Hacker News Reader

You clearly haven't felt a 5$ wrench on your body. Giving up your secrets under torture isn't a character flaw, it's what will happen to 99.99% of people under torture. I can't help you if you don't believe that this is true.

And I hope you understand that 5$ wrench is a euphemism for what would 'really' happen.

All this to say that no, technology does not triumph over politics and policy.

View on HN

Technology very much does. It's the flesh that has a hard time triumphing over force. To counteract this, you can also engineer a system that can resist it through e.g. split secrets on multiple people located in different jurisdictions.

If you split a secret over two people, first, we use the 5$ wrench on one of you to identify the other and the rest is easy.

If the second person is somewhere else in a different jurisdiction, how are you going to communicate with each other to get the two halves of the secret together to encrypt/decrypt messages? It's an unworkable situation.

As I see it, you create a fantasy situation that would not work if you just want to communicate with people in a secure way. No amount of technology or encryption is going to work, especially in the real practical world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com