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Comment by dineshp2 | Hacker News Reader

One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist.

On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern.

There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates and the camp against encryption in the name of national security will continue.

Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem. If someone really wants their communication to be encrypted, they can easily make it happen using the numerous tools available, and there is nothing the Government can do about it.

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> One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy

That argument does not hold under the current constitution of India. Under the guise of one threat or another (terrorists, corruption, protection of classes of people) the government has nullified all our rights. On the one hand the government is quite open about its maliciousness. On the other hand, unlike the First World governments, the government is honest about the rights it grants us. We don't have a situation where the constitution guarantees something, and the law enforcement agencies violate it.

The bottom line: if you care about your privacy, don't depend on the government, wherever you are.

You can't ban math. These problems are solved and publicly. There's no sense trying to prevent honesty people from having privacy because the dishonest ones will already have it.

>Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem.

Generalizing this argument a bit, banning encryption is also not a solution to this problem. The cat is, as they say, out of the bag, and unless we're going to burn every cryptography book and remove every website documenting cryptographic methods or hosting cryptography code, there's no putting it back [1].

1: Presuming the development of effective post quantum cryptography cannot be prevented and distributed, which considering the current state of PQC seems unlikely.

I think this is worth taking a step further and asking for a definition of cryptography...what is cryptography?

Obviously here we are speaking in a mathematical sense, but encryption of information predates the internet. Hell, it predates electricity. Where do you draw the line? can I not encrypt my conversation with a friend by referencing shared unique experiences?

I was talking to young woman a bunch of us helped get into drug rehab recently and she said when she first moved here she used dating apps to find people who supply drugs. All of sudden, her best friend's name is Molly and going out line dancing mean something completely different on dating sites. I forget what she was calling the different drugs, but like a secret crypto key, they shared a common language.

You should read The Code Book sometime

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Please explain how the State had 100% surveillance of attackers'/terrorists' communications before they became electronic, and I'll be "genuinely concerned" about the "crippling" of their work.

Sounds more like we're returning to a state of how things were (suspicions would have to be aroused, and actual police work would have to be done, instead of just retrieving all of the relevant metadata on people the State doesn't like from a database of just about every piece of information transmitted across a wire for 50+ years).

Recent attacks have occurred even without widespread use of encrypted chat. There is no evidence that mass surveillance actually stops terrorism.

David Chaum had a solution he talked about this year at Real World Crypto. If you find someone who understood it you might be on something :)

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