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Such a law would serve no reasonable purpose, though. Criminals can use one-time pads and it's also not hard to make a little encryption program based on existi
by jonathanstrange 7y ago
Such a law would serve no reasonable purpose, though. Criminals can use one-time pads and it's also not hard to make a little encryption program based on existing cryptographic primitives. In fact, drug cartels have specialists for that who could probably even develop and implement their own secure-enough Feistel cipher if they wanted to.
The only purposes such a law seems to serve is to catch clueless idiots who will be caught anyway, and to enable mass-surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
- criddell 7y agoDo the telephone wiretap laws serve any reasonable purpose?
- jonathanstrange 7y agoYes, because hardware devices for encrypting phone calls in real-time are not as easy to produce as text encryption software or stick-it notes with random numbers on them.
- criddell 7y agoWhat does that have to do with whether or not a wiretap serves a reasonable purpose? Today, it would be incredibly easy for Apple to have encrypted voice calls as well.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoA law must be enforceable, otherwise it is useless. A law for wiretapping voice phones is enforceable, because only few criminals have the capability to build their own hardware encryption devices for secure real-time voice scrambling. A law for wiretapping into text chat software is not enforceable, because anyone halfway skilled in cryptography can produce his own encryption layer on top of the wiretapped text chat. The worst inconvenience a criminal would suffer from such a law is that they would need to use the copy&paste function of their device. A law that by design is not enforceable, serves no reasonable purpose.