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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

So ill be honest here, im not a STEM person...but how exactly do you "crack down" on something thats essentially just really great math?

What, if anything, is the government hoping to do to stop people from using GPG/PGP? I mean i guess you could force companies in the US to not ship phones encrypted by default, but they could just sneak a menu asking if you want it encrypted before the first power on.

How does the cat go back in the bag after 2015? Snowden has basically put the word "encryption" in the mouth and ears of every American. We know the government spies on us. We know it uses this information to hold theater trials of people it just doesnt like.

How do you crack down on math?

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> i guess you could force companies in the US to not ship phones encrypted by default, but they could just sneak a menu asking if you want it encrypted before the first power on.

Free software can violate the law because it can be anonymous. Corporations have addresses, and employees, and owners. They're legal entities and can only break the law when the government allows it.

Our phones are built and solve by corporations, running software installed by corporations, and we download apps from corporate-controlled app stores. Do you think Google or Apple can just say "no, we're going to violate this law" and keep operating that way freely?

You can't stop a hacker from encrypting, because we can root our devices and install our own software, but encryption is only used by more than a couple percent of the population because it's easy. If you can't encrypt your communications without rooting your device, 99% of the population won't encrypt.

> How do you crack down on math?

Funny story: back in the 90s, whenever you downloaded a web browser, you had to promise that you lived in the US if you wanted it to support the state-of-the-art encryption, because encryption--math--was legally considered a weapon so you couldn't "export" it.

You crack down on math by arresting people using the math. It's pretty straightforward. Remember the illegal prime number that was DeCSS?

> How do you crack down on math?

Same way you crack down on anything else. Round up people and throw them in prison if they break the law.

Sure you cannot stop people from using encryption but if it's a criminal offense to incorporate it into a consumer application then you could easily go after the company, it's executives, developers, or even users. The first three of those is already enough to have a chilling effect on the rest of the industry.

It won't stop foreign developers in countries that don't extradite people to US like China, Iran, North Korea or Russia. You will have to find an excuse to cut those countries from Internet or implement a border firewall.

In Russia, we have a law that requires companies that own messenger apps, to retain and provide contents of messages at request or provide information necessary to decrypt the message (encryption keys). There is no responsibility for using encryption for end users, and for companies it is either a large fine or being added to a registry of blocked URLs. So it is difficult to enforce such a law in practice.

the most basic way is to just change "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent" if encryption is involved. yes this is counter to the constitution (like several other things the government does at the highest level), but it can be achieved de facto by a law that makes it illegal to not surrender encryption keys when asked. So if the cops serve a warrant and find files in your possession that you cannot decrypt, they just charge you with violating the encryption law and ensure the penalties for such are greater than or equal to whatever crime they were originally intending to prosecute.

They already cracked down on copyright, even though any picture/video/audio is just a number (a series of bits).

Law is all about interpreting and enforcing ambiguous rules.

They've cracked down on numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

The won't be able to stop it completely, but they will be able to stop 99% of people from using it.

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