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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I agree with you but I always struggle to convince people that this line of reasoning makes sense.

The government can already enter anybody's home upon receiving a warrant to do so. If you don't let them in, they can bust through a door or tear down a wall. We trust the government not to do this without court oversight. We trust courts to provide good and honest oversight. It is far from a perfect system, but we set up lots of human-level checks and balances to keep power distributed enough that this basically works.

The problem with strong encryption is that this is impossible. Even if there is a very good reason signed off by an honest court, it is impossible to get in. This breaks that human-level checks-and-balances system. What replaces it?

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Another difference from the metaphor is that busting down doors is visible and obvious, and doesn't scale.

Imagine if the government busted down a quarter of all doors in the country - that's a lot of industrial-scale police work, and it's very visible to all citizens. On the other hand, the government can tap half of all phones in the country, or intercept half of all emails sent by US residents, and we're not even legally allowed to know it happened, so we can't even argue against it in a public court of law.

Atomic-grade offense requires atomic-grade defense. We will have un-breakable encryption, or we will be crushed by secret intelligence agencies with immense power and no public accountability. It's a whole new game.

Anyway, I'm not too worried, strong encryption is open source and widely available already (even if not used in nearly all the circumstances it should be yet). This cat isn't going back in the bag.

My preferred analogy is paper shredders. Imagine if any criminal could just walk into a store and buy a paper shredder so effective that it's impossible for the FBI to piece the data back together, with or without a warrant, no matter how many resources they throw at it.

Clearly the solution is to require every paper shredder to be equipped with a camera to scan documents and upload them to cloud.gov before shredding. Of course, nobody would be authorized to look at the data without a warrant, and we should trust that nobody working for the government would ever break this law.

The next step would be to outlaw fire because of its ability to render paper 100% unrecoverable.

I agree that this effectively counters the lock and door analogy, and that it's better to avoid these analogies all together when making the case for strong encryption.

Another line of argument is to emphasize the extent that our digital economy and national security rely on strong encryption. If you outlaw it, then all of our online banking and shopping, corporate and government secrets, and more are vulnerable to hackers and foreign governments. And just as the conservative gun advocacy argument goes, outlawing it won't necessarily take encryption out of the hands of criminals, only law-abiding citizens.

I actually agree with you that this is an issue. However, key-escrow has some issues that warrants don't have.

The first, as others have mentioned, is how easy it is to use an escrowed key without detection. The second is the fact that strong encryption remains available. This means you need to outlaw strong encryption, at which point steganography comes up to hide the encryption. Finally, key-escrow is a massive increase of the attack surface of encryption. It's almost as if the government mandates we all use TSA locks on our doors.

It's not the government I fear with this concept, it's that anyone with a brain can steal the master keys from the (generally inept) government and break into your house - and you can't prove who it was.

Personally I think you can make it a crime not to produce a key if a warrant has been issued to search what ever you've encrypted.

That is a lot more out in the open than a "back door". When the government bashes through the door at least it's in plain site and the house owner knows it's happening. But with encryption how would you know if the government has used their access?

>Personally I think you can make it a crime not to produce a key if a warrant has been issued to search what ever you've encrypted.

Personally, I find that suggestion repugnant.

How is this different to getting a warrant to search say a safe deposit box at a bank? Is there something about encrypted data that should be beyond the reach of the law?

I already have so many different accounts on various websites that I regularly forget a password, the same can happen with an encryption key. Should that be a crime?

We already require corporations to preserve all their email, voice, and other electronic communications in case the government wants to investigate it. Maybe you're irresponsible for losing your key, and need to be held accountable.

We also require people to document their finances to accurately tax them. You're presumed 'guilty until proven innocent' in the sense that you're taxed on income unless you can document that it's untaxable(a business expense). There are penalties for failing to document things. What's wrong with requiring you to document your private keys, along with your receipts?

If you sell apples under the name "Loving Apples", you have to pay your state government to register that name. You can be fined for not registering your name, and your bank or other financial provider will want to see the government approval document. You could have the government maintain a central registry of all private keys, and make it a crime to encrypt a document with a key not documented in a state agency.

If you receive a document that is encrypted, you may be further required to tell the government who gave it to you, to ensure compliance with the encryption law; similar to how giving someone money requires you to tell the government about the transaction for compliance with tax law.

Wouldn't the same reasoning apply to all communication? Do you keep transcripts and/or recordings of all private conversations you have (in meatspace) so that you can hand those to the government when they show up with a warrant? Would you like to live in a society where not keeping such records is a crime? If not, why should communication "on a computer" be held to a different standard?

"One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens"

Which direction of the implication you take is a matter of preference. People who agree with giving the government full power(and trust them not to abuse it) or who agree with not giving the government any of this power are both logically consistent with my argument.

I'm only attempting to rule out people who are okay with all of the existing documentation requirements, but balk at documenting their encryption keys.

The main difference is that devices store and transmit tons data that would never be stored in a safe deposit box, and which has always been inaccessible to law enforcement anyway, such as one-off drunken quips between friends.

The difference is that the physical box at the bank is not subject to being stolen by foreign adversaries remotely. With information that is stored in databases or on phones that may be lost or stolen there is no border. And when you start to consider the critical national infrastructure that is managed by private companies and individuals, it becomes clear that on balance Americans are safer if the FBI cannot read Tony Soprano's email because any tool they can use to get his data can be used by sophisticated adversaries to get at the emails of the CEO of the nuclear power plant and more. While I do not have a link at the moment to share, Retired General Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, says the same thing.

How do you plan to prove that a person can unencrypt certain communication and is not simply an intermediary?

What if a hacker plants "secret encrypted documents" on your computer, and then the government demands that you produce a key for them? This situation has allegedly already played out with child porn[0], and planting drugs is not unheard of by unscrupulous police officers[1]. Essentially, you're back at the issue GP describes - we don't trust government employees with this much power over our lives.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-put...

[1] - https://www.innocenceproject.org/leaked-documents-show-alaba...

> Personally I think you can make it a crime not to produce a key if a warrant has been issued to search what ever you've encrypted.

That's exactly what my (UK) government has done.

It's a horrific idea.

A "better" way to do this would be to use key-escrow where a key only you have access to is needed to unlock the escrowed key.

If your personal escrow key is government mandated, and well-protected, that prevents the issue of you forgetting passwords (Estonia already has something like this). It also fully ensures that the government accessing escrowed keys requires you being informed.

I still don't support this plan, but it is the best thing I've seen.

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