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This is largely overblown though. Even with unfettered access to great and easy to use crypto your society doesn't collapse. It turns out that maintaining anony

This is largely overblown though. Even with unfettered access to great and easy to use crypto your society doesn't collapse. It turns out that maintaining anonymity is a giant pain in the ass, no more people are going to go full on tinfoil ghost on society to dodge taxes any more than they already disappear and live off the grid. Most businesses are easier to conduct in public and even derive benefit from it. Regulatory enforcement is fairly easy: in order to have a license to operate your coal plant, you agree to hand over documents x, y, z. If in your crypto-dystopia I handed over encrypted docs instead of the plaintext for my coal plant I would just have my business fined out of existence just like would happen now. If I have incriminating documents and no crypto I'm not going to encrypt them, I'm going to slag the hard drives they're on and burn the paper copies. If you're a public official: make it illegal to use encryption beyond the provided email encryption (which the agency IT dept can also read). I think you can make the case that it is already illegal since an internally encrypted message that you refuse to decrypt (at the request of a superior, a court, or investigation) would have to have been misuse of gov't property (your first amendment rights do not allow you to use government systems for private use and you explicitly have no privacy with respect to the scenario mentioned above when you use them). People have always had plenty of ways to be shitheads and get away with it, and there have always been mechanisms to make those decisions costly. These things continue to be true despite the presence of strong crypto. The reason an "absolutist" position here makes sense is because this is a binary choice between everyone legally having security, or no one legally having security. Until now we haven't had to make this choice because neither was an option, we just all existed in a vague middle ground dictated by our circumstances, number of shits given, and technical acumen. True, you might not have had access to cryptography, but you didn't have data to encrypt so you lost nothing by having no encryption. Now everyone has a lot to lose but not everyone realizes that.

cromwellian 11y ago
The issue isn't that they won't hand over documents x,y,z, they'll just hand over fake documents x, y, and z, while the real documents remain encrypted. When the government asks why they can't read files Real_X, Real_y, and Real_Z, they'll claim they're private email communications between employees, and that you can't force them to turn over the keys. But in reality, they were secret bribery emails between corporate executives and local politicians. Prior to cryptography, you could pull this off as well, you could have fake books. Hide the real books offsite so warrants can't find them, etc. Cryptography doesn't change whether it's possible to do or not, it just makes it easier to do and scales better. I mean, even the Nazi's could have used one time pads by carrier pigeon if they wanted to, Enigma wasn't even needed. But the logistics of doing it are less convenient. As cryptography becomes more universal, more automatic, more user friendly, OpSec will become less of a burden for less diligent people. Infact, we hope it does, because sloppy OpSec is a huge problem for society right now. Just look at passwords.

cromwellian 11y ago

The issue isn't that they won't hand over documents x,y,z, they'll just hand over fake documents x, y, and z, while the real documents remain encrypted. When the government asks why they can't read files Real_X, Real_y, and Real_Z, they'll claim they're private email communications between employees, and that you can't force them to turn over the keys. But in reality, they were secret bribery emails between corporate executives and local politicians. Prior to cryptography, you could pull this off as well, you could have fake books. Hide the real books offsite so warrants can't find them, etc. Cryptography doesn't change whether it's possible to do or not, it just makes it easier to do and scales better. I mean, even the Nazi's could have used one time pads by carrier pigeon if they wanted to, Enigma wasn't even needed. But the logistics of doing it are less convenient. As cryptography becomes more universal, more automatic, more user friendly, OpSec will become less of a burden for less diligent people. Infact, we hope it does, because sloppy OpSec is a huge problem for society right now. Just look at passwords.