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Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

and if you say "no", they're screwed. Whereas with a door, they can just push you out of the way and kick it down.

I'm opposed to back doors, but the door analogy is a bad one.

There's no such thing as a perfect analogy because the entire point of an analogy is it takes an argument and reframes it in a different context. Different contexts have different edge cases and thus no analogy fits an argument perfectly.

Given this door analogy works for the majority of the arguments being presented (which is impressive in itself given how different the physical and electronic worlds are), I'd say it's actually a pretty good analogy.

> and if you say "no", they're screwed

This is false. If it's ever true, the crime is confined to the perpetrator's mind.

Any analogy has its limitations, but I think it is helpful for talking about things like "back doors" (and how that is no different from not having doors at all) or how a proposal is basically only "unintended" consequences and no gain. Feel free to suggest a better analogy.

The main difference where this analogy breaks down is that it is much easier to build practically unbreakable encryption (assuming P != NP), versus practically unbreakable doors or safes.

If you say no, then you're arrested for contempt of court or similar.

They can't kick it down and push me out of the way if I have built an underground bunker.

And surely we all deserve an underground bunker.

no, if you say "no", you're screwed. they jail you until you cooperate with the investigation.

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