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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

"Authorities want every house in America to be remodeled to include a second front door with a special government lock. They promise to only give police departments, contractors, and/or federal employees access to the single master key that can be instantly and easily copied and shared over the internet and opens every single house and business in America. Even if we trusted the government with this power, how could that go wrong?"

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I think most Americans know that the government can quite easily enter anyone’s home if they want to.

Generally, not legally without a warrant, which can be a good enough deterrent. Or at least should be if our legal process is working at all.

If you are wealthy enough to own your own land, this can be true. If you rent you have very few rights.

You could say the same about a hypothetical encryption backdoor. The question is whether consumers should be allowed to use encryption the FBI can’t crack even with a warrant. I think the answer is “yes”, but…

Right, which is why the locked door is the wrong analogy.

It's more like burying treasure. The location is a secret map (key) that only you know. The critical distinction here, I believe, is between "having" and "knowing".

And I like to believe we have even stronger rights to what we know than to what we have.

All that said, this is assuming use of working cryptography. With the exception of the technically savvy (those who know how to hid things properly) asking for backdoors into encryption is akin to registering your treasure with the feds, something I'd assume gold miners wouldn't have put up with, for example.

I didn't do a good enough job with the analogy. The main problem I want to illustrate is that if the key falls into the wrong hands (which is extremely easy to do), then anyone else can easily enter anyone's home.

There are two main issues: government abusing its power, and weakening security of everybody. I meant to focus more on the second.

This exists and has long been required by fire code for most commercial buildings. https://www.knoxbox.com/fire-departments

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