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Comment by ptero | Hacker News Reader

This tirade and "go improve it" recommendation may make sense in a vacuum, without governments undermining encryption and criminalizing parts of the activities to provide secure, private comms "because terrorism/pornography/covid/whatever".

In the real world, many states freely admit that they will fight against secure, private messaging between citizens (say, because law enforcement needs a backdoor to solve crimes). And while governments can, and do, make laws to that effect, improvement will be legislated away beyond a certain point. This also produces a chilling effect on engineering: why work on a technology that will likely be outlawed if successful?

In most cases when the government is making laws to criminalize X trying to overpower it with better engineering just does not work. My 2c.

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Why not work on said technology? It can even end up being very lucrative to take up the cause. Do you forget that prior to the 90s (and also during part of the 90s) much of the lead-in to the completely common, widely commercially and privately used digital encryption we have today was completely discouraged or even made illegal by governments except for their own use.

It was a generation of pioneers who weren't quite so timid about working on new technology and fight absurd, archaic laws that built the foundations of modern consumer/commercial encryption. The U.S government especially tried very hard to chill these efforts too, and failed (so far at least).

I agree vehemently with your call to go work on this stuff.

What I don’t understand is why you seem to be suggesting that as an alternative to opposing legislation which would prohibit such work.

Both can be done, activist opposition, and a practical move to build the tools that make circumventing such privacy-hating regulatory nonsense all the more easy to pull off. More simply put: while active public opposition to bad laws is good, few things nullify bad laws better than a fait accompli that's out of the bag.

The first half I disagree with: if a law is passed, circumvention tools won’t help. This is what it seems like you have been arguing for up till now, and frankly not getting traction.

However, the second part (about the fait accompli) is a very important point.

You’d have to achieve widespread usage among the general population for this to be effective to be effective.

I don't see how you could disagree on the first point though. Not only is is often done today to varying degrees of success depending on country and technology, it was exactly how much of consumer crypto got its start back in the earlier days of the internet. During the 90's technologies like RSA, PGP and others basically got built and released while constantly treading all over extremely shaky legal ground. It was their widespread usefulness and steadily growing adoption by users that allowed them to in effect circumvent archaic laws until they were simply recognized as legally usable.

I am well of the history.

Treading shaky legal ground is not the same as circumvention.

This time around, if encryption is banned, they will do more than just hound Phil Zimmerman for years on end.

They’ll come after the end users, and ‘circumvention’ won’t help.

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