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Politicial solutions didn't work in the 1970s (Church Committee), the 1990s (Crypto Wars 1), or more recently. Hopefully it's just bad luck, because I think the
by Panino 10y ago
Politicial solutions didn't work in the 1970s (Church Committee), the 1990s (Crypto Wars 1), or more recently. Hopefully it's just bad luck, because I think the best solution is for technical people to work on technical solutions while political people work on political solutions, and we can meet in the middle.
Unlike in politics, we've had success with technical solutions: strong E2E encrypted messaging is now normal, TLS is getting massive deployment, we have better crypto in general from key agreement to ciphers to libraries, and so much more.
To compare, what political solutions have equally improved the landscape? What's the political equivalent of getting Curve25519 into the hands of billions of users? What's the political equivalent of Signal Protocol going mainstream?
I've seen this same basic comment a lot in technical circles, and they ~all seem to subtly discredit technical solutions.
It makes me wonder: do people in political groups say, "let's stop with the political solutions and instead learn programming and cryptography and make technical solutions!" I sure hope not.
- zigzigzag 10y agoHow did Crypto Wars 1 not have a political solution? Export controls were dropped, the Clipper chip was canned. It was mostly due to the political arguments being made at the time, not some unstoppable technological breakthrough.
- Panino 10y agoThe story that prompted this discussion is about BULLRUN, a government effort to backdoor crypto, which took place after Crypto Wars 1. And as we know, BULLRUN is just a small portion of what we've had to deal with since Crypto Wars 1 was supposedly "won."
- dmix 10y agoClipper chip failed on a technical basis as much as politically. Just like all of the talk of crypto backdoors were DOA regardless of all the polticial rhetoric about its merits and downsides.
- zigzigzag 10y agoClipper could have been fixed. The flaw in it was repairable. It was dropped instead because the idea was already politically weak so it didn't take much to push it over the edge.