Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

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Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested. Especially here, where people actually give the idea merit. It makes me miss oldschool /. where 100% of everyone was on the same page. Your point illustrates a huge reason as to why.

Backdooring stupid.crypt and forcing law abiding people to use it just insures that big badguys will use any other kind of encryption. All you've really accomplished is adding an extra charge of illegal encryption use at the expense of security for every human.

This potentially creates all sorts of pathologies. Is it illegal now for me not to update an old computer? If your backdoors are implemented in hardware, is it illegal to use old computers?

When people are against gun control, a common thread is "make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns." This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Not so with encryption. Other, more free countries will constantly be developing better security methodologies, and reproducing those methods is effectively free. "Fuck up encryption, then only bad guys will have encryption" is a much stronger argument, because it's emphatically true.

The ignorant hubris of this is massively disheartening.

> Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested.

Yeah. There's no distinction whatsoever between encryption with backdoors and no encryption at all. Imagine our current web with no encryption. Your logins are all effectively plaintext; your online shopping is effectively plaintext; your emails are all effectively plaintext. "Furiously stupid" is a good way to describe this whole proposition.

> This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Hmm, then wouldn't some people just make their own firearms, just as you are describing with encryption, right?

Many people do that already, perfectly legally. Certainly some percentage would choose not to follow laws banning them.

Some people would, yes. Especially rudimentary single shot weapons. However, its much harder to make a reliable gun than it is to make reliable tough encryption. There are designs available for both and there always will be, illegal or not. But making a gun is manufacturing whereas using encryption would just require installing some software. Trivial.

Given that I have many, many crypto libraries in many many devices, some of which are heavily modified, chances of me even being able to replace those with broken crypto libraries is like... 0. Many people are in a similar situation, so I don't understand how we could even comply with a law like that if we wanted to (which we don't). So yeah, not only trivial to retain unbroken crypto, but nearly impossible to get rid of it.

I want to point out, that manufacturing a gun is not "non-trivial".

Given blueprints, (publicly available) or a template and accurate enough measures, a lathe, and a mill, anyone can make a firearm or parts for one in their garage.

Is there reading involved? Yes. But any argument you make w.r.t. The futility of illegalizing encryption is immediately portable to firearms manufacture.

I mean... manufacturing a working modern firearm in their garage is probably much more achievable to the general population than rolling out any kind of encryption software. Anyone with some basic hands-on competency can make a gun.

All you really need is a drill press and some basic tools. People made Sten guns in WWII and that's still a perfectly valid firearm design (fully automatic even) that requires almost no work to make.

Sure, and you'd be hard pressed to get a lot of people to give up firearms they already own. If you sent agents door to door, statistically some result in conflicts to the death with people that weeks earlier were considered law abiding.

Can you imagine asking every gun owner/computer owner to go to their local police station to surrender their guns/functional encryption?

That would be pretty spooky to me.

Not trying to make this a gun control debate, but for the longest time encryption was considered a munition, so it's not THAT non sequitur.

Being physical objects, gun distribution is much much more difficult than encryption distribution.

Ok, I believe we are in the middle of arguing OP's point about how the pro-gun people are wrong when using the argument "only the criminals will own them", and how the pro-encryption people are right when using the same argument about encryption.

And, I think what you're adding here is that I've got an error in my statement that both parties will happily build their own firearms/encryption because the physical gun is harder to distribute than a copy of software.

And I agree in principle with this, until I realize that broad distribution of an encryption mechanism is exactly what a bad-acting government would want... crack once and everyone is compromised.

So, no, I think I would argue that its easier to distribute weapons than good, bespoke encryption.

And further, I would argue that if it is true for encryption, it is also true for firearms... that if they are outlawed, the power shifts to criminals as they will still use them.

My point wasn't that "pro-gun people" are wrong.

The argument is a tautology, it can't be wrong! If guns ownership is a crime, then owning a gun makes you a criminal.

The tautology is compatible with the hypothesis that if guns were confiscated and illegal, eventually there would be a decrease in the amount of people getting shot. Probably an increase for a while as confiscation attempts resulted in agents getting in gun battles with people who don't want to surrender their property.

Whether the loss in life and liberty is worth the outcome is a matter of personal taste.

Sure, the saying has broad appeal because the tautology of it is interesting. The actual debate, however, centers on whether laying down your weapons makes you vulnerable to those that hold onto theirs.. and that was the lens I was looking through.

> When people are against gun control, a common thread is "make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns." This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.

Even if that is true, "decrease" is not remotely equivalent to "eliminate".

The problem is that as law-abiding citizens, and those who have their weapons forcibly taken by law enforcement are left completely unable to defend themselves; while criminals are not completely unable to acquire firearms.

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