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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I really wish that every legal professional and judicial administrator had some rudimentary computer science knowledge. Having friends whom are lawyers, I can tell you that most of them don't have any meaningful understanding of technology becauae they spend so many years of their career heads down on what is effecctively paperwork. They know enough to realize how bass ackwards their industry is when it comes to tech, but if you asked them if webpages are encrypted they would have no idea and would probably assume they are not.

We are headed for a more authoritarian future if those making law or making judgments only see privacy tech as fringe and criminal, or have little meaningful underatandiing of it.

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It would start with us software engineers to be more exact in our communications. For an engineering discipline, we’re terrible at it.

Take your example. I don’t know whether a web page is encrypted. I do however know whether the transmission of one request of some website contents to a specific web browser is. But that won’t yet tell me whether the communication between me and the website has stayed confidential between the intended parties (which is probably what you’re interested in).

Whether data through an encrypted channel remains confidential isn't really relevant to my point. I didn't say "confidential", I said "encrypted". The distinction you are making with encryption and confidentiality seems conflated; if the channel is uses encryption, then the data is by virtue encrypted. It's another story if we are talking about data arriving from any channel with another layer of encryption for confidentiality.

It's basically meaningless to talk about whether something is encrypted without the "from who" factor. Otherwise you might as well rot-13 it. If you want to use such a narrow definition of 'encrypted', then it doesn't matter if the lawyer knows the answer.

No, the answer is way simpler than you are making it out to be.

Is the data in a TLS connection transformed in such a way that it would make it difficult for an intermediary to figure out the plain information being sent?

If so, the data is in fact encrypted. Where are you getting this idea that encryption is more than that? That is by definition what encryption is, and everything else is just approaches and security layers on top of it. You don't have to like the encryption method, you don't have to care who it's from, you don't have to care about anything else. Encryption is encryption even if it's as pointless as a caesar cipher.

And yeah, there's things like certificates and CAs with HTTPS, but that's totally secondary to the encryption part. No one would bother with HTTPS if it couldn't establish encrypted connections.

If a lawyer or a judge doesn't understand that they themselves are frequently using encryption when they use the internet, that's a problem. They don't need to care about the nitty gritty details that you and others bring up. If they view encryption as something that only bad guys use, why should they be a part of the judicial system in the year 2021?

'difficult' is uncomfortably vague here. Lots of transforms happen to the bits that might make them difficult to figure out even without encryption. Many of them don't intend to keep people out, despite them being more obscuring than a ceaser cipher!

I feel like you're overdefining encryption to make a point, when you don't need to at all.

I've made the definition as simple as it could possibly be. Technically speaking, yes, rot13 is a form of encryption; it's just a really bad one that has virtually no security features, only being a minuscule step above plain text. Rot13 even has a decryption key, but only ever one, which is the algorithm to decode it. (Of course it would not take long at all to reverse engineer) Besides, any encryption other than OTP can be broken in theory given enough time.

Honestly, I haven't the faintest clue the point you are making or why you are nitpicking to this degree. I think I made it clear why legal and judicial professionals should have a rudimentary understanding and awareness of encryption for the purpose of making sound decisions that affect society. If your disagreement with my definition of encryption gets in the way of that for you, then I really don't know what to say. Look up what the word "encrypt" means, think of the etymology, and rethink what you've been saying.

> Honestly, I haven't the faintest clue the point you are making or why you are nitpicking to this degree. I think I made it clear why legal and judicial professionals should have a rudimentary understanding and awareness of encryption for the purpose of making sound decisions that affect society.

You're asking for them to have a very strange understanding of encryption, that doesn't match how the term is normally used. The important part is the security, not that you need an algorithm to decode. It's not nitpicking to say you're asking for them to know something irrelevant that's adjacent to some important things they should understand.

I don't like this line of thinking at all. Legal professionals are supposed to know the law and to ask experts for other things. Just like a judge and jury in a murder case are unable to understand how DNA analysis works, they don't have to understand how computer systems work.

The only thing worse than a judge who doesn't understand the first thing about computers would be a judge who thinks they understand computers but doesn't.

The alternative to encryption really is totaltarian control of the internet. In order to have any level of confidence that the data is not tampered with you need strict security on every meter of cabling, every line of code, every transceiver, and every person involved with the design and fabrication of those things.

Hmm. You could also argue that not having understanding of the technology is a good thing. For instance, the judge can remove themselves from the details and look at it on a higher level.

It’s the job of the attorneys to make the case for or against using subject matter experts etc.

You could argue that. However, it means that people can basically lie to the judges, and the judges don't have the background to call them out on it.

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