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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

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.
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  The kind of encryption that we use to safely buy stuff on-line (such as TLS for securing our HTTP connections) and the kind that security-aware people use to secure data (which includes criminals and anarchists, but also activists living under repressive regimes, healthcare professionals, lawyers, software developers, etc.) is quite similar from a mathematical standpoint. The underlying algorithms (such as AES, SHA-2, RSA, etc.) and mathematical concepts are often the same. There is no practical difference in the kind of crypto a criminal uses and the kind you would use to store your passwords and scans of important documents.
  - woodman 11y ago
    Again... there is very little material difference between a garden hose nozzle and a 1911 handgun, just as there is very little mathematical difference between the functions powering TLS and PGP. But one is completely centralized and offers practically zero protection from government lawyers and NSLs, and the other offers protection from even determined state level adversaries. Guess which one is widely deployed and which one had to be published in a book and shipped over seas in order to circumvent munition export restrictions.
curt15 11y ago
>Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. However that will likely change soon with the rise of general-purpose 3d printers.
- rmk2 11y ago
  Exactly, because obviously 3d printed objects are not, in fact, physical objects that require physical ammunition and that can be treated like any other physical object, right? Right?!
  - woodman 11y ago
    You know that the majority of stuff you see on CSI is total crap... There are three identifying marks on spent shell casings: Fingerprints: easily avoided. Production facility/year: not really useful for criminal investigations. Toolmarks from firing pin and extractor: oversold television crap, toolmark analysis is quickly sinking to the same level of reputation as bitemark analysis in the real world. None of that matters for anything that doesn't eject spent shells, but nobody would choose to print a more easily produced revolver, derringer, liberator, muzzle loader - right? Right?!
    - rmk2 11y ago
      I don't know what you are arguing here. A gun is a physical item, as is ammunition. You can stop somebody, search them, and find out if they have a gun and/or ammunition. You cannot do any such thing with encryption, as it is not a physical entity. Whether your gun is a regular gun, 3d printed or made of candy cane does not change the fact that it is a physical item. I don't care where it comes from or how you built it, as a physical item, it still follows a very different logic than virtual entities.
      - woodman 11y ago
        Ah, given the context my mind went right to ammunition microstamping. Encryption software and 3d printed guns are simply implementations of ideas, both physically interact with the world and both can be observed. ABS plastic stock is to blank hard drive as printed gun is to c:/pgp.exe.

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.

Freak_NL 11y ago
The kind of encryption that we use to safely buy stuff on-line (such as TLS for securing our HTTP connections) and the kind that security-aware people use to secure data (which includes criminals and anarchists, but also activists living under repressive regimes, healthcare professionals, lawyers, software developers, etc.) is quite similar from a mathematical standpoint. The underlying algorithms (such as AES, SHA-2, RSA, etc.) and mathematical concepts are often the same. There is no practical difference in the kind of crypto a criminal uses and the kind you would use to store your passwords and scans of important documents.
- woodman 11y ago
  Again... there is very little material difference between a garden hose nozzle and a 1911 handgun, just as there is very little mathematical difference between the functions powering TLS and PGP. But one is completely centralized and offers practically zero protection from government lawyers and NSLs, and the other offers protection from even determined state level adversaries. Guess which one is widely deployed and which one had to be published in a book and shipped over seas in order to circumvent munition export restrictions.

curt15 11y ago

>Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation. However that will likely change soon with the rise of general-purpose 3d printers.

rmk2 11y ago
Exactly, because obviously 3d printed objects are not, in fact, physical objects that require physical ammunition and that can be treated like any other physical object, right? Right?!
- woodman 11y ago
  You know that the majority of stuff you see on CSI is total crap... There are three identifying marks on spent shell casings: Fingerprints: easily avoided. Production facility/year: not really useful for criminal investigations. Toolmarks from firing pin and extractor: oversold television crap, toolmark analysis is quickly sinking to the same level of reputation as bitemark analysis in the real world. None of that matters for anything that doesn't eject spent shells, but nobody would choose to print a more easily produced revolver, derringer, liberator, muzzle loader - right? Right?!
  - rmk2 11y ago
    I don't know what you are arguing here. A gun is a physical item, as is ammunition. You can stop somebody, search them, and find out if they have a gun and/or ammunition. You cannot do any such thing with encryption, as it is not a physical entity. Whether your gun is a regular gun, 3d printed or made of candy cane does not change the fact that it is a physical item. I don't care where it comes from or how you built it, as a physical item, it still follows a very different logic than virtual entities.
    - woodman 11y ago
      Ah, given the context my mind went right to ammunition microstamping. Encryption software and 3d printed guns are simply implementations of ideas, both physically interact with the world and both can be observed. ABS plastic stock is to blank hard drive as printed gun is to c:/pgp.exe.