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Comment by OrderlyTiamat | Hacker News Reader

Does mr Barr not understand that criminals will simply use free non-backdoored software instead? Of course he does. It's hard not to read this as another attemt to listen in on the conversation of regular citizens instead.

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You could say that about criminalizing TOR. If you knew that by using TOR you were going to get swatted at 3am you'd probably stop using it. Same goes for encryption. The second any law is passed google/apple are going to pull apps; whatsapp etc are going to remove e2e (or alter it so the UI is the same but it can be snooped on) and criminals are going to have to figure out how to use PGP or whatever.

In this scenario, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft will immediately fold as they can no longer securely sell products to customers. If e2e crypto is banned, the entire ecommerce market is fucked.

This isn't a ban on end-to-end crypto. A company would still be able to use end-to-end crypto, as long as they control one end, which is already the case in ecommerce.

If he doesn't right now, he soon will. That will mean first, random government checking whether encrypted comms are backdoored. If they discover that some are double-encrypted, and the inner encryption isn't backdoored, then they will do what we right now call MITM all encrypted comms. By law, with harsh penalties, because that's how we roll in the USA.

I think this is just another step in a War on Change. Snooping was good when the bulk of the comms weren't encrypted, and cellphones could be confiscated and read because plaintext. Change to HTTPS, dominance of a cellphone company that isn't too compliant, and here's a change that needs to be reversed, to be stopped.

Seems like a failure of the tech community that most people don’t understand the ramifications of backdoors. People can also point to the example of China where there are indeed government backdoors and things are fine (from the government can get access but others can’t point of view). Clearly we don’t want to be like China in this regard but it does give an example of a “working” backdoor setup.

> but it does give an example of a “working” backdoor setup.

I'd argue that it's actually giving the illusion of a working setup - not that the setup actually works.

Well (one of) the arguments has been that it's possible to put in a secure backdoor such that only folks that should have access has access. In this case the government. In China the backdoor as far as I know is only accessible by the government and hasn't been otherwise exposed yet.

Most governments won't kill you, your family, friends and and anyone you could have communicated with if you release the backdoor.

If I tell a child that 2 + 2 = 4, and show them four blocks in groups of two, and have them draw pictures demonstrating that 2+2=4, and sing songs about 2+2=4, and yet they persist in believing that 2+2=5, is that my failure?

The tech community has repeatedly and thoroughly explained the impossibility of secure backdoors, but it is apparently a more difficult thing to grasp than 2+2=4, especially when one does not wish to grasp it.

> especially when one does not wish to grasp it.

This is the key point. Borrowing from Upton Sinclair,

It is difficult to get an authoritarian government functionary to understand something, when his pursuit of power depends on his not understanding it.

The way I see it, the general population didn't pay attention[0], and the legislators see this as a problem of colour. What they want is a back door that opens only to people bearing keys of the right colour, and you can't get them to understand that the concept of colour doesn't make sense in the world of bits, for the reasons outlined in [1].

[0] - They never do - they don't care, and it's hard to argue why should they care especially about this, over a million other urgent things. Media being saturated with outrage-inducing crap doesn't help push through the noise either.

[1] - https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

If you are making an argument for something and people aren't convinced, who's issue is that? The tech community wants the general population to be against installing backdoors. If people aren't convinced or don't care, we can take a couple of stances:

1) well, people just are too dumb / don't care enough / stubborn, we've done all we can and it is what it is

2) the message isn't getting through, let's try something different

We have been trying different things since at least the 1980s and the Clipper chip debacle.

At _some_ point, this quits being a failure of the tech community. _Some_ people simply are not teachable, because they refuse to listen. No "something different" is going to convince someone of something they don't want to believe.

P.S. You didn't say "issue" before, you said "failure." That it's an issue is indisputable. Assigning blame seems counter-productive at best.

Exactly. Strong encryption is not rocket-science anymore. Criminals can even simply code their own encrpyted tools and in that case, law enforcement is completely out of the game (and actually, professional crime does no rely on Signal and sorts anyways).

It would be so much wiser to just keep quiet about that topic and rely on the neglicence of the common criminal - below the line there is a plethora of information in metadata and connection data, still incredibly better than anything law enforcement had 15 years ago.

The effect of any public advance into "responsible encryption" is only causing criminals to harden their tools.

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