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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. Anything involving secret backdoors, intentionally compromised crypto, not so secret master keys, etc. is doomed to leak to a hostile entities abusing this. The weakest part of the system becomes secret weaknesses staying secret.

Intentionally compromised encryption is going to be enormously appreciated by North Korea, Iran, China, and all the others one would normally want to keep from looking at secret data related to finances, personal communication, military secrets, industrial R&D, etc.

Countries need to get their priorities straight on national security. The enemy is outside of their country, not inside. And they don't play by the rules, generally.

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It seems to me that you may be making a mistake in assuming these counties do no in fact have their priorities straight, only that those priorities do not align with most people's interests.

The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it consistently and persistently fails to do.

Far too long and far too much, people have assumed a good will of our governments because we have intenionlaly been conditioned to accept with blind faith that "democracy" is a universal "good", never asking oneself why the tiny psychopathic ruling class would be such vehement proponents and rabid advocates of "Our Democracy"™, a supposed rule by majority. It appears that not everyone gets as suspicious of things that contain inherent fundamental contradictions.

I'm not sure what you are on about. Plain and simple, countries like Australia are throwing away the baby with the bathwater by basically giving up on decent crypto. They are making it easier for the likes of China to spy on them who can and will abuse any informational advantage they can get. This long term puts them at a disadvantage internationally. I doubt this is in any way intentional. That would be stupid.

The type of politics that drives this is older, technically challenged politicians (aka. idiots) responding to pressure from minority groups whining about pornography and other things they don't like. The priorities seem to be appeasing groups like that in order to secure the next election cycle. By essentially sacrificing security, which they clearly have a limited understanding off.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Some countries don't get their priorities straight because they are being led by idiots. It's indeed a system failure. The solution is wielding a giant clue bat and causing relevant stakeholders (military, financial sector, etc.) to wake up and push back and doing something about it.

The reason cryptography is still legal in most civilized places is that we've had a few rounds of that over the past decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

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