5 ms·

I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen

I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to government. We could call it `01` and have it in a non fourteen-eyes jurisdiction preferably as an independent nation. We could export code containing cryptographic algorithms to countries that need it for privacy and safety reasons. Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is used by undesirable people to commit crimes!

teclordphrack2 5y ago
We can't have communist countries in latan america because of the good ole u s of a. You think you are going to get some slight utopia that helps people b/c of their ideals? Never going to happen... sadly.
- LeftTriangle 5y ago
  You can’t have communist countries in “Latan” America because their industrial base and population expertise is even worse than the USSR. Not to defend the CIA’s actions, but Venezuela was never going to work out.
  - FranchuFranchu 5y ago
    I don't think he was talking about Venezuela.
    - LeftTriangle 5y ago
      It’s a synecdoche.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
newacct583 5y ago
> Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is used by undesirable people to commit crimes! This is actually more because criminals on balance tend to be too dumb to hide their traces than because of any demographic truth. There are a lot of criminals. Focusing on "crypto" is, I think, a forest for the trees argument. Look instead at anonymity for evidence of where this kind of thing goes. Put up any reasonably anonymous forum where people can interact without their identities being reveals (which often includes, but doesn't always require, some kind of crypto protocol). Within a year it will be filled with criminals. Minor criminals like drug dealers. Worse things like market manipulation and fraudsters. Weapons sales. Black market rings. Revolutionaries of all sorts and sizes. Child porn. Mail order brides and other trafficking trades. Seriously, run a Tor exit node for a while and see where this goes. Your neighbors in your imagined "safe haven country for cryptographers" aren't going to be who you think they are.
- robobro 5y ago
  I recently made a federated, anonymous / pseudonymous messageboard. It took about 2 months before I had found cyber criminals had translated it into another language and were using it to sell narcotics on the darkweb.
swiley 5y ago
Ironically the UK is pretty much a handful of islands. I don't think the islandness means much.
young_unixer 5y ago
There's Liberland, an attempt at a libertarian country, but it's still far from being an actual country.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  That sounds a lot like a place for liberals rather than libertarians. It’s very interesting to read about, thanks. https://liberland.org/en/about https://liberland.org/en/about
  - young_unixer 5y ago
    Liberal as in "classic liberal"
varispeed 5y ago
In the UK if you won't give up your password (or essentially give means to decrypt data) when requested you can get 5 years for that. Encryption will not protect against the state in this case. Likely other countries will start to copy that...
- alentist 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
- gambiting 5y ago
  I know it's the law already, but has it actually ever been used against anyone? I always thought it would be extremely difficult to successfully prosecute because if you give them "a" password and swore it's "the" password to the best of your knowledge you couldn't be accused of maliciously refusing to cooperate. I imagine they would still throw a book at you somewhere, but probably not the 5 years under this law.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    Yes! Plenty of times e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-man-jailed-not-giving-police-thumbstick-password.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-ma... You can Google more easily...
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Yes, thank you for reminding me I can Google. From your own link - he said he forgot the password, which(I assume) in itself wasn't enough to prosecute, it was the fact that he eventually caved in and provided it 4 months later, so they got him on purposefully obstructing justice for 4 months. It's not clear if he could be successfully prosecuted for this crime if he never remembered the password.
      - varispeed 5y ago
mezentius 5y ago
> I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to government. This has always been a fascinating concept to me as well — but I think history demonstrates that you can't just set up a safe haven without significant international leverage, whether financial or military. And if you're actively exporting "munitions" to other countries, it's only a matter of time until someone tries to knock you off. The more likely scenario is that your safe haven will be dependent on a larger nation-state patron—and therefore ultimately vulnerable to changes in its domestic politics. (E.g. Israel, or Taiwan.) It's difficult to build leverage in a country the size of an island—and once you're big enough to have any leverage, autarky becomes nearly impossible as you're always dependent on someone else for logistical reasons (food, fuel, etc.). This is essentially what the Second World War was fought about; autarky lost.
jancsika 5y ago
> I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to government. I wish there was some sort of island of safe haven country setup by compiler developers where C didn't have problems with memory safety. Why is politics the only domain where HN'ers think they can make the domain's problems disappear entirely by moving it physically to an island? It's inane.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bosswipe 5y ago
  You're HN'er yourself.
  - bosswipe 5y ago
    To the downvoters let me explain what I meant. jancsika is an HN'er as we all are. But jancsika is on here trying to say the community as a whole is a bunch of arrogant idiots. This annoying type of comment where you make yourself seem smart by putting down the entire community has become common in this community. I see it more and more often on here.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  They created it and called it rust. Time fixes all bugs.
onetimeusename 5y ago
Creating an island nation to evade laws won't work. It's the same thing as trying to evade tax laws but for content laws. What has happened to tax havens is they are labeled tax non-compliant and then an IGO effectively embargoes them unless they turn over all tax records and come into compliance with their laws. So the same thing would apply to creating an island nation to evade some cryptography export law, or content restriction. I don't think convincing the respective governments with arguments will work either because the incentive they have to require censorship on internet content that they are not mentioning is that they can censor it for their own purposes. For example, Russia is considering blocking Twitter entirely for having illegal content (you know what I mean by this) but I think everyone knows that's not the real reason they are considering blocking Twitter. I don't know what the best solution is.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Well, corporations do evade taxes using island nations and other such machinery, and mostly get away with it. It probably won't work for "just people", without strong lobby powers and corrupting financial temptations dangled before politicians. IMHO there's no running away from resisting/circumventing oppressive legislation in our social surroundings, not by looking for far-away havens.

teclordphrack2 5y ago

We can't have communist countries in latan america because of the good ole u s of a. You think you are going to get some slight utopia that helps people b/c of their ideals? Never going to happen... sadly.

LeftTriangle 5y ago
You can’t have communist countries in “Latan” America because their industrial base and population expertise is even worse than the USSR. Not to defend the CIA’s actions, but Venezuela was never going to work out.
- FranchuFranchu 5y ago
  I don't think he was talking about Venezuela.
  - LeftTriangle 5y ago
    It’s a synecdoche.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

newacct583 5y ago

> Cryptography actually is needed for safety more than it is used by undesirable people to commit crimes! This is actually more because criminals on balance tend to be too dumb to hide their traces than because of any demographic truth. There are a lot of criminals. Focusing on "crypto" is, I think, a forest for the trees argument. Look instead at anonymity for evidence of where this kind of thing goes. Put up any reasonably anonymous forum where people can interact without their identities being reveals (which often includes, but doesn't always require, some kind of crypto protocol). Within a year it will be filled with criminals. Minor criminals like drug dealers. Worse things like market manipulation and fraudsters. Weapons sales. Black market rings. Revolutionaries of all sorts and sizes. Child porn. Mail order brides and other trafficking trades. Seriously, run a Tor exit node for a while and see where this goes. Your neighbors in your imagined "safe haven country for cryptographers" aren't going to be who you think they are.

robobro 5y ago
I recently made a federated, anonymous / pseudonymous messageboard. It took about 2 months before I had found cyber criminals had translated it into another language and were using it to sell narcotics on the darkweb.

swiley 5y ago

Ironically the UK is pretty much a handful of islands. I don't think the islandness means much.

young_unixer 5y ago

There's Liberland, an attempt at a libertarian country, but it's still far from being an actual country.

lostlogin 5y ago
That sounds a lot like a place for liberals rather than libertarians. It’s very interesting to read about, thanks. https://liberland.org/en/about https://liberland.org/en/about
- young_unixer 5y ago
  Liberal as in "classic liberal"

varispeed 5y ago

In the UK if you won't give up your password (or essentially give means to decrypt data) when requested you can get 5 years for that. Encryption will not protect against the state in this case. Likely other countries will start to copy that...

alentist 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption
gambiting 5y ago
I know it's the law already, but has it actually ever been used against anyone? I always thought it would be extremely difficult to successfully prosecute because if you give them "a" password and swore it's "the" password to the best of your knowledge you couldn't be accused of maliciously refusing to cooperate. I imagine they would still throw a book at you somewhere, but probably not the 5 years under this law.
- varispeed 5y ago
  Yes! Plenty of times e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-man-jailed-not-giving-police-thumbstick-password.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-ma... You can Google more easily...
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Yes, thank you for reminding me I can Google. From your own link - he said he forgot the password, which(I assume) in itself wasn't enough to prosecute, it was the fact that he eventually caved in and provided it 4 months later, so they got him on purposefully obstructing justice for 4 months. It's not clear if he could be successfully prosecuted for this crime if he never remembered the password.
    - varispeed 5y ago

mezentius 5y ago

> I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to government. This has always been a fascinating concept to me as well — but I think history demonstrates that you can't just set up a safe haven without significant international leverage, whether financial or military. And if you're actively exporting "munitions" to other countries, it's only a matter of time until someone tries to knock you off. The more likely scenario is that your safe haven will be dependent on a larger nation-state patron—and therefore ultimately vulnerable to changes in its domestic politics. (E.g. Israel, or Taiwan.) It's difficult to build leverage in a country the size of an island—and once you're big enough to have any leverage, autarky becomes nearly impossible as you're always dependent on someone else for logistical reasons (food, fuel, etc.). This is essentially what the Second World War was fought about; autarky lost.

jancsika 5y ago

> I wish there was some sort of island or safe haven country setup by cryptographers so they could safely work on crypto without legal issues or crypto being seen as a munition and a threat to government. I wish there was some sort of island of safe haven country setup by compiler developers where C didn't have problems with memory safety. Why is politics the only domain where HN'ers think they can make the domain's problems disappear entirely by moving it physically to an island? It's inane.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bosswipe 5y ago
You're HN'er yourself.
- bosswipe 5y ago
  To the downvoters let me explain what I meant. jancsika is an HN'er as we all are. But jancsika is on here trying to say the community as a whole is a bunch of arrogant idiots. This annoying type of comment where you make yourself seem smart by putting down the entire community has become common in this community. I see it more and more often on here.
ipaddr 5y ago
They created it and called it rust. Time fixes all bugs.

onetimeusename 5y ago

Creating an island nation to evade laws won't work. It's the same thing as trying to evade tax laws but for content laws. What has happened to tax havens is they are labeled tax non-compliant and then an IGO effectively embargoes them unless they turn over all tax records and come into compliance with their laws. So the same thing would apply to creating an island nation to evade some cryptography export law, or content restriction. I don't think convincing the respective governments with arguments will work either because the incentive they have to require censorship on internet content that they are not mentioning is that they can censor it for their own purposes. For example, Russia is considering blocking Twitter entirely for having illegal content (you know what I mean by this) but I think everyone knows that's not the real reason they are considering blocking Twitter. I don't know what the best solution is.

einpoklum 5y ago
Well, corporations do evade taxes using island nations and other such machinery, and mostly get away with it. It probably won't work for "just people", without strong lobby powers and corrupting financial temptations dangled before politicians. IMHO there's no running away from resisting/circumventing oppressive legislation in our social surroundings, not by looking for far-away havens.