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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government.

I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime. We need to recognize that fact in order to have any productive debate with anti-encryption folks and we can't just pretend the government is evil because they wanted to keep the status quo of the physical world alive into the digital era.

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> >Various government agencies are crooning that they should be able to knock down whichever doors they please because they're the government.

> I think this analogy is apt but it actually works against the author's point. Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants. An encryption door cannot be knocked down. That is a very scary problem for the government and law enforcement. Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.

Well, there was nothing stopping someone from writing their journals or notes in code so nobody could understand them. There is a question of whether someone would be forced to explain the code used for the notes. But the current scheme would be akin to the government requiring schools to spread misinformation about how to make a secure cipher and making it illegal to write a book about how to make a secure cipher without making the cipher broken.

This is a huge shift in how we think about information and learning. There appears to be a general mystery about software as though technology has changed our underlying morals. It hasn't. If you reframe moral questions about software as moral questions about other things, the answers become more obvious. For example, the morals behind free software become immediately obvious if you consider mathematics or even things like blueprints (since a software program is both the design and implementation in a way).

Of course there's the danger of a false parallel (and you might argue that I've drawn such a parallel), but I think my argument holds.

>Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants.

But it hasn't been able to trawl for evidence mechanically and automatically. Now it has the technology to do that.

The default has always been privacy, for practical reasons. Encryption simply continues that tradition by continuing to make evidence gathering non-trivial.

The mechanical and automatic nature of evidence gathering is a real difference, and goes well to argue against NSA-style warrantless crawling.

I think for warrants, though, we're looking at a different beast. By their nature they are targeted. And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law(See [0]). The right against self-incrimination is relatively narrow, so as to not hinder the government's discoverability powers too much.

I think the one thing about this, though, is that people can already be compelled through legal means to unlock things. There is a reading of the Apple case that they are being compelled to unlock something for which they have the key.

Generally, it feels like outlawing encryption isn't necessary for the gov't to pursue the discovery phase of an arrest. There are already a good amount of legal means to compel people to unlock the doors.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Stat...

> And people have been compelled to provide passwords in the court of law

You can have encrypted data that accept two different passwords, producing different decrypted data of your choice. This is like the 2nd code that mute the home security alarm when you are forced to do it, but still calls the police.

Duress codes and embassy grade encryption are an interesting topic. Attempting to address the real world implications of "rubber hose cryptanalysis" is increasing important.

If you do that, and police have any evidence at all that you do this,then its useless from a legal perspective.

The courts will demand for both passwords or you'll get some nice sentencing for contempt of court.

Of course you could not tell anyone but that's a dangerous game.

> people can already be compelled through legal means to unlock things.

Things that they own, yes. But Apple doesn't own the iPhone that the FBI wants to unlock.

> There is a reading of the Apple case that they are being compelled to unlock something for which they have the key.

No, they don't have the key. What the FBI is asking Apple to do is to redesign the lock so that the FBI can try as many different keys as it wants until they find one that unlocks it.

Wiretap warrants aren't practical, nor were they the default; they are the result of years of public discussion and legal battles.

I agree that the situation is changing; the technology to batch surveil everyone at once is new, but the argument over privacy and where governments bounds are isn't.

> Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.

Moreover, more and more of that persistent information is casual communication that historically would have been securely erased by the whispering winds of time. No judge can grant investigators a time machine to travel back and spy on thousands of conversations over the last 5 years to fish for evidence. But now they can have the next-best thing (and getting better).

> But now they can have the next-best thing...

I think the discussion will get more useful when we'll stop talking about them and instead will talk about us. In civilized countries, the government represents the people. Law-enforcing organisms are mandated by people. The question is not whether some stranger wants to be able to enforce the law: the problem is whether we want to be able to enforce the law.

It has been empirically proven[1] that the United States is not a democracy. At least not in any meaningful way.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us...

You are 100% correct, the US is not a Democracy. IT'S A REPUBLIC.

The same citizens complaining that the rich control our country are the same citizens who don't register to vote because their opinion doesn't matter. The person who screams the loudest is the person heard. And the voice of America takes a sad me me me view that their voice doesn't matter, thus the rich get the power.

I'm far from a Sanders supporter, but his way of running this campaign has given America their Voice back. Ban super PACS, and limit corporate contributions to the same dollar amount that you and I are limited to donating, $2700.

Naturally we want to be able to enforce the law. We should also remember the 20th century and how quickly "they" seized control of Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Korea, the Soviet republics, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Cuba, the list goes on. All of that without the benefit of universal surveillance and time scrying technology.

In pursuit of enforcing the law, we need to be vigilant in maintaining the rule of law, which has proved difficult over the last century, with dire consequences.

I think the problem is that while the consequences of encryption on society has enough pros and cons to be gray, the sides that people choose are not at all gray. One side wants a backdoor and the other side doesn't. There's absolutely no way to draw a compromise on that. What does meeting down the middle between these two sides even mean? Law enforcement will always want as much power and legal protection as possible. It's the people who may or may not yield. It's the people who are going to budge on this issue.

I also think that the effect sizes on the pro vs. con debate of encryption has been overblown, and that it will be many years before we get a body of literature on which to anchor claims of magnitudes in our debate.

That being said, I think that leading the discussion on anti-encryption with discussions of terrorism and child porn is dishonest on its face. They're dishonestly exaggerated in effect size, and terrorism is the worse of the bunch, as the war on terror has costed mountains more than terrorism itself, both in money and in life. Unfortunately, these are often the top discussion points for any encryption debate.

I feel part of the problem is that people recognize what you say, and understand its helpful, even necessary for government to have warranted access. The big BUT however is many of us are losing trust in our governments around the world as digital collection and access has been systematically abused in almost every major developed nation.

Until governments can return confidence in their actions and motivations Avoid an even low chance 1984 scenario is more important than making law enforcement/counter terrorism do their jobs the old fashion way.

> digital collection and access has been systematically abused in almost every major developed nation.

I understand that the NSA issue was a bad surprise for many many people but, actually, who has been damaged by those practices?

So if some stalker has been spying on your children over their web cam, but you/they never find out no one was damaged? If a tree falls in the woods...

In practice, if I never know, no one has been damaged. Furthermore, if the FBI has been watching over the stalker and they arrest him as soon as he approaches my house, that's good!

Is anyone damaged if I sit in a tree outside your house and watch you take a shower through a crack in the window?

Before I am discovered no one is, but after I am discovered there can be a significant amount of mental anguish.

> Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption.

The government already has plenty of ways to collect evidence through legal means. A judge can compel you to provide access to your company files, to unlock your home, to decrypt your computer, etc. If you don't comply with the discovery process, you can be held in contempt of court. Encryption doesn't change anything in that equation.

The difference here is that the person in question is dead, so he can't provide the password. So the FBI wants to set a precedent that they can obtain information they want through means that would normally not be available to them.

People die all the time after committing nefarious crimes. In this case the police killed them. Maybe the police is to blame for the fact that we can not get to the truth about the crime. If there is any truth to be found, other than disillusioned religious people go on a murderous rampage all on their own. I mean justice, well in many cases there can't be justice. The long arm of the law can't reach everyone anywhere, especially after death.

Dead men take secrets to the grave every day.

Brain communication interfaces aren't that far off though, so maybe we can solve this "problem" with the our minds being dark to the FBI in a decade or two.

A smartphone and the network services that power it have way more information then any personal journal ever did. It has every one you're associated with, every topic you're interested in, everywhere you've been, etc. Society did not fall apart back when the government did not have access to the complete life record of every potential criminal.

Yet the government, the corporations _and_ the criminals now all want access to the complete life record of every citizen.

You talk about centuries, in the mid 19th century only 10% of the world could even read or write. The vast majority of what governments want to access would have previously been said face to face without any records.

Things like personal notes, journals, communications all used to be accessible to the government through warrants. Now that information is all locked away behind encryption. This is a huge shift in the way governments fight crime.

They only think that information is locked away behind encryption. There is no proof that the information they seek actually exists in the white-noise they claim it does unless the plaintext is recovered.

Our government, nor any government, has ever been able to do the impractical, never mind the provably impossible.

The question is not whether we are restraining the government from knocking down some special doors. The question is more like whether we are preventing the government from using telepathy or defying gravity. No, nobody is preventing that except reality itself.

Our government has legally been allowed to knock down whichever door it has wanted to for centuries assuming it has received the proper warrants.

That's mostly true, but not completely. There are a number of doors that have always been barred:

- Self-incrimination

- Incrimination of a spouse

- Attorney-client relationship

- Minister/priest - parishioner relationship

- Doctor - patient relationship (?)

The doctor simply cannot force you to bear witness against yourself. Nor can they force your attorney to reveal what you said to him.

Some of these examples have a sort of exception, where a doctor or an attorney must give warning it they know that the subject person is going to commit murder, for example. But that's not the same as saying that the government can go back and look at past communications.

It used to be possible to destroy evidence: shred letters, burn receipts. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to do it. If the encryption is crippled, in the cloud based world the evidence of all your electronic communications will be indestructible, for the first time in history.

Not true. You can jail the person for not revealing passwords if you have enough evidence and reasons to suspect the person is guilty and is hiding evidence behind encryption. This is not about being able to access something. This is about the ability to illegally search and seize all information at all times, often without any warrant at all. The government is worried not about not being able to search it, it's grasping for more totalitarian control of people's thoughts and behaviors. I guess because it's scared of what people are capable of.

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