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The mere fact that the encryption ban is being discussed and bringing it up doesn't instantly end one's political career is frightening. Access to all individua

The mere fact that the encryption ban is being discussed and bringing it up doesn't instantly end one's political career is frightening. Access to all individual's communications is a level of trust reserved for closest family members if that. And here government nonchalantly goes on to assume this level of trust from every citizen. Yet everyone except a handful of techies is completely oblivious to how monstrously perverted that is. The future looks really dark right now.

cooper12 11y ago
It's because everyone can understand someone listening in to their phone calls, but computers are magic. What we need is computer literacy and for people to be educated of their rights as users of the world wide web.
- 2close4comfort 11y ago
  This is brought to you by an intelligence community that thinks that using your AOL email address is good enough for classified information.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    To be fair, the intelligence community is outraged. It's their bosses that are downplaying the issue.
- hodwik 11y ago
  The government can tap pretty much any call, and has been collecting meta-data on all calls, and the public does not seem to mind. I think you're overestimating how much the public's indifference has to do with computer illiteracy. That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument. It's a completely valid argument in both cases. Banning only the scary-looking guns has no productive effect. And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no. Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you. If you ask whether large numbers of government employees and contractors should be able to know everything about your business and sex life if it would have the same effectiveness in catching terrorists as a variety of alternative methods that would shovel fewer tax dollars into the pockets of large government contractors, you get a different answer.
    - mindslight 11y ago
      > And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no. Disagree. The person imagines a constrained government, which would only be reading private messages when there is reason for suspicion. The only time another human would be invading their privacy is in an exceptional situation that happens to others (since they themselves are good), which can be just-worlded to the required degree. And of course mass media distorts their priors to think that suspicion strongly implies guilt - a TV show would be quite boring if there were no wrongdoing. I suspect tech is so (relatively) resistant to mass surveillance because we've perceived how horribly wrong group dynamics go and, rather than accepting being compliant herd followers, found our own outlets and created our own kingdoms. We are the outliers - we will never have the majority on our side.
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        > The person imagines a constrained government, which would only read private messages when there is reason for suspicion. That's the point. People who support mass surveillance or encryption bans only do so because they're uninformed (or have been purposely misinformed by others). You teach regular people how it actually works and they change their tune.
- cm2187 11y ago
  I think it's more generally "what you can't see doesn't exist". If there is a dodgy-looking guy staring at you when you go home, you get frightened. If he watching you through the CCTV then it's all fine. A bit like if you have a video of a guy getting killed on youtube it's horrible, but if it's a one liner in a newspaper about a drone bombing a house then it's ok. If there is a video of a guy killing someone with a knife in the street of London, it will be remembered for years as a horrendous terrorist attack. But if the police publishes statistics about knife attacks in your neighborhood then it's just a bunch of boring numbers.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    When I discuss the issue of mass surveillance with older people, it's in the context of phone conversations. A lot of times they bring up the idea of a "click" on the line. If only.
x5n1 11y ago
We should equate encryption banning with antisemitism. That should help end politicians careers for attacking encryption as it does if they come out as big antisemitic. I am only half kidding.
imglorp 11y ago
There's a number of forces aligned here against ubiquitous encryption. Private comms are just the subset, but they have to be considered together. - content holders want to make sure you're paying for every byte you consume [1] - marketing intel and ad networks always need more about you by any means [2] - contractors want to sell their data vacuums [3] - law enforcement wants a precrime db even if it's illegal [stingray] - government control of populace, yadda yadda [4] - because encryption kills children [5], I'm not making this up - congress critters need to appear to be doing _something_ about $threat even if they know it will be shot down later in judicial challenge And arrayed against all that is one little tattered document from a bunch of idealists that only the People seem to read. 1. http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-vpn-access-lock-down-overseas-users-geoblock/# http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-vpn-access-lock-down-overse...! 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085650 3. http://maplight.org/content/73373 http://maplight.org/content/73373 4. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/the-military-industrial-complex-is-real-and-it-s-bigger-than-ever.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/the-militar... 5. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/encryption-kill-children https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/encryption-kill-children
- csydas 11y ago
  I'd like to echo this and add additional comments. The original post states that it should be career ending, but the truth is that while many government officials and Tech companies say they are interested in privacy, the ideas being presented about backdoors are basically incredibly desirable to the majority of government agencies and major tech businesses. Even your average citizen understands encryption on the basic level and what the backdoor means. No, they don't understand the technical underpinnings of how it works, but they know it means privacy that cannot be bypassed, and many are willing to give up that privacy if it means getting what they want elsewhere. You can lob the scares of "are you sure you have nothing to hide?" to any proponent of encryption as much as you like, but in all honesty they've made the assessment already and have decided that it's worth the gamble. Proponents of encryption aren't the victims of some massive disinformation campaign, they're just making a really bad decision despite the available evidence, and it's turning out to be an overwhelmingly popular decision.
mtgx 11y ago
There's a more fundamental problem at stake. Law enforcement has gotten used to requesting our data from third-party providers instead of us directly. So now they act as if that's normal. But it completely bypasses the 4th amendment either directly or in spirit. In most cases they don't even need to serve a warrant to the companies, and even if they do, I think that warrant should always be served to the individual. It shouldn't be served to companies just because "it's easier" and because it happens that in the 21st century the data about our lives is stored on a third-party company's servers. If we just wanted to make things as easy as possible for law enforcement we'd have to do away with many more of our rights.
tptacek 11y ago
I hope it's obvious that I don't support crypto bans of any sort†. But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand. The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence". Access to all an individual's communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn't carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule. The norm for centuries has been that if you're being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn't even the law of this country that the government couldn't intercept and monitor your communications by fiat, without a warrant. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn't choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them. When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they're generally not talking about the status quo. What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen. † (http://cryptopals.com http://cryptopals.com, &c)
- simplemath 11y ago
  >where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen. Good.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I think it's a good thing too, but if you think that technology is going to overturn a foundational principle of our judicial system, you're going to be disappointed. Public policy is going to account for this change, and we may not love the way they solve it.
    - 11y ago
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
It's not frightening at all. This is the standard nation-state insouciance. To see how out of touch governments can be, I think there are two stories, both unfortunately of a military nature. One is Eisenhower's trek across the US in the interwar period, the thing ( along with the Autobahn ) that inspired the Interstate, and the story of the squad-level light machine gun in WWI, especially related to the Lewis gun. Machine guns were not embraced until the Germans showed how effective they were in WWI. This really happened. Commanders were optimizing for damage per bullet long after they should not have been. Be wary, but don't be frightened. I at least find it relatively easy to conduct my affairs such that I don't have to live in fear. So it can be done. At least consider the possibility that the Snowden and Manning stories are stories about people who really didn't think it all the way through, if they didn't want to be hunted. There's an element of martyrdom and hubris to those stories. In a way, much of the Nixon cases were about interpretations of telephone technology and wiretapping roughly 100 years after the advent of those technologies. The timescales here are glacial.
krapp 11y ago
I don't want to live in a world where encryption is banned. I also don't want to live in a world where one's political career is instantly ended by bringing it up. Those are just two different flavors of fascism.
wfo 11y ago
Actually, with a warrant the police should be able to get through your encryption. The debate is not about whether or not the state can look at your communication, the debate is how. When the state wants to look at your communications and has a warrant to do so, do they: Demand your keys and lock you in jail indefinitely until you provide them? Or retain permanent access to every communication and promise to never use it unless they have a warrant.
- csandreasen 11y ago
  Demanding keys would conflict with the 5th Amendment; in the few cases that I'm aware of[1][2] where a defendant was successfully compelled to decrypt their files, the suspect had either already demonstrated that the evidence was in their possession and thus given up their right to self- incriminate or been granted immunity. Also, with end-to-end encryption law enforcement won't be able to decrypt regardless of whether or not they have a warrant, and they need a warrant to initiate a wiretap to begin with. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663447 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663378

cooper12 11y ago

It's because everyone can understand someone listening in to their phone calls, but computers are magic. What we need is computer literacy and for people to be educated of their rights as users of the world wide web.

2close4comfort 11y ago
This is brought to you by an intelligence community that thinks that using your AOL email address is good enough for classified information.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  To be fair, the intelligence community is outraged. It's their bosses that are downplaying the issue.
hodwik 11y ago
The government can tap pretty much any call, and has been collecting meta-data on all calls, and the public does not seem to mind. I think you're overestimating how much the public's indifference has to do with computer illiteracy. That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument.
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > That's like saying gun control advocates only argue as they do because they don't understand guns. It's a really silly argument. It's a completely valid argument in both cases. Banning only the scary-looking guns has no productive effect. And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no. Also keep in mind that push polling is a thing. Every time you hear a statistic like "only 27% of Americans oppose mass surveillance," expect that the question was whether the government should be able to tap your phone if it was the only possible way to prevent a terrorist attack that would kill you. If you ask whether large numbers of government employees and contractors should be able to know everything about your business and sex life if it would have the same effectiveness in catching terrorists as a variety of alternative methods that would shovel fewer tax dollars into the pockets of large government contractors, you get a different answer.
  - mindslight 11y ago
    > And if you ask normal people whether they think government employees should be able to read steamy messages between husband and wife, the answer is going to be no. Disagree. The person imagines a constrained government, which would only be reading private messages when there is reason for suspicion. The only time another human would be invading their privacy is in an exceptional situation that happens to others (since they themselves are good), which can be just-worlded to the required degree. And of course mass media distorts their priors to think that suspicion strongly implies guilt - a TV show would be quite boring if there were no wrongdoing. I suspect tech is so (relatively) resistant to mass surveillance because we've perceived how horribly wrong group dynamics go and, rather than accepting being compliant herd followers, found our own outlets and created our own kingdoms. We are the outliers - we will never have the majority on our side.
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      > The person imagines a constrained government, which would only read private messages when there is reason for suspicion. That's the point. People who support mass surveillance or encryption bans only do so because they're uninformed (or have been purposely misinformed by others). You teach regular people how it actually works and they change their tune.
cm2187 11y ago
I think it's more generally "what you can't see doesn't exist". If there is a dodgy-looking guy staring at you when you go home, you get frightened. If he watching you through the CCTV then it's all fine. A bit like if you have a video of a guy getting killed on youtube it's horrible, but if it's a one liner in a newspaper about a drone bombing a house then it's ok. If there is a video of a guy killing someone with a knife in the street of London, it will be remembered for years as a horrendous terrorist attack. But if the police publishes statistics about knife attacks in your neighborhood then it's just a bunch of boring numbers.
- mindslight 11y ago
  When I discuss the issue of mass surveillance with older people, it's in the context of phone conversations. A lot of times they bring up the idea of a "click" on the line. If only.

x5n1 11y ago

We should equate encryption banning with antisemitism. That should help end politicians careers for attacking encryption as it does if they come out as big antisemitic. I am only half kidding.

imglorp 11y ago

There's a number of forces aligned here against ubiquitous encryption. Private comms are just the subset, but they have to be considered together. - content holders want to make sure you're paying for every byte you consume [1] - marketing intel and ad networks always need more about you by any means [2] - contractors want to sell their data vacuums [3] - law enforcement wants a precrime db even if it's illegal [stingray] - government control of populace, yadda yadda [4] - because encryption kills children [5], I'm not making this up - congress critters need to appear to be doing _something_ about $threat even if they know it will be shot down later in judicial challenge And arrayed against all that is one little tattered document from a bunch of idealists that only the People seem to read. 1. http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-vpn-access-lock-down-overseas-users-geoblock/# http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-vpn-access-lock-down-overse...! 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11085650 3. http://maplight.org/content/73373 http://maplight.org/content/73373 4. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/the-military-industrial-complex-is-real-and-it-s-bigger-than-ever.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/12/the-militar... 5. https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/encryption-kill-children https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/encryption-kill-children

csydas 11y ago
I'd like to echo this and add additional comments. The original post states that it should be career ending, but the truth is that while many government officials and Tech companies say they are interested in privacy, the ideas being presented about backdoors are basically incredibly desirable to the majority of government agencies and major tech businesses. Even your average citizen understands encryption on the basic level and what the backdoor means. No, they don't understand the technical underpinnings of how it works, but they know it means privacy that cannot be bypassed, and many are willing to give up that privacy if it means getting what they want elsewhere. You can lob the scares of "are you sure you have nothing to hide?" to any proponent of encryption as much as you like, but in all honesty they've made the assessment already and have decided that it's worth the gamble. Proponents of encryption aren't the victims of some massive disinformation campaign, they're just making a really bad decision despite the available evidence, and it's turning out to be an overwhelmingly popular decision.

mtgx 11y ago

There's a more fundamental problem at stake. Law enforcement has gotten used to requesting our data from third-party providers instead of us directly. So now they act as if that's normal. But it completely bypasses the 4th amendment either directly or in spirit. In most cases they don't even need to serve a warrant to the companies, and even if they do, I think that warrant should always be served to the individual. It shouldn't be served to companies just because "it's easier" and because it happens that in the 21st century the data about our lives is stored on a third-party company's servers. If we just wanted to make things as easy as possible for law enforcement we'd have to do away with many more of our rights.

tptacek 11y ago

I hope it's obvious that I don't support crypto bans of any sort†. But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand. The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as "the public is entitled to every man's evidence". Access to all an individual's communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn't carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule. The norm for centuries has been that if you're being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn't even the law of this country that the government couldn't intercept and monitor your communications by fiat, without a warrant. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn't choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them. When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they're generally not talking about the status quo. What they're worried about is 15 years from now, where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen. † (http://cryptopals.com http://cryptopals.com, &c)

simplemath 11y ago
>where all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That's not a crazy worry: it's what's inevitably going to happen. Good.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I think it's a good thing too, but if you think that technology is going to overturn a foundational principle of our judicial system, you're going to be disappointed. Public policy is going to account for this change, and we may not love the way they solve it.
  - 11y ago

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

It's not frightening at all. This is the standard nation-state insouciance. To see how out of touch governments can be, I think there are two stories, both unfortunately of a military nature. One is Eisenhower's trek across the US in the interwar period, the thing ( along with the Autobahn ) that inspired the Interstate, and the story of the squad-level light machine gun in WWI, especially related to the Lewis gun. Machine guns were not embraced until the Germans showed how effective they were in WWI. This really happened. Commanders were optimizing for damage per bullet long after they should not have been. Be wary, but don't be frightened. I at least find it relatively easy to conduct my affairs such that I don't have to live in fear. So it can be done. At least consider the possibility that the Snowden and Manning stories are stories about people who really didn't think it all the way through, if they didn't want to be hunted. There's an element of martyrdom and hubris to those stories. In a way, much of the Nixon cases were about interpretations of telephone technology and wiretapping roughly 100 years after the advent of those technologies. The timescales here are glacial.

krapp 11y ago

I don't want to live in a world where encryption is banned. I also don't want to live in a world where one's political career is instantly ended by bringing it up. Those are just two different flavors of fascism.

wfo 11y ago

Actually, with a warrant the police should be able to get through your encryption. The debate is not about whether or not the state can look at your communication, the debate is how. When the state wants to look at your communications and has a warrant to do so, do they: Demand your keys and lock you in jail indefinitely until you provide them? Or retain permanent access to every communication and promise to never use it unless they have a warrant.

csandreasen 11y ago
Demanding keys would conflict with the 5th Amendment; in the few cases that I'm aware of[1][2] where a defendant was successfully compelled to decrypt their files, the suspect had either already demonstrated that the evidence was in their possession and thus given up their right to self- incriminate or been granted immunity. Also, with end-to-end encryption law enforcement won't be able to decrypt regardless of whether or not they have a warrant, and they need a warrant to initiate a wiretap to begin with. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663447 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9663378