Hacker News Reader

Comment by abandonliberty | Hacker News Reader

You're right! It's rarely about who creates the backdoor/update channel/law but about who can leverage and abuse it (hacker, next president, etc).

We are slowly starting to realize how big these issues are. I hope.

View on HN

Ahem, the next president?

That ties into the overall point of the comment that the person using the backdoor may not be the one who created/mandated it, i.e. one president that people trust mandates a backdoor but never uses it improperly, but the next president after them is more unscrupulous and uses that backdoor for nefarious purposes, effectively piggy-backing on the trust of the previous president.

The point is that it might not be appropriate to give someone the keys to the castle even if you trust them completely not to abuse that power, because people don't last forever in a position and that power will eventually pass to a successor who may be less trustworthy.

This is an important approach to this problem. If you attack a hypothetical future leader, everyone can picture someone that might be worse, whether or not they like the current leader. It's a good way of avoid being dismissed over partisan concerns.

Same reason why you would never trust any country to be a nuclear power, no matter how trustworthy it seems to be.

Specially one which has used nuclear weapons against civilians in the past.

Oh, wait, never mind ...

The problem is that once a country is a nuclear power, taking the nukes from them is kinda hard. Even when you simply don't trust them.

This seems to be a pretty big blind spot for our two-party system here. Every president I can remember has set precedent by using some rule/loophole in the powers granted to the Executive Branch and then their party gets bent out of shape when the next president uses that same technique to do something they don't like.

Doing the 'right thing' the wrong way just conditions the American public toward accepting an autocracy. While particularly bad for one party, it's not great for either of them, and certainly not for the citizenry.

Honestly, when the big bad comes around, any loophole will be used, the eternal classic being a state of emergency.

If everyone abuses these loopholes anyway, then maybe there's a chance that they'll be closed in time. One can dream, right?

I laughed out loud reading this. This is a great, very clear explanation (though I think you may be responding to a joke). Can I get you to write my comments from now on? :)

Current president isn't intelligent enough to pull the political maneuvers to pull this one off -- even his base would be up in arms. You can't say "bigly cyber" and click your heels three times and get back doors.

Also in the case of hostilities, there's no way you could block this channel ( OS updates ) on a large enough scale, fast enough. This vector would be utilized in advance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com