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Comment by DarkKomunalec | Hacker News Reader

I've said it before and I'll say it again: too much focus is being put on how backdoors can be abused, and too little on why mandating them is a terrible idea in general.

If we decide we don't have the right to conceal our digital correspondence from the government, what else should we not be allowed to conceal? The conversations you have in your car? In your home? Besides the right to privacy, what other rights make fighting terrorism harder? Freedom of association and movement? Freedom of speech, which is regularly used for recruitment?

Finally, if they really want someone's data, in a covert way, they're already able to plant hardware keyloggers, or spy on someone as they enter a password, etc. But it all requires manpower. What backdoors would let them do is monitor encrypted communications covertly and in bulk. To build up a database of all your chats and forum posts, and mine it for any anti-current-politics sentiment.

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Building on this line of thought, I never completely understood the description of crypto as a safe to the public. To me, it's more about mandating how I decide to communicate: requiring I speak a language the FBI can understand, that I always speak loudly and clearly enough such that their recording devices can accurately capture what I'm saying, that I always write my letters in a language they can understand, etc.

Crypto isn't a safe, it's the ability to talk in a language only two people understand. Unlike a safe, they have access to the data. They just can't understand it.

Eben Moglen made this point during the first crypto wars, in 1999: http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/yu-encrypt.html ("The right to speak PGP is the right to speak Navajo")

> ...that I always write my letters in a language they can understand, etc.

And more importantly, with legible handwriting! The FBI has limited resources and we wouldn't want them to waste time deciphering your handwriting only to learn what you've said to your lover, while a terrorist's handwriting goes unanalyzed.

I like this line of reasoning, that we must modify our behavior to enable surveillance. It switches things around from the traditional perspective, which is that we're doing extra things to increase our privacy, to instead be that we're doing extra things to decrease our privacy (using weak crypto, no crypto, adding and removing ssl here, etc).

I agree about the importance of keeping crypto secure, but I think the safe analogy is pretty apt (in situations without illegal stuff happening, which you seem to be implying). People can't understand encrypted data (at least, I'd be super impressed with you if you could understand encrypted data as is), people have to decrypt the data using an encryption key. The FBI's current issue is that with data in a safe, there's a clearly defined legal penalty for refusing to unlock a safe when given a legitimate court order if you're the only person with the safe combo (you can't plead the 5th to unlocking the safe). With encryption, there's currently no corresponding penalty.

> If we decide we don't have the right to conceal our digital correspondence from the government, what else should we not be allowed to conceal? The conversations you have in your car? In your home?

Let's say the Government decides that it has a zero tolerance for domestic violence, it goes ahead and implements "preventive measures" - cameras and microphones in every home, in every room. Now, they might achieve the great reduction of violence, might even catch one terrorist. As always - think about the children, we could prevent all those terrible parents that beat their offspring and catch all those wife beating husbands. And, lets think about what that would do to society...

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