Hacker News Reader

Comment by Phlarp | Hacker News Reader

"It's too late to criminalize prostitution, every is already having sex"

"It's too late to criminalize possession of drugs. Half the country takes pharmaceuticals!"

The War on Drugs is considered a failure and in parts of the world like NSW, Australia made prostituion legal in 1979 in both cases because criminalising things most people use generally doesn't work and all you do is randomly jail people for doing the exact same thing as a large proportion of the population.

Sure, it's a failure. But you can still be jailed over it.

I fail to see the point, without encryption, there's no modern web, no e-commerce, no smartphones, absolutely everything relies on it like water. Unless you want to go back to pre-2000's technology of course.

Of course e-commerce will be fine, because browser vendors will obtain licenses to ship TLS modules and as a condition of such will include the .gov root cert.

It's trivial when you can pass arbitrary legislation.

Back in the 90s we had to deal with US gov restrictions on encryption export. Software companies and organisations fell into line. It was a big deal when 128-bit keyed Netscape became available globally in 1997, per State Dept approval, but even then the full-strength server-side SSL was still restricted to 'approved' entities.

And even 56-bit server SSL was only exportable with us.gov key escrow.

I used to use Apache with the 40-bit SSL option. Pathetic strength but no-one was going to risk jail-time by breaking laws.

< no one was going to risk jail time

I did at that time, it was just another law to ignore.

The difference being that there's way too much necessary legitimate use of cryptography to stop now, and as the traffic is encrypted, you can't tell what traffic isn't legitimate. Plus steganography and plenty of places accessible on the net that aren't the United States.

This isn't meatspace, the dynamics are quite different.

There is nothing you cannot legislate for. For example use of encryption could be licensed, just as drugs are. If you don't have prescription, you go down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com