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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Completely apart from the possibility, more like a fact, that the back door will be breached by non-law-enforcement black hats, there's another serious matter here.

Anyone who thinks that a solution to this might be possible should be prepared to give a good answer the following question:

How does your system protect the rights of people subject to these searches in cases where law enforcement is evil?

Hint: it doesn't. And that's not a mere trivial inconvenience. It's a fatal flaw that can corrupt economies, bring down governments, wreak havoc on lives, destroy cultures, corrode societies, and crush freedom.

There's a reason Thomas Jefferson said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." I don't want to live in a place like today's Venezuela, Syria, China, North Korea... we should value our rights and our freedoms.

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> How does your system protect the rights of people subject to these searches in cases where law enforcement is evil?

And especially: when law enforcement becomes evil or goes rogue. For example, in 1936 in the Netherlands a census had established a list of all people - including their religious affiliation. When the Nazis marched in a couple years later, they had a perfectly validated source of Jews to deport (per https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenkartei#Niederlande).

While I do not believe that data about religion will be used as a round-them-up-and-kill-them list ever again, there are other things which we allow various forms of law enforcements or secret services to access or to do which may be OK under our current governments but may very well be used against us in the future. There's a reason why undocumented people have been afraid to register or interact with the government - what Trump and his cronies did basically confirmed all their decade-long suspicions.

> While I do not believe that data about religion will be used as a round-them-up-and-kill-them list ever again

This seems to go against centuries of crusade and genocide, but we can always try our best :)

> This seems to go against centuries of crusade and genocide, but we can always try our best :)

I'm German. I seriously hope for this world that no one will ever again dare to repeat the atrocities that my ancestors have committed. But then, I am afraid, the Holocaust and the two World Wars have drifted so far out of living history that some may at least be tempted to try the latter one again.

Unfortunately there are even young Europeans who have been witness to genocide. The Srebrenica massacre was 22 years ago.

> I seriously hope for this world that no one will ever again dare to repeat the atrocities that my ancestors have committed

If you look a bit outside a euro-centric view of things, you can see this happening today in the Middle East. Just because it isn’t white folks killing Jews doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.

I've always imagined the hope is for a country like Singapore, not North Korea (which is still scary).

> Syria

'Eternal vigilance' in the face of a significant portion of population hoping to forcibly enact sharia law on the rest of the likely takes the form of a ideologically moderate strongman...

An inconvenient fact that USians like to avoid discussing in order to continue simplemindedly branding people as 'evil'.. .. But only if we just fund more rebels, they will certainly magically embrace 1700's style western free market capitalism because the west is great!

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