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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

Encryption is math. Can we really make a form of math illegal?

I feel privacy is a basic human right regardless of what country you live in.

I’m not fan of punishing the majority because of a screwed up minority.

People who commit illegal acts as horrible as child abuse and terrorism are not going to respect the law when it comes to encryption.

Again, you can’t stop people from doing math. The idea of making it illegal is silly.

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Actually they've already made some numbers illegal in the past [0], and exporting maths had been illegal in the US [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Yes, and the silly people are often in power.

"Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/14/forcing-f...

Wow, that’s a real shit argument.

> Again, you can’t stop people from doing math. The idea of making it illegal is silly.

I don't think anybody is suggesting two individuals should not be allowed to use math to protect their conversations. Even if Facebook adds a way for law enforcement to access communications individuals are still free to talk in code or encrypt their messages before putting it on the wire. With your old telephone, your carrier can wiretap your line but you can still use a scrambler or talk in code and the tap will reveal only metadata.

How is Facebook (or other internet services) being required to provide wire tap access any different from a telecom company?

Such a law would serve no reasonable purpose, though. Criminals can use one-time pads and it's also not hard to make a little encryption program based on existing cryptographic primitives. In fact, drug cartels have specialists for that who could probably even develop and implement their own secure-enough Feistel cipher if they wanted to.

The only purposes such a law seems to serve is to catch clueless idiots who will be caught anyway, and to enable mass-surveillance of law-abiding citizens.

Do the telephone wiretap laws serve any reasonable purpose?

Yes, because hardware devices for encrypting phone calls in real-time are not as easy to produce as text encryption software or stick-it notes with random numbers on them.

What does that have to do with whether or not a wiretap serves a reasonable purpose? Today, it would be incredibly easy for Apple to have encrypted voice calls as well.

A law must be enforceable, otherwise it is useless. A law for wiretapping voice phones is enforceable, because only few criminals have the capability to build their own hardware encryption devices for secure real-time voice scrambling. A law for wiretapping into text chat software is not enforceable, because anyone halfway skilled in cryptography can produce his own encryption layer on top of the wiretapped text chat. The worst inconvenience a criminal would suffer from such a law is that they would need to use the copy&paste function of their device.

A law that by design is not enforceable, serves no reasonable purpose.

But using it is applying math, so yes you could make its application illegal, says devil’s advocate because I am pro encryption.

Smarter bad actors could still do it without being detected. Hiding an encrypted message in unsuspicious messages isn't that difficult. I really don't see the point of having such a law.

Back to Devil's Advocate, You could say that about most laws, people breaking them will find more clever ways to avoid getting caught. The fact that you can be more clever, does not mean it should be legal.

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