Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

This article begins by giving away the moral high-ground.

"They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?"

Why on earth would you allow that a court order is legitimate? Both the tactic and the execution are of questionable legality, and critically that legality is flexible.

Remember that the clearly illegal complicit acts of telecommunication companies were made retroactively legal through a grant of immunity. The idea that you would begin your article by allowing the emperor to retain the assumption of clothes undermines the credibility of your remaining contentions. Courts having the right to demand things from citizens that they do not wish to divulge is not some force of nature, it has not always existed, does not exist in all systems, and need not exist in the way it currently does.

So cut the crap trying to justify the moral, conscientious, and brave action of a small company and force them to justify their existence.

I submit that you have rather egregiously misread TFA. The antecedent of "They" in this case is the judge and other law enforcement fans. Felten's point is not to stipulate to their mistaken assumption, but to contradict it. That is, he shows how the threat represented by the court system is indistinguishable from that of various other bad actors. He doesn't spare Lavabit from critique either, by pointing out how better systems design would have better resisted the "insider" attack carried out using the courts.

A man with a crowbar will beat you for your password even if you assure him you can't divulge it. The problem is with the man with the crowbar, not whether or not you use a secure system.

A man with a crowbar won't continue to beat you for your password if you can prove that you can't divulge it, unless he is beyond the reach of logic. At that point he might as well be beating you because he doesn't like the color of the moon, and you would best get together with some of your friends and divest the lunatic of his crowbar.

> and you would best get together with some of your friends and divest the lunatic of his crowbar.

And thus government was born.

> And thus government was born.

And then government becomes the lunatic with a crowbar and here we are.

Hence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes.

But there is a logical reason to beat you for the password you can't divulge, namely to serve as an example and deterrent to any future persons who might attempt to restrict access via the same mechanism.

What about deniable encryption, where you can give them a key that decrypts the ciphertext to innocuous stuff while concealing the real key that decrypts to the real plaintext? What does the crowbar do for the attacker then?

Continues beating until it decrypts into what he wants it to decrypt.

"Perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill-treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualisations obscure the purpose of torture... The aim of torture is to dehumanise the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities." -- Physicians for Human Rights

It won't convince the crowbar enthusiasts (who support every abuse of citizens by state agents), but the existence of more secure email providers will eventually lead reasonable people to question why the regulation of email provision requires so many crowbars.

> Why on earth would you allow that a court order is legitimate?

You won't get very far when arguing with judges & lawyers if you deny that, and they are a target audience.

The point that requiring law enforcement access necessarily weakens a system's security from malicious actors is an important point that our legal system needs to come to terms with, because the courts need to balance the public's legitimate need for security against the wishes of law enforcement, because the most likely alternative is for them to ignore our needs in favor of investigators' wishes.

I don't think the author gives away the moral high-ground. I think you're misinterpreting his sentence. I interpreted it as if the word "even" was at the beginning, as in:

Even if court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?

The point being, whether or not court orders are legitimate, it's perfectly reasonable to engineer systems to protect against insider attacks.

Is everything a political litmus test? This is a great article making a logical rational argument for why, even if we were to grant that a court order is legitimate, we should still build systems that make them hard to support.

This is an article about designing systems to be secure, but sadly the discussion descends into an echo chamber of "boo bad government, stop enabling them".

Just because a HN blog post complained about this supposed "echo chamber" yesterday doesn't mean we all have to stop talking about it. The role of government is a complicated, unsolved issue and it happens to be something that lot of people in this community care about. I think that's a good thing.

Exclusively addressing one point of an argument does not magically concede all other points.

did you even read the article? the whole point is that sites like lavabit should exist, and that more data security is better

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