4 ms·

What the law would do is make everyone using an encryption tool (Such as OpenSSH or GPG) a criminal... It's like the Eric Schmidt Quote: " If you have somethin

What the law would do is make everyone using an encryption tool (Such as OpenSSH or GPG) a criminal... It's like the Eric Schmidt Quote: " If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. " The laws that would arise would make anyone with a desire for REAL privacy an immediate criminal. I don't use Twitter but if I did I'd tag this with #fail.

LiveTheDream 16y ago
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
tptacek 16y ago
It is flagrantly unlikely that this law would outlaw OpenSSH or GPG, or in any way change the way normal people use OpenSSH or GPG. I say "unlikely", a hedging word, which you did not use, because nobody knows what this proposal actually contains, because it hasn't been disclosed yet. The probability that the federal government could outlaw OpenSSH is epsilon. You can don the tinfoil hat and argue anything, but the reality is that the government cannot outlaw or even substantially influence the IT practices of all five hundred of the Fortune 500. So, at the risk of sounding like Vizzini, clearly, the objective here can't simply be to outlaw cryptography, because that is an untenable proposition. What is substantially more likely is that the DoJ wants RIM and Skype to build CALEA-style systems so that BBM's and Skype calls don't constitute an immediate exemption from all wiretaps. Call it the "criminals should not be secure from wiretaps by default" proposition. Before you geek out about how you could (say) use OpenSSH to build a non-wiretappable voice network, remember that the people writing and arguing for these proposals are not geeks, and they do not care.
zaphar 16y ago
Again that doesn't solve the problem of the mob boss who could care less that he's using forbidden encryption.

LiveTheDream 16y ago

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"

tptacek 16y ago

It is flagrantly unlikely that this law would outlaw OpenSSH or GPG, or in any way change the way normal people use OpenSSH or GPG. I say "unlikely", a hedging word, which you did not use, because nobody knows what this proposal actually contains, because it hasn't been disclosed yet. The probability that the federal government could outlaw OpenSSH is epsilon. You can don the tinfoil hat and argue anything, but the reality is that the government cannot outlaw or even substantially influence the IT practices of all five hundred of the Fortune 500. So, at the risk of sounding like Vizzini, clearly, the objective here can't simply be to outlaw cryptography, because that is an untenable proposition. What is substantially more likely is that the DoJ wants RIM and Skype to build CALEA-style systems so that BBM's and Skype calls don't constitute an immediate exemption from all wiretaps. Call it the "criminals should not be secure from wiretaps by default" proposition. Before you geek out about how you could (say) use OpenSSH to build a non-wiretappable voice network, remember that the people writing and arguing for these proposals are not geeks, and they do not care.

zaphar 16y ago

Again that doesn't solve the problem of the mob boss who could care less that he's using forbidden encryption.