Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

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It's still troublesome as a precedent: Making a particular class of software illegal to be in possession of.

As others have pointed out - once the precedent is in place, what is stopping them from deciding that some other piece of software superficially matches the law close enough that the police will ding you for it? After all, this is policing 101, where they use whatever laws are on the book as leverage for something totally unrelated to the laws they're using.

Having a look at the wording on offer:

- An offence of making, modifying, supplying, offering to supply a specified article where a person has reasonable grounds to suspect that it will be used in any serious crime.

- An offence of possessing any specified article where a person intends or, has reasonable grounds to suspect, that it will be used in any serious crime.

Every time we get new laws like this, we take a step towards the police being able to arrest anyone, for any reason, at any time.

Two things are simultaneously true:

1. The entire UK economy is dependent on everyone having access to cryptography so good that even Russia can't break it, therefore it is of paramount national interest that everyone does have access to it.

2. Bad people will use the exact same tech to avoid detection while planning and committing major crimes that have the potential to escalate to the level of undermining the state.

The only way to prevent #2 is to enforce extremely luddite laws that mess up #1.

In reality things get much harder to guess at when pontificating from armchairs, as when you have to account for the fact that the government and police aren't actually trying to perfectly enforce any specific law — not even the ones we all grew up assuming they "surely must" fully enforce because they were the worst horrors in the newspapers — it stops being clear how much any given law is supposed to help nor how much harm it will cause.

> The only way to prevent #2 is to enforce extremely luddite laws that mess up #1.

That's often how they think, but of course it isn't true.

The FBI has had good success with another route:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-sold-criminals-fake-encrypted...

Then there's just good old fashioned good police work. Informants. In-person Surveillance. Sting operations.

The problem with the latter is that it's very labor-intensive, and states would like to be able to automate detection in the same way that professional criminals are becoming capable of automating crime.

It's interesting that the UK is (as usual) taking the approach of designating particular technologies to be bad because they facilitate crime, and thus presumptively assigning criminal liability to their manufacture. Perhaps it's because the technology can be described in abstract terms, similar to a patent. A more expedient approach (like saying 'I notice, sir, that 95% of your customers are criminals') founders on the dilemma of needing a new kind of legal theory to address the criminal supplier's plausible deniability, or an elaborate and uncertain investigation to discern just how product X gained the approval of the criminal class to become established as a standard.

It's also interesting how non-geeky criminals want a walled garden ecosystem with very limited configurability, so they can outsource the technical decision-making to some underworld equivalent of Steve Jobs instead of having to promulgate standards of digital security practices.

You're ignoring the main point of the comment you're replying to, which is that laws like this mean they can arbitrarily charge whoever they like because everyone is constantly in violation of some law. The argument that we should trust the police not to use this power irresponsibly doesn't stand up when they're shown again and again that they are very happy to abuse such powers despite promising not to do so when the law is brought in. The UK government has made it clear they want to prevent anyone from hiding data from them and criminalising encryption and selectively enforcing that law is one way to achieving that.

Funny you say that. It's almost like if some part of Russian intelligence had strong influence on the Tory party and they try to make us less safe.

Elections can't come soon enough. These people are dangerous.

Almost, but not quite. It seems that there isn't a country left on Earth that isn't toying with such ideas, so I don't see how one could blame it on covert influence of Russia or any other single state.

> The only way to prevent #2 is to enforce extremely luddite laws that mess up #1.

Except laws are not effective in preventing #2 because bad people, by definition, are happy to break the law. Such pre-emptive laws mostly annoy honest, law abiding citizens.

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