Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

> Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications.

This is very naive. Just assume the scenario where a CEO or politician has a certain fetish that he/she rather would not like to be splattered over the front page of a national news paper. This person is likely going to use his personal email, phone, voice and data applications to indulge in this fetish. If there is a backdoor, it is almost guaranteed China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail to get their hands on corporate or national secrets.

View on HN

Yes. We went through this same fight with the Clipper chip already, but we can have it again with these incompetent, ignorant, appointee bureaucrats.

It's a solved political, human-access issue that doesn't need an easily-hackable technological hammer in search of a nail: if they can get a warrant, then they demand the password or one goes to jail. Adding backdoors would inevitably give unimaginable power to a host of foreign governments, random hackers and political adversaries... little good could ever come from it that couldn't come from warrants and traditional channels of legally-compelling disclosure without the damage to the already tenuous image of the integrity, security, and trust in most every type of system. The attack surface of modern, complex systems is big enough without a hole the punches right through it if you have the master key to everyone. For example, think of the immense risk and target posed by a master escrow key database, and some random subcontractor losing or "losing" a laptop, compromising everyone.

>but we can have it again with these incompetent, ignorant, appointee bureaucrats.

I agree with your sentiment completely, but do want to serve as a footnote on the sentence I am quoting: Being an "appointee" does not imply competence or incompetence on technological details. Being elected does not imply competence or incompetence on matters of technological details.

When the officials in charge of the decision are entirely elected, it is not as if they are elected because they have a technical pedigree, presented at DEF CON, or have a high score on leetcode. They are elected because of a myriad of complex factors, most of which relate to the prevailing cultural memes of the day. Heck they only stand for election based on a similar set of complex factors and impulses, and awareness of technological specifics is eternally low on the list.

I say this having known one low-level federal bureaucrat well (he might even qualify as part of the "deep state", if such a thing existed), and interacted with a few others in passing. In some ways they are ridiculously competent in their area of expertise. In other ways, they are depressingly in favor of the inertia of the status quo. But in all cases, I can't say that replacing their hiring process with an election would change a damned thing.

Or let's forget a fetish. Let's just say they sent someone a nude. Or how about an inappropriate joke (in or out of context)? These are pretty common things that people do and can easily be used as blackmail. Everyone has things that they are embarrassed about.

Playable deniability.

Mutual transparency.

Assured secrecy.

Non-indulgement.

The last two aren't realistic. The first two might be.

Those things work for nation state actors, not quite so well for just some random hacker. Or even if a nation state actor goes rogue (or "rogue").

>it is almost guaranteed China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail to get their hands on corporate or national secrets.

In fairness, this is pretty naive too.

The idea that a backdoor exists, and our intelligence community is not monitoring the proclivities of, say, Halliburton's chairman, is fanciful in the extreme.

I think it's safe to assume that everyone would be recorded, and some people would be watched in such a scenario. Anyone above VP level at Oscar Meyer, Boeing, Procter and Gamble, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc would be pretty high up on that "watch" list. Probably even anyone who knows the CEO at Boeing, or Intel, or whatever would be high up on that list.

I always look at it this way, the intelligence guys are at least as smart as I am, and if I had a back door, that's the minimum list of who I would watch. I think it very likely that we would have gotten to those guys and gals long before any Chinese, Indian, Israeli, or whatever nation's operative would.

This is part of the insidiousness of backdoors.

> and our intelligence community

What happens when a foreign or hostile intelligence community gets their hands on some of those secrets? Just because "your own" know them already doesn't mean they're completely worthless for all the others.

An adversary armed with such secrets can change the course of an election, undermine certain people and initiatives to promote others or change a company's leadership, etc. And they can do it with 0 accountability since they never have to ever directly leverage the information, just release it in very targeted ways to the people who will then do all the work, knowingly or not.

Having backdoors is a bad idea and it has proven as much time and time again. And coming out in public to say "corporations can have their way but regular people have to be kept on a leash" is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from someone on the wrong side of such a backdoor, someone with no choice but to prostrate themselves.

There's no way there aren't corporate secrets,and probably national security too, going over those same email, phone, voice and data applications already, whether considered "personal" devices or not. You don't even gotta get to finding something else to use as blackmail.

Or even an unscrupulous domestic agent of law. If you look at the handling of the Silk Road investigation by the FBI, you'll see that people are easily compromised (Secret Service agents investigating tried to pocket some of the bitcoin). They may tell you they are only using backdoors when necessary, but who's liable when they abuse it?

I was thinking of a another counter-argument:

Should we allow prisons in the united states to have "master keys" or "back doors" to allow firemen to evacuate prisoners in the case of fire?

The issue there is that it is too easy for your opponent to say that no, we should not have those master keys, because convicts are not worth saving whereas I am a regular average Joe, etc.

Not just China, could be any country really.

Could even be our own country. Given that Barr is the son of a CIA scion I'm sure he wouldn't mind if U.S. intelligence agencies were given the power to pick and choose who is electable.

This is the greatest threat. Existing administration hacks into their opponents digital devices and then exposes all of their secrets to the world. This ensures that the party in power never loses an election again.

Forget about parties, it allows them to control who wins the primaries for both parties.

Including their own. How soon before the government is utilizing its security apparatus to blackmail its own wealthy and powerful?

I think that ship likely sailed long ago.

The fact that something has gone wrong before (even if repeatedly!) does not imply that we should not attempt to prevent it from happening again, or that it's no longer possible to take steps that would move us in that direction.

Please allow me to introduce you to J. Edgar Hoover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

Not that he was the first in US history, by a long shot.

> If there is a backdoor, it is almost guaranteed China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail to get their hands on corporate or national secrets.

Hell yes. Solidarity.

Also, everyone knows, only people break the laws, businesses never do.

I've never seen a business in jail. They're filled with people.

No, they get fined, limited in where and how they can act, broken up, dissolved.

Cells make no sense for the business entity, however justice definitely does.

When we regain sanity and quit insisting corporations are people, and recognize them as the constructs and devices they are, then these discussions can make more sense.

But I thought corporations are people too?

When a business "goes to jail" it simply ceases to exist. Enron, Theranos, etc.

Those went bankrupt. They didnt go out of business as punishment for wrong doing.

Fines so large that they lead to bankruptcy is how the death penalty works for businesses.

I think the opposite is more common: the government steps in to save a company that would otherwise be forced out of business due to the harm they caused others.

See for example tobacco and asbestos companies.

And did Enron really die if all their assets were sold to competitors and continue to operate?

I guess Arthur Andersen (Enron's accountants) is the only one that comes to mind. They were penally convicted and had to fold, if memory serves me right.

> China, Russia or any other country will eventually break it and potentially use it for blackmail

Interesting choice of bad guys there. Snowden already showed us that you've omitted the biggest bogeyman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com