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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

I run an ecommerce agency in the UK. We turn over several million quid, employ forty odd people, and process the better part of £1bn of ecommerce purchases in the UK.

Needless to say, if encryption is banned here, we'll either be going out of business or moving to a progressive regime - say Yemen.

The UK is the second biggest ecommerce market in the world. He kills encryption, he will sink the UK retail economy - which is rather at odds with the whole "nation of shopkeepers" bit.

Actually, if it does happen, I'll raise an army and march on Westminster. Cromwell managed.

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If they really do plan to ban encryption, the response will be much faster than retail. There is literally no way London financial business can safely exist without encryption. Investments, accounts, insurances, etc. pretty much require encryption under the current DPA and any comparable law of other countries.

The moment London banks say "we're forced to use backdoored/no encryption", any foreign business they interact with will (have to) say "LOL, bye then".

Majority of tech companies are not even comparable to that market.

Indeed.

UK finance here. Several billion goes through our platform.

We've already moved company registration offshore in case the shit goes down. We're about ready to move all our kit out of the country as well.

As for staff, we're staying put because when everything else goes down the shitter, we're going to be in the last position of power financially. House time.

Edit: Also EU safe harbour; fucking joke if there ever was one.

Your welcome to bring your business to Ireland!

We love tech and finance companies (most major international ones work here), have a sensible attitude to terrorism related issues (we have a bit of a past history), part of the Euro, long-term plans to stay in the EU, don't force backdoors or intimidation of large companies, stable politically, neutral foreign policy, easy enough to get high-skilled visas.

Great place to work, cool people, English speaking, 12.5% Corporation tax, good grants, good beer and music.

Find out more: www.idaireland.com :)

Believe me I have considered that!

Does the fibre for Ireland go through the UK?

Well, with all the previous relevations we've seen about various 3 and 4 letter agencies, we should have marched long ago.

It's possible to solve this technically ,such that the encryption will happen on government mandated servers, in a fully secure manner that doesn't hurt most businesses - and hat's probably how they'll handle that.

I'm not sure if this comment is a joke, shill or some serious fucking crack smoking.

The chain of trust is broken. It doesn't matter where or who does it.

It's a serious comment. Sure doing it this way would give the government access to all your knowledge(not really a new state of things). But that won't stop commerce - as long as security from theft is guaranteed, which i think can be assumed under government control.

You are completely misguided then:

1. You consider the government as a singular entity. It's a group of people. In that circumstance, it's as secure as the lowest denominator of person, which in a government is low.

2. You're find for them retaining your data, then implementing a law, then using it against you?

3. There are plenty of cases where the government have abused data that has been entrusted to them. There is no commercial motivation via competition for them to do a good job. You are effectively contracting out to a monopoly.

4. There is no absolute security either and it should be in your own hands. The moment you contract it out, you're morally responsible for the competence of who you contracted it out to, yet the government isn't an entity you can easily take to court nor seek compensation from.

5. Keys are complicated to distribute. Do you expect this to be 100% effective?

Consider these a little further then check your opinion against the facts on the table.

With regards to secure technology ,governments, or at least armies and intelligence agencies are most likely leading the race.

With regards embezzeling government money in such system: i believe(and could be wrong), that generally, this isn't a worse problem than the private system. And again, this a problem armies/intel agencies have been dealing it over a long time ,with far higher risks. And of course there's always options of secure auditing(maybe like bitcoin) , further reducing the risk.

With regards to key distribution - if we look at the awful security afforded by credit cards, even though we know how to solve this(chip and pin, for ex.) i'm not sure the government is worse.

As for the issues of power of government and potential for abuse of that power - sure i definitely agree with you(it's a huge problem even today). But again, my comment was about that it's possible to do so in a way that would be compatible with online commerce.

I worked in the defense sector in that particular area. They're really not very advanced. Academia is way ahead of them.

It's all about the rubber hose, key escrow arrangements and politics.

But academia is also way ahead of commercial products. Do you really think that the defense industry is work than the commercial sector ?

"Nothing the government can't read" doesn't mean no encryption. It means that there has to be a stored version of the message and the encryption key is handed over if asked, otherwise you go to prison. It'll be no different to what we have now (it's already illegal to withhold an encryption key) but with mandated storage.

So they can factor your keys at their leisure?

No chance.

You mean it won't hurt most businesses because it will hurt all of them?

Here is how the US gov't secures sensitive information: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/0...

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