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Comment by bartislartfast | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control

If you pay enough attention, you will notice that the same argument is used to push many political agendas (for better or worse):

- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."

- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."

- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."

- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."

All of these are half truth, and half lie. Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.

The common theme of most of the above points is that the freedom of the innocent will be reduced or their suffering increased if the change is enacted, while less innocent people can continue to ignore the rules. It's oppression of the weakest.

In general, society should be very careful with the things it bans. Prohibition is a hammer best left for extreme situational outliers, not one that should be used for each and every thing someone happens to dislike.

Unfortunately, societal amnesia means we will never learn this lesson. We will continue to ban things too much, and be too oppressive, until it becomes too overwhelming and a revolution happens. Rinse and repeat.

I'm sure all of these examples (encryption, guns, abortion, crypto currencies) are considered by some people to be that extreme situational outlier, and needs to be banned yesterday.

Mine is proof-of-waste crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, or Ethereum before the PoS merge. Too much CO2 for too little gain.

(There's also the Ponzi aspect, but I don't think we need new laws to ban Ponzi schemes: if a crypto currency turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, just sue them for making a Ponzi scheme.)

A quicker way is to note that a given policy would be difficult to effectively enforce. People like to say unenforceable, which is rarely true given enough resources. But if there are two solutions to an issue, and one isn't as easy to enforce, that is a valid point. Using gun control as an example, restricting sale of ammunition instead of firearms might be difficult to enforce, because ammunition is easier to manufacture at home. Restricting sale of marijuana isn't effective because anyone can grow it in a closet, but testing at employment centers adds a lot more friction as you say, and you don't neednto monitor people's power usage or send around sniffer trucks.

It should be noted tho that the easiness of "finding a way", and the difficulty of enforcing the law, varies widely between these.

For example - and I say this as someone pro-gun - gun control would likely be the easiest to enforce since it necessarily involves physical things, and not easily obtainable ones at that, at least if you want efficient guns. E.g. black powder is not hard to make, but good luck trying to make it work in anything semi-auto without constant jamming. Sure, there's an active "gun hacker" scene where people come up with designs that can be made at home with readily available tools etc, and it's great as a counterbalance to heavy-handed attempts to regulate... but there are no from-scratch designs that are even close to just about any semi-auto rifle on the market in terms of firepower or reliability (the non-from-scratch designs involve making the regulated parts of the firearm at home, and buying everything that can go over the counter; in US, the latter is everything except for one part).

OTOH if you ban encrypted messaging, how would you enforce that? It's hard to detect on the wire if the protocol is specifically designed to withstand such scrutiny, so you'd have to go after distribution of software. You could force Apple and Google to scrub their app stores, but then people can still install directly on everything other than iOS, and they'd just download it from foreign websites. So now you need some kind of a national firewall to detect and block that etc. It's not that any of that is impossible, but it's certainly much harder, and it would affect a lot more people overall, resulting in more pushback.

For years the US government has attempted to limit the use (and 'export') of strong encryption protocols like PGP using the argument that they should be treated as munitions. The case against Zimmermann in the early 1990s regarding his posting of PGP to a Usenet site, and the eventual decision by the US government not to proceed with the case, is illustrative. Here's an excerpt from the statement by lawyer on the case. It's from over two decades ago, but still worth reading (the laws have been relaxed somewhat since then, but it's not really clear how far):

http://dubois.com/No-prosecute-announcement.txt

> "Now, some words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It isn't. The law may change, but for now, you'll probably be prosecuted if you break it. People wonder why the government declined prosecution, especially since the government isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be that Mr. Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't sure whether someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that person to find out.) Another might be that the government did not want to risk a judicial finding that posting cryptographic software on a site in the U.S., even if it's an Internet site, is not an "export". There was also the risk that the export-control law would be declared unconstitutional. Perhaps the government did not want to get into a public argument about some important policy issues: should it be illegal to export cryptographic software? Should U.S. citizens have access to technology that permits private communication? And ultimately, do U.S. citizens have the right to communicate in absolute privacy?"

> "There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation. Those folks I mention in this message have participated and no doubt will continue. My thanks, and the thanks of Philip Zimmermann, to each of you."

One obvious concern about this move in the EU is that they'll try to criminalize the use of cryptography again.

Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.

Don't call encryption illegal. That's letting them shape the narrative.

Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal.

To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.

My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft

We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

You should look into the so called ghost guns that show up. It hasn't been easier to get one, whether from assembling a kit to 3d printing to finding plans to build one from scrap.

It's still hard. I couldn't go out and make a gun right now. Meanwhile, many children have invented their own codes and ciphers by age 10, armed only with paper and pencil and the desire to keep a secret. A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that "hey, maybe asymmetric encryption is possible" and the knowledge that (F_p \ {0}, ×) is a group.

> A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that

And I bet the NSA would break your homegrown RSA built with your basic understanding of group theory in a few minutes. RSA is extremely subtle to implement correctly and if you get it wrong you can easily leak everything.

Unlikely. The hard part of implementing RSA is making it secure against timing attacks, but I doubt my desk calculator and I will be particularly vulnerable to that. It's not like I'm going to suffer from the ECB penguin issue: MY MSGZ R SMOL and my key size is large enough to avoid that.

RSA really is very simple group theory. It was independently invented at least three times, as I recall.

Outside of the USA you can't simply order gun parts or ammunition without a licence. You'd have to manufacture everything yourself. That's a lot harder than simply 3D printing a lower receiver.

Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose. You'd be prosecuted even if you used it to defend yourself.

While true, the post I was responding to claimed you needed to be a gunsmith. That simply isn't true anymore.

> Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose

Also irrelevant, given that the topic is illegal firearms.

You pretty much need to be a gunsmith to create a reliable weapon that won't jam and won't explode in your face. In most countries you can't order weapon parts online - all load-bearing parts are regulated. You can't manufacture those without gunsmithing skills and equipment.

This is why criminals prefer to smuggle industrially manufactured illegal guns from somewhere else instead of making them at home.

Gun laws don't prevent someone from making shitty homemade guns. They prevent them from getting properly made ones. Accessing gun smuggling networks isn't that easy without connections to the criminal underworld.

I looked up Luty's homemade firearms. He claimed that they can be manufactured by anyone. But that's obviously not true. He definitely had good metalworking skills. I certainly would not be able to manufacture anything like that at home.

So?

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