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One thing I love about watching the 2016 Crypto Wars: pro-encryption people using all of the pro-gun arguments. Here are my favorites: 1. Criminals will still

by aftbit 11y ago

One thing I love about watching the 2016 Crypto Wars: pro-encryption people using all of the pro-gun arguments. Here are my favorites: 1. Criminals will still use encryption / get guns. Only lawful people will be harmed. 2. Compromises will just lead to defeat for the pro-encryption / pro-gun side. 3. If we want to stand up for all of our other civil rights, we need the right to encrypt / bear arms. 4. Consequentialism: the number of people being harmed by encryption/guns is smaller than the number of people who would be harmed by living in a world without encryption/guns. Personally, I think these are all solid arguments that work for both guns and encryption, but I'm generally more libertarian than many in the SF tech scene.

studentrob 11y ago
You're right to point out the similarities, but when you drag guns into this issue you lose some supporters. It unnecessarily complicates the issue, even though I agree with you on the similarities. People will just find more ways to disagree on encryption and they won't have learned anything more about computer technology.
- LyndsySimon 11y ago
  The obverse is also true - there are many in the firearms community that oppose access to effective encryption.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
It's probably because they're arguments over a tool that's morally neutral.
TheHydroImpulse 11y ago
They become pretty weak for encryption except #1. Moreover, there are real arguments for the inherit danger in owning a gun, statistically. It's a fact that you're more likely to commit suicide or someone gets killed because you own a gun. You can't say the same about encryption because it's a tool, not a weapon. A gun is a weapon meant to kill. > 2. Compromises will just lead to defeat for the pro-encryption / pro-gun side. A compromise in encryption hurts everybody. The whole platform for electronic banking needs strong encryption, for example. > Consequentialism: the number of people being harmed by encryption/guns is smaller than the number of people who would be harmed by living in a world without encryption/guns. If you own a gun you are statistically more likely to get shot or killed.
- mindslight 11y ago
  If you use encryption, you are more likely to lose your own data. It's much easier to blow away a LUKS header than an entire disk.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Prudent folk put their LUKS volumes on RAID10 arrays. And they keep header backups.
- fsaneq2 11y ago
  > If you own a gun you are statistically more likely to get shot or killed. Or is it that if you have reason to believe you might get shot or killed, you are more likely to buy a gun? I don't have an account, but I just made one because I'm genuinely curious about whether you have a good source for this claim. The usual study referenced for this is deeply flawed; if I remember correctly it examines people who were shot and checks whether they owned a gun. Of course that study is completely invalid because of the selection bias involved. P(X owns a gun | X gets shot) is not the same as P(X gets shot | X owns a gun). There is also data showing for example that "the higher a state's firearm ownership rate, the lower its firearm homicide rate" – see https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/photos/a.130184327167571.1073741828.123061011213236/453254564860544/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/photos/a.1301843271..., based on FBI data.
  - nkurz 11y ago
    While agreeing with you that there are some statistically terrible high profile studies (such as failure to control for cases where the subject acquired a gun explicitly because they thought someone was planning to shoot them), I think it is still true that owning a gun causally increases your likelihood of being shot. The biggest reason is suicide. If you don't own a gun, you are much less likely to intentionally shoot yourself. The second reason is accidental shootings. If there is no gun in your house, there is practically no chance that you will accidentally shoot yourself, or that your toddler will accidentally shoot you. Of course, the question that's really being asked is whether an individual is at greater risk of being shot intentionally by someone else if they own a gun or not. This is where the data is much thinner. This seems like a solid review article: http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20of%20a%20Gun%20in%20the%20Home%202011.pdf http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20o... Their conclusion at the bottom of page 4 and top of page 5 is even after "controlling for illicit drug use, fights, arrests, living alone, and whether or not the home was rented", that "Yes, owning a gun increases your risk of death by gunshot". Still, I'd be interested in seeing a study that breaks apart statistics for hand guns and long guns. (Welcome to HN!)
aeturnum 11y ago
I largely agree with you as far as rhetoric goes, but I think there are practical details of guns & encryption that matter in practice. First, guns are physical things where encryption is (largely) ideas. Second, the 'protection' offered by the two technologies differs. Guns offer a dis-incentive to mistreat the user, but do not directly restrict behavior when at rest. On the other hand, encryption prevents access even if the user is un-aware, but does not offer any method of 'active' defense (i.e. shooting at an aggressor).
- sarvinc 11y ago
  Devil's advocate. Brandishing a firearm i.e. displaying but not drawing it could be considered an 'inactive' defense. Knowing someone owns an iPhone might dissuade one from attempting theft.
  - dmourati 11y ago
    Brandishing a firearm is a crime.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      It's also stupid. People who brandish firearms often get shot with them.
  - wagglycocks 11y ago
    This is an extremely poor analogy. Displaying a weapon is absolutely not a defense. Firearms should never be used to threaten in this manner.
  - aeturnum 11y ago
    Even so, you cannot brandish a weapon at someone you don't know about, while encryption doesn't care.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  > First, guns are physical things where encryption is (largely) ideas. I don't see what this means for the topic at hand. > Second, the 'protection' offered by the two technologies differs. Guns offer a dis-incentive to mistreat the user, but do not directly restrict behavior when at rest. Same here. What's the significance? Would auto-firing guns be better?
paulddraper 11y ago
The only difference is that more people use encryption then guns. And what affects me is most important, morals be damned. /s Majority oppression is very effective. And that's why I think this will turn out differently than guns. My prediction: you won't have to register encryption keys, or keep it disabled, or pay the state some ridiculous amount for a permit that they illegally stonewall, or be prevented from using any encryption made after 1986.
- Benjammer 11y ago
  Yeah, there's also the fact that you can't use a digital private key as a physical murder weapon in quite the same way.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    You can use encryption to perpetrate terrible crimes. That's the whole reason politicians talk about controlling it, e.g. with France. And queue the arguments: it's just a tool, it's inevitable, etc. --- Now that I think more about it, one difference is that a gun is more useful for survival, hunting, etc. A more "basic" need in a sense.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Replace "encryption" with any of cars, knives, food, rat poison, drain cleaner, plastic wrap, dogs, lasers, urine, syringes, air, water, concrete, VCRs ... to see why this is an inconsequential point.
      - paulddraper 11y ago
        I agree.
    - Benjammer 11y ago
      Yeah I agree, I just think there's something a bit more visceral about shooting someone with a gun (or using any other physical weapon that shoots or cuts or stabs) rather than using encryption to set up a scenario that would cause harm in some way indirectly from the perpetrator. I would think this is why there are those restrictions on guns that seem pretty weird when you talk about applying the same rules to encryption.
ntucker 11y ago
The really interesting thing about point 1 is that with encryption, there's really extremely little personal risk to being unlawful when it comes to encryption. That's why this is a losing game of chess for them. Encryption is just math, and you don't need anybody's permission to do math. You can take a system that the government has mandated be broken and you can do good encryption inside that system by layering it. And good people who simply want to be safe will do this. And so will terrorists. Outlaw good encryption and a whole sub-industry of deniable encryption tools will emerge. And they will have achieved nothing except that our companies won't be allowed to officially support strong encryption, so they'll be disadvantaged in the marketplace. It's a really backwards move.
- leeoniya 11y ago
  If your hardware contains unflashable firmware with a back door to direct memory access, then there is no encryption you can trust to perform on the device itself. For example, your baseband processor in your mobile phone which is a binary blob, protected/signed so not to violate FCC regulations and disrupt networks. Such firmware can be mandated from manufacturers without outlawing encryption directly but making it useless nevertheless.
  - riscy 11y ago
    The ability for any software to reliably recognize whether an encryption algorithm is being performed or not is not possible (not computable). It can always be hidden.
    - leeoniya 11y ago
      you don't need to detect encryption. with full memory access, you just take the plaintext.
      - ntucker 11y ago
        My point is that you don't have to do the encryption on the device. You can send/store encrypted data via compromised devices and channels.
abalone 11y ago
That's an oversimplification. While it's true that criminals will still get encryption, there's no corresponding harm to innocents like there is with widespread gun ownership (domestic violence, fights that escalate into shootings, child accidents, adult accidents, etc.) It is not as "solid" an argument for guns as it is for encryption.
- woodman 11y ago
  > ...there's no corresponding harm to innocents like there is with widespread gun ownership... That is also an oversimplification. Have you considered the possibility that encryption can be used in commission of a non-victemless crime? Let me direct your attention to the state's now second favorite goto: child porn. Privacy advocates are as familiar with that justification as gunrights advocates are with the waving of bloody shirts following school shootings.
  - Freak_NL 11y ago
    The difference is that it is for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption, because it is a virtual good; it is a mathematical concept, implemented in a lot of widely available open source code. At most you can legislate that stock computing devices (such as smartphones) contain no such strong encryption without government backdoors, and you would be able to catch the low hanging fruit of the criminals depending on that technology. But you cannot prevent someone from using strong encryption using third party applications. How will you force a backdoor into, say, gnupg or dm-crypt? Outlaw that software? Any criminal worth his salt will use tools that are not backdoored, completely negating the gimped government-approved stock software. Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. This discussion and comparison is also very strange for someone from Europe, where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority.
    - woodman 11y ago
      I don't mind taking the conversation in a different direction, but I just want to make it clear that nothing you said has anything to do with what I said. > ...for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption... They learned their lesson after the first attempt to do so. Just jumble those words up a little and you'll see the current strategy: actually ban practical encryption. The state doesn't care about gnupg, or any other software that requires more than an hour's worth reading to safely use - because 99% of people won't. So they only have to target the stuff that is easy to use or on by default... unless they can depend on corporate cooperation (Apple up until recently, Microsoft, AT&T, etc). > Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. One can very easily manufacture a firearm using the same equipment that one would use to produce common consumer products like garden hose nozzles. The schematics are all available online. The state doesn't ban the means of production, they ban the stuff that makes it accessible to the common folk - like retail sale of firearms. You see where I'm going with this right? The state doesn't ban math, they ban the stuff that makes the math accessible to the common folk. > ...where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority... lol, unlike encryption software? I'm not talking about the kind that lets you buy crap online that the state can easily circumvent, I'm talking about to kind of crypto that only terrorists, pedos and anarchists want to use... and that the state can't break.
dalke 11y ago
Your #2 is not specifically a pro-gun argument. Compromise on the death penalty, from an anti-death penalty advocate, means there will still be a death penalty. Compromise on prohibition, from a prohibitionist, means there will still be alcohol for sale. Compromise on allowing abortions, from someone thinks that abortion is murder, means there will still be murders. Compromise on slavery, from an abolitionist, means there will still be slaves. Compromise on the Taft-Hartley law, by Communist union officers forced to take an oath that they were not Communists and anti-Communist politicians, means that one of them can't get what they want. In all cases, someone who compromised will view the compromise as a defeat. Therefore, you can't really say it's a pro-gun argument per se, but that both are examples of a wide class of arguments. I feel that holds for the rest of your points - they hold for nearly every argument, and aren't specifically pro-gun or pro-encryption. For an example of #3, the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade says abortions are legal due to a right of privacy. Those who want to restrict or eliminate abortions view it as a right to life of the unborn, and believe the Court was incorrect in making their decision. Both sides base their arguments in civil rights. Also, I think the comparison of cryptography to guns is not a good one. If you want to think of cryptography as a munition, then it's much more like armor than it is to a gun. Bulletproof vests are sometimes used when committing a crime. There are also some laws against them. And in the US, bulletproof vests are not, I believe, covered under the Second Amendment.
barrkel 11y ago
There's little risk your kid will get his hands on your encryption and do something immature that is also lethal; similarly there's little domestic violence you can commit in a rage with encryption. A lack of faith in the absolute rationality of people is my argument against guns, and I include my own rationality there. My argument for encryption is that tech is increasingly an extension of our minds, and we need to keep our mind private. I'm for encryption to the same degree that I'm against government use of a hypothetical mind scanner. It is breaking encryption that is violent; that's the "gun" here, and it's one I'm against.
- rspeer 11y ago
  Be careful with the implications of that rhetoric. Breaking encryption isn't "violent", and often it's legitimate security research.
- 13years 11y ago
  However, your premise is that it is possible to do something about guns. However, consider the war on drugs, billions spent, agencies created, military style task force, severe penalties including life in prison just for possession. So if that didn't keep drugs out of the hands of bad people, why would changing some regulations keep guns out of peoples hands? I don't see any regulations that have ever been proposed that would make any difference and if we went all in as in the war on drugs, but war on guns, the war on drugs sets a precedent that it won't be successful.
  - barrkel 11y ago
    I'm not interested in a gun debate (besides, gun regulation works fairly well almost everywhere in the world, but drug regulation doesn't). This topic, however, is about encryption.
    - wooter 11y ago
      > besides, gun regulation works fairly well almost everywhere in the world source? doesn't work in venezuela and didn't work in maoist china or hitler's germany
kijin 11y ago
Well, people have in fact considered breaking out the Second Amendment to defend encryption... https://xkcd.com/504/ https://xkcd.com/504/ This doesn't sound as crazy as it might at first glance, once you remember that strong encryption used to be treated as munition, and in some ways still is.
- vacri 11y ago
  There is plenty of weaponry that is restricted despite the second amendment. The US public gets pretty antsy when smallarms get restricted, but they don't say much when states start banning civilian-owned things like tanks, landmines, maces, or even brass knuckles. Hell, the US even invaded Iraq for the official reason that 'Iraq had weapons you weren't supposed to have' (chemical weapons). Yes, Iraq is not subject to the US constitution, but the concept of 'some weapons are okay, others are not' is still there.
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > There is plenty of weaponry that is restricted despite the second amendment. The US public gets pretty antsy when smallarms get restricted, but they don't say much when states start banning civilian-owned things like tanks, landmines, maces, or even brass knuckles. Those laws are violations of any honest reading of the Second Amendment (with the possible exception of tanks, if one thinks that the Second Amendment protects only man-portable weapons).
vacri 11y ago
#3: Ironically, the pro-gun people that argue this never actually use this supposed right. You hear that the second amendment is the protector of the others, yet most of the rest of the US Bill of Rights get some significant erosions without so much as a peep of second-amendment reaction. Perhaps they're waiting for the 3rd and 7th amendments to suffer like the others, so they can react to the complete set in one go? Certainly the 4th, 6th, and 8th amendments have taken quite a pounding in the past couple of decades...
devishard 11y ago
1. The majority of the time, encryption is used for legal, positive reasons, like protecting your bank info or medical info. Guns, on the other hand, there's no argument for: just look at the data from the UK. Even the police are better off without guns. 2. This might be true for guns, but who cares? 3. In the age of tanks, machine guns, and grenades, consumer guns don't enable us to overthrow unjust governments as they did when the bill of rights was written. As such, they no longer play a role in protecting our civil rights. If anything, gun rights are frequently a talking point for Right-wing politicians who happily trample over all of our other civil liberties. As a political force, the pro-gun politics is actively harming our civil liberties. 4. Looking at the data, I don't see how your can argue this. In the US guns are used more in suicide or commission of a crime than in self-defense. In the UK, near-universal bans on guns have lead to a drastic decrease in gun deaths.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > The majority of the time, encryption is used for legal, positive reasons, like protecting your bank info or medical info. Guns, on the other hand, there's no argument for Ummm, the vast, vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are used for legal, positive reasons like target shooting or self-defense. The number of murders per gun-year is incredibly low, effectively infinitesimal.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    Focusing on murders really misses the point. Or rather misses the full picture. Something we rarely talk about but is the biggest gun problem in the US. 60ish percent of deaths by firearms are suicide. Owning a firearm is a risk factor for suicide. This is because many (most?) suicides are not carefully planned out and given considerable deliberation but are somewhat impulsive. Removing an easy means to commit suicide actually reduces suicide. I'm neither pro or anti gun.
    - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
      I'm very very opposed to a government which uses sticks as a means to prevent suicide. (criminalizing [gun, suicide implement] ownership)
Confusion 11y ago
It's entirely reasonable to argue that some of these arguments apply to encryption, but not to guns, as the actual arguments that are usually used are more complex. Applying an argument to something physical vs. something digital or something that directly kills people vs. something that prevents access to information makes a lot of difference.
nyan4 11y ago
This comparison is just silly, the context and the implications of the 4 points are entirely different.
gunsarentspeech 11y ago
Comparing private speech to devices which convert a few ounces of finger pressure into deadly violence is... silly.
dandersh 11y ago
I guess then the next time someone (perhaps even yourself) argues "they're trying to take our guns away" you will point to the 2016 Crypto Wars to show them that they're wrong...

by aftbit 11y ago

studentrob 11y ago

You're right to point out the similarities, but when you drag guns into this issue you lose some supporters. It unnecessarily complicates the issue, even though I agree with you on the similarities. People will just find more ways to disagree on encryption and they won't have learned anything more about computer technology.

LyndsySimon 11y ago
The obverse is also true - there are many in the firearms community that oppose access to effective encryption.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

It's probably because they're arguments over a tool that's morally neutral.

TheHydroImpulse 11y ago

They become pretty weak for encryption except #1. Moreover, there are real arguments for the inherit danger in owning a gun, statistically. It's a fact that you're more likely to commit suicide or someone gets killed because you own a gun. You can't say the same about encryption because it's a tool, not a weapon. A gun is a weapon meant to kill. > 2. Compromises will just lead to defeat for the pro-encryption / pro-gun side. A compromise in encryption hurts everybody. The whole platform for electronic banking needs strong encryption, for example. > Consequentialism: the number of people being harmed by encryption/guns is smaller than the number of people who would be harmed by living in a world without encryption/guns. If you own a gun you are statistically more likely to get shot or killed.

mindslight 11y ago
If you use encryption, you are more likely to lose your own data. It's much easier to blow away a LUKS header than an entire disk.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Prudent folk put their LUKS volumes on RAID10 arrays. And they keep header backups.
fsaneq2 11y ago
> If you own a gun you are statistically more likely to get shot or killed. Or is it that if you have reason to believe you might get shot or killed, you are more likely to buy a gun? I don't have an account, but I just made one because I'm genuinely curious about whether you have a good source for this claim. The usual study referenced for this is deeply flawed; if I remember correctly it examines people who were shot and checks whether they owned a gun. Of course that study is completely invalid because of the selection bias involved. P(X owns a gun | X gets shot) is not the same as P(X gets shot | X owns a gun). There is also data showing for example that "the higher a state's firearm ownership rate, the lower its firearm homicide rate" – see https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/photos/a.130184327167571.1073741828.123061011213236/453254564860544/?type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/UnbiasedAmerica/photos/a.1301843271..., based on FBI data.
- nkurz 11y ago
  While agreeing with you that there are some statistically terrible high profile studies (such as failure to control for cases where the subject acquired a gun explicitly because they thought someone was planning to shoot them), I think it is still true that owning a gun causally increases your likelihood of being shot. The biggest reason is suicide. If you don't own a gun, you are much less likely to intentionally shoot yourself. The second reason is accidental shootings. If there is no gun in your house, there is practically no chance that you will accidentally shoot yourself, or that your toddler will accidentally shoot you. Of course, the question that's really being asked is whether an individual is at greater risk of being shot intentionally by someone else if they own a gun or not. This is where the data is much thinner. This seems like a solid review article: http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20of%20a%20Gun%20in%20the%20Home%202011.pdf http://www.iansa.org/system/files/Risks%20and%20Benefits%20o... Their conclusion at the bottom of page 4 and top of page 5 is even after "controlling for illicit drug use, fights, arrests, living alone, and whether or not the home was rented", that "Yes, owning a gun increases your risk of death by gunshot". Still, I'd be interested in seeing a study that breaks apart statistics for hand guns and long guns. (Welcome to HN!)

aeturnum 11y ago

I largely agree with you as far as rhetoric goes, but I think there are practical details of guns & encryption that matter in practice. First, guns are physical things where encryption is (largely) ideas. Second, the 'protection' offered by the two technologies differs. Guns offer a dis-incentive to mistreat the user, but do not directly restrict behavior when at rest. On the other hand, encryption prevents access even if the user is un-aware, but does not offer any method of 'active' defense (i.e. shooting at an aggressor).

sarvinc 11y ago
Devil's advocate. Brandishing a firearm i.e. displaying but not drawing it could be considered an 'inactive' defense. Knowing someone owns an iPhone might dissuade one from attempting theft.
- dmourati 11y ago
  Brandishing a firearm is a crime.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    It's also stupid. People who brandish firearms often get shot with them.
- wagglycocks 11y ago
  This is an extremely poor analogy. Displaying a weapon is absolutely not a defense. Firearms should never be used to threaten in this manner.
- aeturnum 11y ago
  Even so, you cannot brandish a weapon at someone you don't know about, while encryption doesn't care.
paulddraper 11y ago
> First, guns are physical things where encryption is (largely) ideas. I don't see what this means for the topic at hand. > Second, the 'protection' offered by the two technologies differs. Guns offer a dis-incentive to mistreat the user, but do not directly restrict behavior when at rest. Same here. What's the significance? Would auto-firing guns be better?

paulddraper 11y ago

The only difference is that more people use encryption then guns. And what affects me is most important, morals be damned. /s Majority oppression is very effective. And that's why I think this will turn out differently than guns. My prediction: you won't have to register encryption keys, or keep it disabled, or pay the state some ridiculous amount for a permit that they illegally stonewall, or be prevented from using any encryption made after 1986.

Benjammer 11y ago
Yeah, there's also the fact that you can't use a digital private key as a physical murder weapon in quite the same way.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  You can use encryption to perpetrate terrible crimes. That's the whole reason politicians talk about controlling it, e.g. with France. And queue the arguments: it's just a tool, it's inevitable, etc. --- Now that I think more about it, one difference is that a gun is more useful for survival, hunting, etc. A more "basic" need in a sense.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Replace "encryption" with any of cars, knives, food, rat poison, drain cleaner, plastic wrap, dogs, lasers, urine, syringes, air, water, concrete, VCRs ... to see why this is an inconsequential point.
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      I agree.
  - Benjammer 11y ago
    Yeah I agree, I just think there's something a bit more visceral about shooting someone with a gun (or using any other physical weapon that shoots or cuts or stabs) rather than using encryption to set up a scenario that would cause harm in some way indirectly from the perpetrator. I would think this is why there are those restrictions on guns that seem pretty weird when you talk about applying the same rules to encryption.

ntucker 11y ago

The really interesting thing about point 1 is that with encryption, there's really extremely little personal risk to being unlawful when it comes to encryption. That's why this is a losing game of chess for them. Encryption is just math, and you don't need anybody's permission to do math. You can take a system that the government has mandated be broken and you can do good encryption inside that system by layering it. And good people who simply want to be safe will do this. And so will terrorists. Outlaw good encryption and a whole sub-industry of deniable encryption tools will emerge. And they will have achieved nothing except that our companies won't be allowed to officially support strong encryption, so they'll be disadvantaged in the marketplace. It's a really backwards move.

leeoniya 11y ago
If your hardware contains unflashable firmware with a back door to direct memory access, then there is no encryption you can trust to perform on the device itself. For example, your baseband processor in your mobile phone which is a binary blob, protected/signed so not to violate FCC regulations and disrupt networks. Such firmware can be mandated from manufacturers without outlawing encryption directly but making it useless nevertheless.
- riscy 11y ago
  The ability for any software to reliably recognize whether an encryption algorithm is being performed or not is not possible (not computable). It can always be hidden.
  - leeoniya 11y ago
    you don't need to detect encryption. with full memory access, you just take the plaintext.
    - ntucker 11y ago
      My point is that you don't have to do the encryption on the device. You can send/store encrypted data via compromised devices and channels.

abalone 11y ago

That's an oversimplification. While it's true that criminals will still get encryption, there's no corresponding harm to innocents like there is with widespread gun ownership (domestic violence, fights that escalate into shootings, child accidents, adult accidents, etc.) It is not as "solid" an argument for guns as it is for encryption.

woodman 11y ago
> ...there's no corresponding harm to innocents like there is with widespread gun ownership... That is also an oversimplification. Have you considered the possibility that encryption can be used in commission of a non-victemless crime? Let me direct your attention to the state's now second favorite goto: child porn. Privacy advocates are as familiar with that justification as gunrights advocates are with the waving of bloody shirts following school shootings.
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  The difference is that it is for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption, because it is a virtual good; it is a mathematical concept, implemented in a lot of widely available open source code. At most you can legislate that stock computing devices (such as smartphones) contain no such strong encryption without government backdoors, and you would be able to catch the low hanging fruit of the criminals depending on that technology. But you cannot prevent someone from using strong encryption using third party applications. How will you force a backdoor into, say, gnupg or dm-crypt? Outlaw that software? Any criminal worth his salt will use tools that are not backdoored, completely negating the gimped government-approved stock software. Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. This discussion and comparison is also very strange for someone from Europe, where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority.
  - woodman 11y ago
    I don't mind taking the conversation in a different direction, but I just want to make it clear that nothing you said has anything to do with what I said. > ...for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption... They learned their lesson after the first attempt to do so. Just jumble those words up a little and you'll see the current strategy: actually ban practical encryption. The state doesn't care about gnupg, or any other software that requires more than an hour's worth reading to safely use - because 99% of people won't. So they only have to target the stuff that is easy to use or on by default... unless they can depend on corporate cooperation (Apple up until recently, Microsoft, AT&T, etc). > Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. One can very easily manufacture a firearm using the same equipment that one would use to produce common consumer products like garden hose nozzles. The schematics are all available online. The state doesn't ban the means of production, they ban the stuff that makes it accessible to the common folk - like retail sale of firearms. You see where I'm going with this right? The state doesn't ban math, they ban the stuff that makes the math accessible to the common folk. > ...where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority... lol, unlike encryption software? I'm not talking about the kind that lets you buy crap online that the state can easily circumvent, I'm talking about to kind of crypto that only terrorists, pedos and anarchists want to use... and that the state can't break.

dalke 11y ago

Your #2 is not specifically a pro-gun argument. Compromise on the death penalty, from an anti-death penalty advocate, means there will still be a death penalty. Compromise on prohibition, from a prohibitionist, means there will still be alcohol for sale. Compromise on allowing abortions, from someone thinks that abortion is murder, means there will still be murders. Compromise on slavery, from an abolitionist, means there will still be slaves. Compromise on the Taft-Hartley law, by Communist union officers forced to take an oath that they were not Communists and anti-Communist politicians, means that one of them can't get what they want. In all cases, someone who compromised will view the compromise as a defeat. Therefore, you can't really say it's a pro-gun argument per se, but that both are examples of a wide class of arguments. I feel that holds for the rest of your points - they hold for nearly every argument, and aren't specifically pro-gun or pro-encryption. For an example of #3, the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade says abortions are legal due to a right of privacy. Those who want to restrict or eliminate abortions view it as a right to life of the unborn, and believe the Court was incorrect in making their decision. Both sides base their arguments in civil rights. Also, I think the comparison of cryptography to guns is not a good one. If you want to think of cryptography as a munition, then it's much more like armor than it is to a gun. Bulletproof vests are sometimes used when committing a crime. There are also some laws against them. And in the US, bulletproof vests are not, I believe, covered under the Second Amendment.

barrkel 11y ago

There's little risk your kid will get his hands on your encryption and do something immature that is also lethal; similarly there's little domestic violence you can commit in a rage with encryption. A lack of faith in the absolute rationality of people is my argument against guns, and I include my own rationality there. My argument for encryption is that tech is increasingly an extension of our minds, and we need to keep our mind private. I'm for encryption to the same degree that I'm against government use of a hypothetical mind scanner. It is breaking encryption that is violent; that's the "gun" here, and it's one I'm against.

rspeer 11y ago
Be careful with the implications of that rhetoric. Breaking encryption isn't "violent", and often it's legitimate security research.
13years 11y ago
However, your premise is that it is possible to do something about guns. However, consider the war on drugs, billions spent, agencies created, military style task force, severe penalties including life in prison just for possession. So if that didn't keep drugs out of the hands of bad people, why would changing some regulations keep guns out of peoples hands? I don't see any regulations that have ever been proposed that would make any difference and if we went all in as in the war on drugs, but war on guns, the war on drugs sets a precedent that it won't be successful.
- barrkel 11y ago
  I'm not interested in a gun debate (besides, gun regulation works fairly well almost everywhere in the world, but drug regulation doesn't). This topic, however, is about encryption.
  - wooter 11y ago
    > besides, gun regulation works fairly well almost everywhere in the world source? doesn't work in venezuela and didn't work in maoist china or hitler's germany

kijin 11y ago

Well, people have in fact considered breaking out the Second Amendment to defend encryption... https://xkcd.com/504/ https://xkcd.com/504/ This doesn't sound as crazy as it might at first glance, once you remember that strong encryption used to be treated as munition, and in some ways still is.

vacri 11y ago
There is plenty of weaponry that is restricted despite the second amendment. The US public gets pretty antsy when smallarms get restricted, but they don't say much when states start banning civilian-owned things like tanks, landmines, maces, or even brass knuckles. Hell, the US even invaded Iraq for the official reason that 'Iraq had weapons you weren't supposed to have' (chemical weapons). Yes, Iraq is not subject to the US constitution, but the concept of 'some weapons are okay, others are not' is still there.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > There is plenty of weaponry that is restricted despite the second amendment. The US public gets pretty antsy when smallarms get restricted, but they don't say much when states start banning civilian-owned things like tanks, landmines, maces, or even brass knuckles. Those laws are violations of any honest reading of the Second Amendment (with the possible exception of tanks, if one thinks that the Second Amendment protects only man-portable weapons).

vacri 11y ago

#3: Ironically, the pro-gun people that argue this never actually use this supposed right. You hear that the second amendment is the protector of the others, yet most of the rest of the US Bill of Rights get some significant erosions without so much as a peep of second-amendment reaction. Perhaps they're waiting for the 3rd and 7th amendments to suffer like the others, so they can react to the complete set in one go? Certainly the 4th, 6th, and 8th amendments have taken quite a pounding in the past couple of decades...

devishard 11y ago

1. The majority of the time, encryption is used for legal, positive reasons, like protecting your bank info or medical info. Guns, on the other hand, there's no argument for: just look at the data from the UK. Even the police are better off without guns. 2. This might be true for guns, but who cares? 3. In the age of tanks, machine guns, and grenades, consumer guns don't enable us to overthrow unjust governments as they did when the bill of rights was written. As such, they no longer play a role in protecting our civil rights. If anything, gun rights are frequently a talking point for Right-wing politicians who happily trample over all of our other civil liberties. As a political force, the pro-gun politics is actively harming our civil liberties. 4. Looking at the data, I don't see how your can argue this. In the US guns are used more in suicide or commission of a crime than in self-defense. In the UK, near-universal bans on guns have lead to a drastic decrease in gun deaths.

wtbob 11y ago
> The majority of the time, encryption is used for legal, positive reasons, like protecting your bank info or medical info. Guns, on the other hand, there's no argument for Ummm, the vast, vast majority of the guns in the U.S. are used for legal, positive reasons like target shooting or self-defense. The number of murders per gun-year is incredibly low, effectively infinitesimal.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  Focusing on murders really misses the point. Or rather misses the full picture. Something we rarely talk about but is the biggest gun problem in the US. 60ish percent of deaths by firearms are suicide. Owning a firearm is a risk factor for suicide. This is because many (most?) suicides are not carefully planned out and given considerable deliberation but are somewhat impulsive. Removing an easy means to commit suicide actually reduces suicide. I'm neither pro or anti gun.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    I'm very very opposed to a government which uses sticks as a means to prevent suicide. (criminalizing [gun, suicide implement] ownership)

Confusion 11y ago

It's entirely reasonable to argue that some of these arguments apply to encryption, but not to guns, as the actual arguments that are usually used are more complex. Applying an argument to something physical vs. something digital or something that directly kills people vs. something that prevents access to information makes a lot of difference.

nyan4 11y ago

This comparison is just silly, the context and the implications of the 4 points are entirely different.

gunsarentspeech 11y ago

Comparing private speech to devices which convert a few ounces of finger pressure into deadly violence is... silly.

dandersh 11y ago

I guess then the next time someone (perhaps even yourself) argues "they're trying to take our guns away" you will point to the 2016 Crypto Wars to show them that they're wrong...