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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

The Powers that Be are conducting a coordinated disinformation campaign to keep and expand their backdoor access by scaring the bejesus out of the public.

Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile.

What happens when they blame strong cryptography for the next gut-wrenching tragedy involving innocent kids and a bombing / school shooting / kidnapping / pedophile?

Your arguments will be swept away by a tsunami of grief, hatred and blind patriotism. Is it possible to make an equally emotional argument in favor of the freedom to be secure?

Secure information deserves the same prestige and protection as the Four Freedoms.

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

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I hate to make this kind of argument but it isn't hard:

If a hacker gets access to this golden key, they can use data gleaned from your child's phone to stalk or hurt them.

The problem is that the general public is going to take "unbreakable encryption" at face value. So don't worry, unbreakable encryption prevents the hacker from getting access to the golden key, because without the golden key even the government can't break into things. The whole thing feeds on itself.

So here's what we do guys: put the golden key in the black box!

I was about to say almost exactly this. A country in which encryption requires a golden key is the country all pedophiles will want to move to.

Also, I agree that it's shitty, but sometimes you can only fight fear tactics with scarier fear tactics.

Aren't there already documented cases of domestic abuse enabled by Find My iPhone? How much would you bet that whoever knew about and exploited the bug that leaked all those private celeb pictures didn't also have access to all the power of Find My iPhone as well?

Yes - either that, or naked photos of you on the internet. Imagine hackers taking every picture in your camera roll and posting it to the internet.

That is likely the tragedy of freedom: There are no emotional arguments for it.

It seems to me, politicians and other people have long sought for the most emotional arguments to wipe away the wings of freedom -- and thus making the victims of pedophiles, bombing and kidnapping victims again!

(BTW: In Germany, pedophiles where also used as argument for internet censorship. Organisations of those victims protested against these attempts, because they clearly saw, that this legislation did not help (and where never intended to) those victims or help to prevent anything.)

"What happens when they blame strong cryptography for the next gut-wrenching tragedy"

The topic changes but the story never does. We still have rock music, teenagers, acid, dungeons and dragons, hippies, video games, atheism, firearms, meth, Islam, gays, texting while driving, basically all the good things in life, and we'll always have thousands of things in the future that are not cool with the conformist old people and will be blamed for everything bad whenever possible, and aside from a lot of journalist click bait nobody will really care.

Also worth noting that in the case of cryptography, virtually no one "blaming strong cryptography" for anything actually understands much about complex cryptographic protocols aside from what they know from watching television.

It's even more of a whitewashed canard than those other things you listed.

Uh, is it just me, or does "texting while driving" not belong in that list? Do you really think people care about it because they're "conformist old people"?

Man that brings back fond memories of being a teenager driving down the highway blasted on meth. Thankfully texting hadn't been invented yet.

...the next gut-wrenching tragedy involving innocent kids and a bombing / school shooting / kidnapping / pedophile?

It's frustrating that TPTB don't actually care about these cases at all, apart from their political potential. Amber alerts are usually issued in response to non-custodial parent custody disagreements, which phenomenon is 95% driven by divorce lawyers, and involves very little risk that isn't created by the police themselves. In the rare actual stranger-danger case, "authorities" routinely allow multiple hours to pass between the kidnapping and issuing the alert. Of course by that time the child is beyond help.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article34...

Complete nonsense - you're equating imperfections that result in failure of a system with complete disinterest. For each anecdotal example of failure, as you cite here, it is equally easy to find anecdotal examples of success, eg: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/13/justice/amber-alert-hannah... I don't see any evidence here for your contention about the proportion of alerts issued in divorce proceedings, or a systemic pattern of indifference on the part of law enforcement.

Also, the government spends quite a lot of effort on the investigation and prosecution of child pornography, as documented here, for example: http://www.justice.gov/usao/waw/press/categories/childporn.h... To what degree this should be a factor in encryption policy is open to debate, but your charge that 'TPTB don't actually care about these cases at all' is baseless and does a disservice to the people who investigate such crimes.

What happens when they blame strong cryptography for the next gut-wrenching tragedy involving innocent kids and a bombing / school shooting / kidnapping / pedophile?

Pedophiles (or more specifically: child pornographers) routinely use strong cryptography and effectively nobody cares.

The point the OP is making is that nobody cares because nobody has been told to care. All it takes is a well-timed news article on how some Bad Guy used Irresponsible Unbreakable Crypto to change that.

Do you believe that your beliefs are dictated by single "well-timed news articles" directed by "the powers that be"?

They can be, thats what the whole concept of memes is all about. It happens.

Dictated? No. Profoundly influenced? Yes, yes I do.

I think that I'm more than capable of detecting most forms of propaganda, but I hold no illusions as to my ability to judge _everything_ that comes my way in a fully informed manner.

I can look back and see cases where too little information, bad information, or even just a misunderstanding lead me to believe in things that just weren't true. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

It's not about the technically educated minority (though even they are vulnerable to falsehoods perpetrated via propaganda), but the vast majority of people who aren't aware of how computer security works and believe that the government is always working only in their interests.

Encryption doesn't kill people, people kill people.

99% of all terrorists and rapists use shoes.

Do the math. Shoes = Evil.

Don't be alarmed, we have an entire agency devoted to that now.

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