8 ms·

A small anecdote. A few years ago in an undergrad business class, we were having some discussion and the topic of encryption came up during one of my presentat

• westmeal 7y ago
  It sounds like a majority of the students had no idea what encryption was and because the authority figure (the professor) asked them whether or not it was bad they just went with it? I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad.
  • wyldfire 7y ago
    > why people would say mathematical functions are bad. People don't think 'encryption' is a mathematical function. They think it's like a radar detector in your car. "Why would you have it unless you intend on speeding?" [goes their thought process] "Oh I use this frequently and things I do every day would be totally broken without it? Really?!" [is the realization we hope dialogue could bring]
    • u801e 7y ago
      Then again, given speeding is so widely accepted, radar detectors are legal to use in 49 out of 50 states. It would be nice if encryption was viewed the same way.
      • blattimwind 7y ago
        Isn't (relatively) strong encryption legal in every one of your 50 states and deployed to more than 10^10 devices globally?
        • benignslime 7y ago
          What point are you trying to make? The fucking article posed is about ensuring that is isn't legal.
      • JoshTriplett 7y ago
        No, we absolutely don't want strong encryption viewed as "illegal but accepted", we want it viewed as "absolute necessity for day-to-day life and personal safety, unacceptable to ever weaken".
        • u801e 7y ago
          I think it comes down to popular vote versus government policy. While things like speeding and marijuana are illegal, popular votes have made these things legal (or quasi legal) in their respective jurisdictions. For example, votes to remove speed cameras or make them illegal, or votes to decriminalize marijuana. But you are correct in that we really should make it completely legal so that the government doesn't have an excuse to target individuals for engaging in a practice that is generally widely accepted.
  • notRobot 7y ago
    > I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. That's such a naïve way of putting it. People don't care about the mathematics behind it. They think it's "bad" because they think it enables terrorism and the spread of child sexual abuse imagery or whatever politicians have led them to believe.
    • NateEag 7y ago
      Let's be clear - encryption can absolutely enable those things. That is not all it does, but pretending it does not is stupid.
      • lostcolony 7y ago
        The internet enables all of those things too. Before that, telephones and fax machines did. Hospitals enable the spread of disease by clustering all the sick together with a constant flow of healthy people (visitors, doctors, etc). They also enable the development of superbugs. What's your point? You're confusing incidental usage with enablement. The lack of these good things doesn't prevent the occurrence of the evils listed, and to make a conversation one sided for how much it exacerbates the evil without instead focusing on the good and the reason they exist is incredibly disingenuous (which is the clearly the intent of most of the people on a soapbox about the evils)
        • gjs278 7y ago
          the point is that you can track phone calls and fax
  • grecy 7y ago
    > I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Encryption is more than just mathematical functions, it's the application of mathematical functions. And the application is what matters, because it would be easy to say a Nuclear weapon is just physics or that a bio-weapon is just chemistry. Clearly, how you use basic principles matters.
    • cortesoft 7y ago
      It isn't like Nuclear weapons, though, because every single computer has everything you need to do full encryption. Nuclear weapons require materials, manufacturing, etc. Nuclear weapons require both the knowledge and the physical world parts.... encryption just requires the knowledge, which is impossible to put back in the box.
      • beatgammit 7y ago
        Every house has the basic materials for a bomb, and many houses have the basic materials for a big bomb (especially if you use fertilizer). The difference is understanding how to use it. Every computer is capable of building software that can bring society to its knees, but most people don't know how to do it. Software is just algorithms, after all. The problem is that law enforcement pushes the bad uses of something without weighing it with the good. If fertilizer can be used to make bombs, should be ban fertilizer? No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately, many voters don't fully understand what the baby is WRT encryption, they just see child porn, human trafficking, etc.
  • slg 7y ago
    Encryption allows data to be locked away from the government including law enforcement and prosecutors in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago. Warrants can't break encryption like they could doors or locks. As much of life moves to the digital world and becomes encrypted, that can be a drastic change in how the justice system works. Pro-encryption people need to keep this in mind when talking to anti-encryption folks. Criminals being able to hide evidence is a serious concern for the average person.
    • strbean 7y ago
      > in a way that was nearly impossible for the average citizen a few decades ago Ehh, maybe if you are talking about speed and scale. The average citizen could always learn how to use a one-time pad.
      • slg 7y ago
        Speed, scale, and by default with no initial sharing of keys are super important distinctions.
    • unlinked_dll 7y ago
      Why can't the government serve warrants to give up their private keys? I don't really see the State's argument against encryption except in the case that they want to break encrypted information without due process.
      • lostcolony 7y ago
        Well, 5th amendment protections, and inability to determine whether a person even remembers the key, means that serving a warrant doesn't always work either. But then, neither did breaking down the door and ransacking the obvious physical target pre-internet days always work. And everyone understood a suspect had no obligation to tell the feds where he hid the goods.
    • feanaro 7y ago
      I always have trouble imagining examples of this kind of evidence that criminals were previously utterly unable to hide but can now do it easily using encryption. It seems any kind of evidence could had just been shredded and burned in times past or hidden in an obscure, physical safe that no one knows about. If anything, the digital age had made the location of evidence more obvious and even produced entirely new kinds of evidence (traffic and connection logs, emails, etc). It seems to me that law enforcement is simply pining for the fjords of a very short time span in human history when ample digital information co-existed with the lack of widely available cryptographic systems.
  • outworlder 7y ago
    I hope those people access their bank over port 80.
    • brokenmachine 7y ago
      They do, on their open wifi network.
  • reaperducer 7y ago
    I'm having trouble understanding why people would say mathematical functions are bad. Because the vast majority of people don't know that encryption is mathematical formulas. They only know what they see from Hollywood, which is that it's a thing that bad guys use.
• nickbauman 7y ago
  What was the class about? What sort of majors were the attendees?
• Buttons840 7y ago
  So in an ethics discussion the professor simply asked "is X bad?" That doesn't seem like a very enlightened ethics discussion. How certain are you he said "bad"? If he has instead asked "is encryption problematic?", the outcome can be interpreted much differently because there are problems with encryption. Especially in an ethics discussion, there are definitely pros and cons to encryption. (FWIW, the pros outweigh the cons by far, IMHO.) I'm not trying to say your memory is wrong, I'm just asking how certain you are about what was asked exactly. Changing one synonym for another can make a big difference.
  • Jtsummers 7y ago
    Per GP this was in a business class likely taught by a business professor, not an ethicist or someone similarly specializing in such discussions. It's not surprising that they'd pose the question to the group in such a blunt fashion. As a CS major, I had to take an engineering and a CS ethics course and it was similarly problematic. The courses were taught by an engineering or CS professor (respectively) and ethics discussions were not their specialty.
  • 99052882514569 7y ago
    Asking if it's 'bad' is an excellent starting point for an ethics discussion. It reveals pre-existing biases and emotional responses to a topic, which must be taken into account as a pre-requisite to any rational discussion. You cannot get dispassionate without first examining the passions.
  • caconym_ 7y ago
    Asking about a nuanced subject in broad and blunt terms can be pedagogically useful because you hear what people really think, unfiltered ... and maybe they hear it too, priming them to realize that they've been underthinking the topic. From there you can get into nuance, which is easier when you know where you currently stand. I have no idea what tack this prof took with the question, but I think you've drawn a hasty conclusion here.
    • Buttons840 7y ago
• vuldin 7y ago
  Similar but different anecdote. I installed i2p the other day to see what had changed/improved over the last year, and mentioned to my 12yo son that I had done this. He asked what i2p was, and I said it was the dark web. He immediately thought he knew what this is, and asked "aren't you worried about getting in trouble because it's illegal?"
• dv_dt 7y ago
  An interesting follow question should have been how many people think privacy is bad. That leads to a discussion of encryption as a form of privacy boundary...
• jb775 7y ago
  Should have followed up with: Do you think having a lock on your front door is bad?
  • 3pt14159 7y ago
    Eh. Locks can be picked and doors can be rammed. Layered encryption is really hard to break and one time pads are impossible.
    • choward 7y ago
      So locks are only good because they don't actually work? And encryption is only good if it doesn't work too? That logic kind of makes sense. However, locks at least delay intruders and make it harder for someone to go undetected if the break into your house. The intruder is either at your door for a little while, makes noise trying to break in, etc. If the police bust into my house there will probably be witnesses and I will know about it. If they steal my data, how is anyone going to know? This gives them way too much power.
      • 3pt14159 7y ago
        They already have a great deal of power. Technological progress gives us all more power.
  • panic 7y ago
    I think locks are a bad analogy. Going online without encryption is like living in a house without walls or windowshades. It's less about physical access and more about people being able to see what you're doing. Even if you're not doing anything "wrong", the lack of privacy still feels uncomfortable.
• cvwright 7y ago
  I think we in the tech community tend to vastly under-estimate the threat of legal restrictions on encryption. When the public gets scared, they look to governments to "do something", whether that something is really a smart thing or not. If we're unlucky and we get caught unprepared, we run the risk of getting stuck with a backdoor or "exceptional access" mechanism that provides little or no technical safeguards against massive and nearly unlimited government overreach. IMO this makes it our responsibility to figure out how we might design such a system that does have strong protections against misuse. Of course that is a very difficult thing to do. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
  • strbean 7y ago
    I think you'll run into a chicken-and-egg problem here. Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist.
    • cvwright 7y ago
      > Without bonafide strong encryption, those strong protections against misuse probably can't exist. Agreed. I actually did some work on this topic that requires having things like strong ciphers and hash functions, and protocols that provide perfect forward secrecy. Our approach was to take strong constructions and turn them into a kind of proof-of-work. So you can recover the key, but to do so you have to expend a huge amount of electricity (ie, money). The idea was partly just to call the bluff of the government types who claim that "exceptional access" is so critical to our safety. If they're not willing to spend the money, then we should not be willing to compromise our security. NOTE: I'm not suggesting that we should actually deploy this kind of thing, as long as we have a choice in the matter. Just that we should be prepared in case we need it. Anyway, the paper is here: C.V. Wright and M. Varia. Crypto Crumple Zones: Enabling Limited Access without Mass Surveillance. In IEEE EuroS&P, 2018. https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cvwright/papers/crumplezones.pdf
• nikonyrh 7y ago
  Maybe the professor should have asked whether drugs are bad. (and yet this is still a poor analogy)