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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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