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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

So really it wouldn’t be encryption so much as right to have secrets. Because whether I use EDCA or a really strongly in crackable safe, my right to privacy should be a thing?

It sounds like somewhat of a stronger version than the US’s fifth amendment which says that you have a right to privacy unless it has to do with the crime currently being investigated. And come to think of it, encryption is unconstitutional as in because the government can subpoena or obtain a warrant to your information it may not be able to enforce it because of the encryption. So either the government has no right to subpoena or encryption is illegal.

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This is incorrect. The fourth amendment gives people the absolute right against "unreasonable search and seizure". This means the police may be granted access to search someone's property by a judge, if they are suspected of a crime. It does not give the government the right to find anything, only to search. Furthermore, the fifth amendment grants people the absolute right to not incriminate themselves. So if you know something (information about where the bodies are buried, passwords for decryption of encryption keys, etc.), you have the absolute right to not divulge that knowledge. So the people here have more rights than the government when a crime is being investigated.

Ah you are correct. But let’s make a physical analogy. If I can make an uncrackable safe in which I put evidence of a crime along with lots of other secrets. The police come to my door with a reasonable search warrant. I tell them I have the key to the safe but will not tell them where it is. They know they have absolutely no way to get into my safe without taking about 100 years and $2 billion. What happens next?

The law isn't entirely settled on the matter, but some rulings so far suggest that the government can compel the surrender of a physical key, but not the disclosure of a combination.

So by that definition since my private key is a lot like a combo to my safe, the government cannot compel me to disclose it? That sound like good news.

Also, I guess I am storing all my keys at STL files that get 3D printed and destroyed upon first use. Hello protection from search warrants!

It's the password required to decrypt the secret key that you would not need to disclose. They'll likely end up with the encrypted secret key, but no way to access it. That's because the password is something you know, and divulging it could mean self-incrimination.

Courts have ruled, for example, that the police can compel a suspect to put their face or finger up to a phone to unlock it through biometric means, but a suspect cannot be compelled to divulge their PIN. That's why using biometrics, while convenient, is a bad idea.

This is also a great example of how you can follow what sounds like logical principles to a completely bonkers end-state. Knowledge is protected but your bodily autonomy is not? Eesh.

> encryption is unconstitutional as in because the government can subpoena or obtain a warrant to your information it may not be able to enforce it because of the encryption

No, you can't subpoena information from someone that doesn't have it. So the government can subpoena the cyphertext, but can't ask for the plaintext if the provider never had access to it.

Wouldn't you want the word 'encryption' to be in the description, so there is no evil solicitor trying to argue about what 'secrets' meant. Or 'the right to confidentiality whenever, where-ever, and with whomever the person pleases'

But I would also not want the method of storage of secrets to become obsolete. The important thing is that I’m able to keep a secret, not how the secret is stored. For example, say quantum encryption comes to be known as “q-store” and is always said to be different from encryption. Now, what does that do to my rights if I move from traditional encryption to quantum algorithms?

Well it worked for copyright, we're kinda stuck with it, regardless of how much the we ways we store things have changed.

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