban on encryption. /s 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.

justaman 11y ago

The thing about encryption, you can always roll your own if you are advantageous enough.

s_q_b 11y ago

Trying to ban encryption is like trying to ban a triangle.

twoodfin 11y ago

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".

Grishnakh 11y ago
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.

joesmo 11y ago

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.

such_a_casual 11y ago

But if they ban encryption, there won't be any more bad guys.

Alupis 11y ago

> a foundational principle of our judicial system 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.

tptacek 11y ago
I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me.
- Alupis 11y ago
  > I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me. Those quotes are from you... And coupled with the general tone in majority of your posts in this thread... it's painfully clear you fundamentally believe the government not being able to intercept and access all private electronic communications the world-over is a major problem... Taking this to it's logical conclusion, you support weakening, backdooring, or somehow subverting generalized end-user encryption in order to "aide" law enforcement (to whatever end). This is an absurd stance for anyone who works in technology to take. The government is not just kicking around the idea of banning/backdooring full-device encryption, but even run-of-the-mill encryption such as SSL/TLS because it can be used to mask communications just the same. In this world, you wont even be safe purchasing goods online, let alone conducting banking, etc. It literally is incompatible with the technology we need to drive today's world. So please get off the "government needs this to stop bad guys" high horse and come back down to reality. There is not a world where anyone is safe without strong encryption.

fakhar50 11y ago

i agree

newman314 11y ago

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.

perks 11y ago

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.