Hacker News Reader

Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

We're looking for the "Goldilocks Zone" of privacy. We want:

* Enough privacy that activists don't wind up facing death squads * Not so much privacy that drug cartels wind up running the country.

The problem is that cryptography is all or nothing: for a given observer, the transaction is either private or it isn't.

I'm fascinated by models like differential privacy. Maybe there are ways of making systems which snare large scale abuses but provably leave the minnows free.

View on HN

There is nothing about the nature of privacy itself that leads to drug cartels running the country. There could be a world with perfect privacy and a perfect justice system where this wouldn't be a problem at all. Of course that isn't realistic, but the tendency should be to always trend towards more privacy and less corruption. Thinking that a private yet safe world isn't possible is a fallacy, because privacy itself isn't the source of these issues.

The problem is the institutions writing the laws see it as, "enough privacy to allow us to deal with the Contras, but enough surveillance to stop activists from running the country." ;)

Small nitpick: it isn’t entirely true that cryptography is “all or nothing”. With things like time lock crypto and proof of work you can effectively have a scheme where large scale snooping is impossible (would take too much compute), but any individual transaction can be decrypted with a bit of work.

Ah, I remember the times when the US only allowed to export 40-bit RSA in order to be able to do just this. As a result, non-US versions of e.g. SSL were not as secure, and quickly became laughably inadequate.

Frankly, I think that was mostly silly: you can either keep some math completely secret, or deal with the situation when the adversary knows the math a perfectly as you do, and can implement relevant computation. Unlike building actual rockets, implementing relatively simple math is not rocket science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com