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Comment by kriops | Hacker News Reader

What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?

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I suggest you look into how much of chemistry, physics and biology has already been "outlawed", and how the legislatures went about it ?

If I possess, e.g., a certain quantity of U235, the government can act on the material, e.g., confiscate it because it is a physical entity. Meanwhile, I can arrive at the knowledge required for encryption, and even an encrypted message, a priori.

In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.

That knowledge is not illegal, nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

> nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

Just don’t write it down encrypted.

> That knowledge is not illegal, nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.

In Germany, it is often illegal to disseminate such material (e.g. for building bombs) by § 130a StGB:

> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130a.html

DeepL translation:

"§ 130a Instructions for criminal offenses

(1) Anyone who disseminates or makes publicly available content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instruction for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1) and is intended to promote or arouse the willingness of others to commit such an act shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.

(2) The same penalty shall apply to anyone who

1. disseminates or makes available to the public content (§ 11 (3)) that is suitable for serving as instructions for an unlawful act referred to in § 126 (1), or

2. gives instructions in public or at a meeting for an unlawful act referred to in Section 126 (1)

in order to encourage or incite others to commit such an act.

(3) § 86 (4) shall apply mutatis mutandis."

---

For reference: § 126 StGB is:

> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__126.html

DeepL translation:

"§ 126 Disturbance of public order by threatening to commit criminal offenses

(1) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace,

1. commits one of the cases of breach of the peace specified in § 125a sentence 2 nos. 1 to 4,

2. commits a criminal offense against sexual self-determination in the cases specified in § 177 paragraphs 4 to 8 or § 178,

3. murder (§ 211), manslaughter (§ 212) or genocide (§ 6 of the International Criminal Code) or a crime against humanity (§ 7 of the International Criminal Code) or a war crime (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 of the International Criminal Code),

4. grievous bodily harm (§ 224) or serious bodily harm (§ 226),

5. a criminal offense against personal freedom in the cases of Section 232 (3) sentence 2, Section 232a (3), (4) or (5), Section 232b (3) or (4), Section 233a (3) or (4), in each case insofar as these are crimes, Sections 234 to 234b, § 239a or § 239b,

6. robbery or extortion (§§ 249 to 251 or § 255),

7. a crime dangerous to the public in the cases of Sections 306 to 306c or 307 (1) to (3), Section 308 (1) to (3), Section 309 (1) to (4), Sections 313, 314 or 315 (3), § 315b (3), § 316a (1) or (3), § 316c (1) or (3) or § 318 (3) or (4), or

8. a dangerous offense in the cases of § 309 (6), § 311 (1), § 316b (1), § 317 (1) or § 318 (1)

shall be punished with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine.

(2) Anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb public peace, knowingly falsely claims that one of the unlawful acts referred to in paragraph 1 is about to be committed shall also be punished.

You are familiar with “intent” right? It’s not right, that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.

Tell that to Chinese trying to get through the Great Firewall.

Better yet, tell that to the Chinese who can't be bothered to try to get through the Great Firewall.

Yeah, nitrogen chemistry, high-concentration hydrogen peroxyde is already fairly restricted, as well as poisons.

Including in the US. The "right to bear arms" doens't cover high-energy explosives.

High explosives are even less regulated than firearms in the US. You can buy them by the ton and explosives are very inexpensive. This does not circumvent compliance with regulations for safe transport and storage, which is the practical limitation.

>the practical limitation

That... Wouldn't be tolerated if this was a 2nd amendment right. Imagine the same limitations applied to firearms.

I can store a ton of firearms in my garage but they can’t destroy the neighborhood by accident. High-explosives can.

People that buy high-explosives at scale just have some land outside of town where they can store them en masse. Problem solved. There are huge magazines of high-explosive just outside many major cities all over the US. Very infrequently, one of them goes “boom”, which kind of justifies forcing them to be on the outskirts.

You can own it, you just have to store it where it won’t wreck your neighbors if you are an idiot. Rural land is cheap.

Black powder, which is used (and at the time necessary) in the kind of firearms used when the 2A was conceived, has such limitations in any non-trivial (more than personal use) quantity.

Interestingly, the laws around high explosives in the US aren’t as restricted as you think.

You can make lots of things legally. The laws are around storage and transport. Where the short version is you 24hours and you mostly can’t transport.

Ackshually, when the NFA was passed to 'tax' explosives ('destructive devices'), it was considered unconstitutional infringement on the right to keep/bear arms to ban explosives, machine guns, etc so they 'taxed' them instead. You can still buy/manufacture them with a tax stamp.

Also when congress de-funded (outlawed) the process for felons to restore their firearm rights, they forgot to do it with explosives. So even a felon can have high-energy explosives legally.

“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

All Australians now live with the Assistance and Access Act 2018, where yes in fact if you use the illegal math, receive a TCN and do not comply… straight to jail.

Australia is dystopic in more ways than one[1], so this unfortunately does not surprise me.

I probably do not have to point out the issue with the soundbite, but I am doing it anyway: The “laws” of mathematics are valid across all of existence. Last time I checked, that includes Australia. As a matter of fact, I have personally stored encrypted communications with an Australian vendor after the law went into effect (not that I knew about that law in particular). And I can confirm that the communications were indeed still encrypted.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w (Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election?)

This doesn't seem hard to do. Messaging apps exist in app stores, transmit data through one of a few ISPs often past national boundaries to a couple of data centers. It's not hard for a national government to see the communication and stop it or punish those attempting it. It could be done by technical means, putting pressure of the stores, or anywhere along the chain. Countries block all social media by fiat. It seems easy enough.

It is easy to ban what are currently the most popular apps for encrypted messaging. But the math is more or less trivial, to the point that this will simply kick off a cat-and-mouse game the government cannot win. And that is before steganography comes into play.

At the absolute worst, OTPs are trivially uncrackable and relatively foolproof, assuming you can exchange keys out of band. Furthermore, it is trivial to generate keys that decode captured ciphertext into decoy cleartext, should the government try to coerce the keys from you.

I'm not saying OTP is practical for regular people in everyday chats (though it certainly can be for text, in my opinion). However, it is apparent to me that if RSA+AES becomes unviable, for example, then it will have nearly no impact on any criminal operation that cares about security.

I agree with you in substance. But do these cute little word games—where we redefine commonly understood strings of words with idiosyncratic meanings to obscure what’s actually being disputed—work on anyone? It’s like saying that gun control is “literally trying to outlaw chemical reactions and kinetic energy.” Why not just clearly articulate what right you think society should protect?

Define encryption.

To help you along, you basically have two alternatives:

1. Be intentionally vague, so the definition encapsulates just about anything and can then be applied and enforced at will. This is obviously what they are going for, by the way, and *that* is the word game being played here.

2. Some set of sets of mathematical functions, contingent on some properties pertaining to computational complexity. This is what cryptography is and, as such, is the correct way to go about it. Non-exhaustively, one property we are looking for is that some data can only be considered 'encrypted' if the computational complexity of decoding it without a secret/key is strictly higher than with said secret/key.

As I also said in another comment, I can derive an encrypted message a priori. That makes it fundamentally different from any analogies tied to physics or chemistry.

You mean like '1st amendment' and 'freedom of speech'?

This is Denmark?

Denmark's constitution recognizes the right to freedom of speech. Moreover, the right to freedom of speech is a fundamental right that exists regardless of your government's ability to recognize it.

Thus, 'freedom of speech' is a perfectly legitimate and reasonable answer to 'what right you think society should protect', regardless of what country we are speaking about.

They'll just ban encrypted apps?

Define 'encrypted app' in a way that is not just completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent.

It's almost as if being able to ban things in a completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent way was exactly the point...

They'll just ban apps like Signal.

Which is comical because the Swedish military has standardized signal for all non-classified communication.

uh oh

As far as definitions go, that's circular.

And if they do that, do you think it will affect what criminals do?

Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.

It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."

How do you filter encrypted channels from the noise? For example, say the criminals now communicate by having a browser extension write e2ee encrypted todo items on a shared todo list app.

And then they will just post SPAM messages at a defunct Usenet group as a some of internal code to share illegal stuff as nothing.

I don't have enough context, why are they trying to ban encryption in the first place?

Now that you see how the government lies in the area you actually understand, try to extrapolate a little and think about what else the government might be lying about ;)

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