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Comment by sprucely | Hacker News Reader

But the million ways to go wrong IS the problem. I may be appealing to authority here, but is it disingenuous when an overwhelming majority of encryption and security experts agree?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cyb...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/ray_ozzies_en...

https://www.justsecurity.org/53316/criminalize-security-crim...

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Note that he was replying to a comment that was saying that a back door that is not wide open to criminals is comparable to thinking pi = 3.

As is pointed out in the Schneier article, the problems with a key escrow scheme are on the law enforcement side of things. They could lose access to their keys, especially if a lot of different agencies have keys.

Those are difficulties that can in theory be overcome, although it may not be practical to do so. That's a far cry from a pi = 3 issue.

The original argument was “The legislation in no way compromises the security of any Australians’ digital communications.”

This is approaching a pi = 3 level falsehood because of the “in no way compromises” clause. There are many schemes that are outright illegal (in my not a lawyer interpretation of this law), and it nakedly makes the other schemes harder with state actors as additional points of failure.

Appealing to authority is only a bad argument if the authority is irrelevant to the topic.

Appealing to Schneier on the topic of encryption is not an irrelevant appeal.

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