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I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling their own encryption, using well documented algorithms. You'
by MarcScott 7y ago
I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling their own encryption, using well documented algorithms. You'd need to literally outlaw Wikipedia. Hell, even one-time-pads could still be used by truly motivated bad actors that wanted to communicate securely.
- shantly 7y agoThey can make it so if they spot you using it (for other than communication with approved banks and retailers and such, maybe), that's instantly something they can charge you with. Then go after a few people who're spotted using it on the Internet by traffic sniffing, meaning the only folks left using it are cranks and actual bad guys.
- Judgmentality 7y agoA total tangent, but the words chosen in this comment and how it relates to the logic behind the US War on Drugs are eery - down to "sniffing" out paraphernalia, "trafficking" illegal goods, end users are "cranks" and bad guys...
- SubiculumCode 7y agoI can encode hidden meaningd in poetry. If you outlaw poetry, our US experiment is over.
- shantly 7y agoThat some may get around it isn’t the point. Most won’t risk charges to share recipes with aunt Edna or family photos with Grandpa. Some will keep using it and stay under the radar but any time someone’s caught using it, even if it wasn’t part of a crime, it’ll be added to the list of charges against them. It’ll be dead for common use, and risky and annoying to use for those who keep to it.
- imhoguy 7y agoThis is why I am hesitant to use Tor, efforts to monitor it are probably several folds stronger than normal clearnet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bityard 7y agoKnowledge of encryption isn't what would be illegal, _using_ it to communicate would be illegal.
- _jal 7y agoYou also can't outlaw physics or chemistry. Let me know how non-approved rocketry enterprise goes.
- Mirioron 7y agoPretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time. The barrier to entry to cryptography is many times lower too.
- serf 7y ago>Pretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time. That's pretty far detached from real rocketry. A similar metaphor for computing would be the allowed use of a LeapFrog system, rather than a computer. 'My cryptography hobby is going pretty well, I just practiced a Caesar cipher on my LeapFrog.' (neither a LeapFrog or a model rocket being a practical equivalent to their big relative.)
- Mirioron 7y agoBut if you want to communicate with somebody else in an encrypted way, then you can likely do so with effort that doesn't even approach a hobby. Setting up a system requires more effort, but these singular cases are hard enough to detect and crack that the law enforcement agencies would never be able to do it. You might not even need encryption, because you could communicate in ways that are just obfuscated enough that nobody's going to check. Eg write with blocks on the ground in Minecraft or something. If the goal is to catch malicious people that are trying to hide their communications, then outlawing encryption won't work. But it will give the government a good excuse to spy on people.
- rsync 7y ago"I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths." I don't think this is the right analogy - instead, I think a better statement would be "you can't outlaw random numbers". A random number and the ciphertext output of a secure encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable. I don't think I am being naive to think that even in our wildest dystopian nightmares there is no real path from (current jurisprudence in five-eyes jurisdictions) to (random numbers being illegal).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]