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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I have a reasonably solid understanding of cryptography; part of what I do professionally is break cryptosystems. I do not think that the condition where billion dollar companies ship products that deny the people the right to "every man's evidence" is a stable equilibrium. Something will have to give. Since I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, it seems unlikely to me that what's going to give is the state.

That doesn't mean I think the FBI is on the right side of every (or even most) crypto debates. But I understand where they're coming from and foresee debates in the future where they'll be on the right side.

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What if it weren't "billion dollar companies" selling these phones, but hobbyists building them out of commodity parts? Where do you draw the line? I can build my own automatic rifle, which has no serial number and appears on no list, using parts purchased legally and a drill press. That being the case, how can "the state" police the function of personal general-purpose computing devices and not tie itself in knots?

You can build yourself such a rifle, or maybe even ten of them, but you can't build and sell a billion.

The points of control are pretty easy to find in a context where the Internet is run by a dozen large companies all headquartered in the United States.

But we're talking about relatively simple algorithms here. Not even iOS prevents you from, say, running crypto written in Javascript (as ill-advised as that is).

Gun control is far easier than controlling AES.

They don't want to control AES. I think they want the defaults used by commercial devices to be subject to court order. They can deal with the idea that suspects can arrange to protect their communications; they've been dealing with that for centuries. What they have a hard time with is when all communications everywhere are irrevocably protected without trying.

This seems to admit what many suspect: the purpose of this exercise is not to catch criminals, who as you indicate will have good crypto even when good crypto is criminal. The purpose is to surveil normal citizens, all the time.

I don't think such an admission necessarily follows. It has always been possible for determined criminals to invest enough time and caution to make their communications prohibitively expensive to intercept. The vast majority do not do so. Everyone (criminals included!) have to make decisions about the tradeoffs in time, effort, and convenience they're willing to make for security. Changing the default level of security enabled out of the box on commercial devices changes that calculus. It's possible to simultaneously believe that the FBI should not surveil normal citizens all the time, criminals do have the ability to secure their communications to an arbitrary degree if they make the effort, and the default level of security your iPhone provides should be less than "requires nation-state level resources in order to comply with a lawful search warrant."

Let us stipulate that dumb (unsophisticated, foolish, intemperate, whatever) criminals exist. Is it now your argument that LEOs especially need help catching these dumb ones, who would actually be coordinating their criminal activities via cheapest-commercially-available non-burner smartphones with original ROMs? Are they just forgetting entirely the smart criminals who have hired someone to root their equipment? Know your limits, I suppose.

That's nonsense, of course. They'll continue to catch the dumb ones the way they always have: when the criminal screws up and a cop whose shift is still young just happens to be around. They'll continue to catch the smart criminals only very rarely, when someone with enough clout gets pissed off enough. They'll continue to "catch" innocents all day every day, only now they'll have more circumstantial "evidence" of the "this guy googled TVs last month; he was obviously trying to decide which TVs to steal" variety. This is why the Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment.

Yes: I believe the overriding concern is that smartphone vendors have defaulted people who don't ever think about comsec to extremely strong comsec.

Sort of like automobile manufacturers, who with all their airbags and crumple zones have defaulted drivers who don't ever think about safety to extremely strong safety. It's really disheartening, to read security professionals hoping to deny security to regular people. I guess I'm somewhat mollified that you've stopped pretending this is about catching criminals.

Some of the people getting this unbreakable security by default are really, really bad people, and we want the police to be able to catch them.

Oh yeah, what are their names? If these really really really bad people who can only be caught by ignoring 4A actually existed, one or more of them would have been prosecuted in the last decade. This is movie-plot threat analysis. Despite the ironclad logic to the contrary upthread, you cling to the idea that this is about catching criminals. Because you trust what the enforcement-industrial complex tells you about crime and the security of personal computing devices. Why is that? I can't imagine you'd believe what they tell you about crime and ideal incarceration rates...

No, horrifying crimes are not movie plots, sorry. Some of the crimes we're talking about are issues virtually everyone on HN seems to care about (for instance: securities and banking fraud) and are already extremely difficult to prosecute without the kinds of evidence we're discussing.

I won't presume to speak for "everyone on HN", but my personal concern about "securities and banking fraud" is the capriciousness and corruption exhibited by our current prosecution of those. Multiple people are in prison because they sold BTC to someone who sold BTC to someone who used BTC to buy drugs. Meanwhile HSBC, Wachovia, etc. have been caught red-handed laundering billions in drug money, and no one has seen the inside of a jail. Lots of other big banks screwed up badly enough on securitization of subprime loans that their paid-for Treasury Secretary had to bail them out with public funds, and who do the prosecutors go after? Some tiny little Chinese immigrant bank who actually caught and reported a loan officer who tried to write some fraudulent loans. Giving LEOs more power to snoop into every part of citizens' private lives isn't going to make this sorry situation any better.

The phrase "horrifying crimes" makes me think of something violent. Evidence in violent crimes tends to be physical rather than mobile-phone-based.

Of course, you've also already admitted [0] that none of this is about catching criminals.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239680

You can buid a riffle by yourself but I can't copy-paste yours, with code that's a huge deal.

> Since I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, it seems unlikely to me that what's going to give is the state.

The US already had crypto restrictions for years. Other nations didn't. It meant the US couldn't compete in technical markets that make use of encryption, which today is everything. Even so, crypto was still readily available. I wouldn't bet on the state.

That would be a more compelling argument if US-defined crypto --- for better and often much worse --- didn't practically define commercial cryptography.

I think you missed the point: the US defined crypto despite the fact that export restrictions were in place. PGP spread across the world, and the laws against it didn't do a darn thing.

I'm not sure I see the relevance. Export restrictions are silly (I shipped a commercial product in the 1990s for which we needed a "real" Canadian version and a broken US version because of them). I don't support export restrictions, and they're not an important component of what the FBI wants. But see below.

I think what the FBI wants is for the default mode of encryption in commercial phones to be subject to court orders. I don't think that's viable either, though I understand why they want it.

You can sum my take on this up as "something's got to give at some point, and it probably won't be the state; also, don't be smug about this, because it's complicated".

The idea that nobody who understands encryption sympathizes with the FBI is silly. That might be moving the goalposts from the original argument --- nobody understands crypto and supports the FBI --- but I'm not sure people have a clear idea of what the FBI is asking for (vs. what the FBI's ambit claim is).

Later:

I misread the previous comment; I get the argument. I don't think the failure of export controls is a good indication of the capabilities of the state; in a sense, they served their purpose well, by ensuring that commercial products were sold in a default configuration that offered trivially breakable crypto.

> I misread the previous comment; I get the argument. I don't think the failure of export controls is a good indication of the capabilities of the state; in a sense, they served their purpose well, by ensuring that commercial products were sold in a default configuration that offered trivially breakable crypto.

Did they? I seem to recall that it was easy for international users to illegally download the "secure" 128-bit version of Netscape, and that most people did. I could be misremembering, though.

Because there are no restrictions. Once those restrictions are put in place, expect the brain drain. After all, these are a lot of careers we're talking about. Assuming we're talking about crypto restrictions of course.

If we're talking about some other measure, I addressed some of those here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16236105

Can you elaborate as to what kind of position that would be? I don't see, for example, why an attempt to mandate Clipper chip style key escrow would be a sensible policy.

Is it "not sensible" or is it just something you wouldn't like? If iMessage, WhatsApp, and SMS used escrowed encryption, they'd be in some way fundamentally insecure --- although still safer to use to send your bank account to your accountant than many "secure" encrypted messengers. You might respond by installing Signal (I sure would). They might not care; as long as the default enables investigations, they can probably make most of their cases.

By "mandating escrowed encryption" I mean something like the export controls of the '90s. That is, banning encryption in general without key escrow, or at least something like China's Cybersecurity Law of 2017, which allows the government to demand any product add decryption capabilities, effectively the same thing.

> If iMessage, WhatsApp, and SMS used escrowed encryption, they'd be in some way fundamentally insecure…You might respond by installing Signal (I sure would).

I'm not sure how lawmakers could meaningfully target iMessage and WhatsApp and not Signal with legislation.

Edit: Oh, I see you mentioned default apps shipped with devices. Seems like a nightmare to word that law so that it targets iMessage and WhatsApp, but not, say, HTTPS. (Besides, does WhatsApp even ship with iOS?) I guess it could work in theory, but it seems like a bad idea to me.

>Something will have to give.

Perhaps the notion that governments and their professional law enforcers are entitled to pry under certain conditions that tyrants can redefine at will, will have to give.

Not just talking about the FBI here. The issue is larger than just one country. There are plenty of tyrants out there who should not be given the tools the FBI wants.

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