Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

And this is why in western countries the politics of encryption should be regarded as a stopgap only. It's better than allowing the police to opportunistically go fishing in your data, but it's no substitute for sound democratic rule-of-law culture.

If politics gets to the point of having to rely on encryption as your only protection then it's simply going to get banned and/or blocked.

View on HN

That's true, and I think it means encryption not only protects speech but also works as a simple test for flagging nation states who're failing to protect the basic human right of privacy for their citizens. If a country tries to stop the use of encryption by its citizens then it's failing to do a good job, and its citizens (and other nations) should be working to make them aware of the problem.

additionally relying on specific applications / services that can relatively easy singled out with DPI and by that also stick out their users for "further inspection".

Their suggestion to use TOR does not really help - Turkey for example has today started to block TOR ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38365564 ).

With DPI hardware having dropped substantially in price while at the same time expanded functionality, TelCom providers / gov. agencies can relatively easily / quickly deploy such censorship / surveillance at the edge or in the TelCom core.

I think it's unwise to rely on a sound democratic rule-of-law culture to protect our right to encryption: there's nothing which says that a majority of people won't support a law banning strong encryption.

I'd argue that the politics of encryption should be regarded as a stopgap in every country, not just western countries. Even Singapore sees value in encryption, and they aren't exactly supporters of free speech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com