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I think you're missing an important point - this is a legal issue, not a technical one. Private communication is becoming illegal, however you do it. You can ca

I think you're missing an important point - this is a legal issue, not a technical one. Private communication is becoming illegal, however you do it. You can call it "steganography," and the government will call it "20-to-life." The press will go along with the government and talk about you as a "hacker who is using sophisticated message hiding techniques to disguise their secret communications with conspirators." Even if you were just talking about dinner plans.

derefr 3y ago
They're not missing the point, they're taking your premise and accepting it, and then moving past it. They're saying: let's just forget about the possibility of encryption being something you can do legally — let's just instead concentrate on encryption that works whether it's legal or not, because it's impossible to determine that it's you doing it. (After all, much of what we've spent the last 40 years of cryptography research doing, is inventing new and creative ways to communicate or broadcast or participate in systems anonymously.)
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  It does not matter if it is you doing it or not, the oppressive governments of the world will just as happily jail you for facilitating it, even if you were unaware. These laws will be used as a cudgel against anyone whom they don't like. Technical solutions to lawfare are pointless.
  - derefr 3y ago
    If you're in an oppressive country, why would you facilitate an illegal activity any way other than anonymously? I do understand what you're trying to refer to — to things like "you can't tell it was me who connected to that darknet market" / "but we can tell that your IP address originated a Tor connection, and we now consider that illegal in-and-of-itself, even if it wasn't you doing it but you were just acting as an exit node for others." But again, we've spent a long time building various different cryptosystems that make different sets of guarantees that are useful in different situations. Tor is useful under one particular set of constraints, but that set of constraints is not "staying long-term under an oppressive regime that will arrest you for emitting Tor fingerprintable traffic." For a cryptosystem that is useful under this use-case, see: Freenet. Or NNTP numbers groups. Or MixMaster. (Though also, even Tor does work here, with modification. This is why Tor added bridges — precisely so that people in oppressed regimes could forward their traffic, in an innocuous-looking way, through bridge nodes hosted by people in non-oppressed regimes, where the IPs of these nodes are only handed out as needed to Tor users, one or two at a time, and so can't be blacklisted by country-level firewalls in advance.)

derefr 3y ago

They're not missing the point, they're taking your premise and accepting it, and then moving past it. They're saying: let's just forget about the possibility of encryption being something you can do legally — let's just instead concentrate on encryption that works whether it's legal or not, because it's impossible to determine that it's you doing it. (After all, much of what we've spent the last 40 years of cryptography research doing, is inventing new and creative ways to communicate or broadcast or participate in systems anonymously.)

GauntletWizard 3y ago
It does not matter if it is you doing it or not, the oppressive governments of the world will just as happily jail you for facilitating it, even if you were unaware. These laws will be used as a cudgel against anyone whom they don't like. Technical solutions to lawfare are pointless.
- derefr 3y ago
  If you're in an oppressive country, why would you facilitate an illegal activity any way other than anonymously? I do understand what you're trying to refer to — to things like "you can't tell it was me who connected to that darknet market" / "but we can tell that your IP address originated a Tor connection, and we now consider that illegal in-and-of-itself, even if it wasn't you doing it but you were just acting as an exit node for others." But again, we've spent a long time building various different cryptosystems that make different sets of guarantees that are useful in different situations. Tor is useful under one particular set of constraints, but that set of constraints is not "staying long-term under an oppressive regime that will arrest you for emitting Tor fingerprintable traffic." For a cryptosystem that is useful under this use-case, see: Freenet. Or NNTP numbers groups. Or MixMaster. (Though also, even Tor does work here, with modification. This is why Tor added bridges — precisely so that people in oppressed regimes could forward their traffic, in an innocuous-looking way, through bridge nodes hosted by people in non-oppressed regimes, where the IPs of these nodes are only handed out as needed to Tor users, one or two at a time, and so can't be blacklisted by country-level firewalls in advance.)