Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yafbum | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting.

Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once everyone was connected as part of a global network, we'd see an inevitable global rise in liberal forces that would make governments unable to control speech. See Bill Clinton's on "nailing Jello to the wall". Clinton whose administration did liberalize encryption quite a bit.

That "end of history" mindset was wrong. We are back in a quasi cold war, with an active proxy war on top of it and a few more smoldering. And so my prediction is that we will see a reversal to the mean of history, and cryptography become again a govt granted privilege with conditions attached. (Yes yes I know public implementations of every algorithm exist, but China showed the blueprint of the machine that nails Jello to the wall anyways.)

>Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege.

no, throughout history has always been the privilege of those with the ability to encrypt, which was often governments, big businesses, or in some cases very clever individuals.

with the ability to encrypt becoming simpler it follows that the cleverness of individuals to achieve it has decreased.

There's no way bad actors will adhere to these restrictions anymore. Unless one's view of government is a very cynical one (they only care about controlling the general population vs actually fighting crime), tightly controlling cryptography is just not the effective tool anymore that it had been in the 90s.

Is this the same argument as "bad people will always flout rules, might as well give every person a machine gun so the good guys can have an even fight"? Looking at China, I think that it is very possible to make it least very uncomfortable, so uncomfortable as to be an effective deterrent.

It's a deterrent for your grandma, but not for any bad actors.

> And so my prediction is that we will see a reversal to the mean of history, and cryptography become again a govt granted privilege with conditions attached.

Electronic financial transactions (banking, e-commerce,...) and commercial communications are two main reasons we won't see this. Too much impact on the economic levels and the government already have access to this data, so it will be just cons, no pro.

You won't catch bad actors, they will move to illegal services and protocols. I think the voice of reason just prevailed and they realized that it's a bad idea. The only next step I can see is the requirement for data persistence to be done inside the country.

Financial transactions are already typically transparent to the government (they can just ask the registered banks for data). As for commercial communications, it's already the case in many jurisdictions that every service provider operating in that country must provide their private keys to a key escrow. That does not cause a visible collapse of Internet-based services in these countries.

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