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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

>...it is impossible to create a back door into an operating system that eliminates the possibility that other unauthorized access will occur...

This idea of back doors being opened up to black-hat hackers seems to be the crux of the current leading argument against key escrow. Even the EFF is beating this drum.

Bear with me, I'm not disagreeing with that argument, but isn't there another point to be made here? And that is:

Key escrow systems ask us to assume that the current "good" guys in positions of authority will always remain good. Isn't that a bit too much of an assumption?

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they are always the 'good guys' until they are coming after you. I can imagine, a time when government would have requested comms from the Occupation movement. The problem is that they get to determine who the current enemy is. We all agree that the extremes are negative (i.e. ISIS, Narc Terr etc.) but what if a government is elected that decides that reproductive rights, equal pay, race equality, pot legalization etc. are an issue...Are you still ok with back doors? There would have been a time in the very near past that these things would have been a very powerful weapon in the authority's arsenal that would have stifled our culture's advancement (imho).

>but what if a government is elected that decides that reproductive rights, equal pay, race equality, pot legalization etc. are an issue...Are you still ok with back doors?

To statists, the state is infallible. If race inequality is the standard codified by law, then race inequality is good, because the government has declared it so. So many people operate under these assumptions, giving exception only to a few partisan issues which they've never even thought critically about.

I agree with you, but this argument seems to succeed with people of certain political orientations more than with others. Your argument requires a skeptical (or cynical) view of the (bureaucratic and political branches of) government, and possibly the voters; almost all libertarians would agree, while conservatives and neoliberals often do not (, they believe the government is capable of executing their vision of 'what should be').

To me, the biggest argument is that they lost this fight with PGP almost two decades ago when it was determined that they could not constitutionally suppress its export.

There were a lot of questions in that talk along the lines of "How is this going to work?" which Comey admitted he had no good answers to.

There is always a chance that the key will somehow get into the wrong hands, regardless of how "good" the organization that controls the keys is.

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