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Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's one scenario I didn't even consider: the government making it illegal to use encryption. Blows my mind that you could some day be considered a criminal for using PGP.

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Actually, usage of cryptography with computers was illegal at a point. Here in France, the strength of SSH was capped by law.

Even today, the distribution of cryptography is not totally open. Oh, and even if you used cryptography, you have to decrypt your data at the request of the justice, so it's more or less pointless against your own state.

For the record, mandatory decryption is an unsettled issue in the U.S. and conflicting rulings have been issued. It's entirely possible that a judge in a given encryption case will rule that the accused's right not to self-incriminate as defined in the Fifth Amendment precludes mandatory decryption.

Regardless of the state's ability to compel decryption, you should still encrypt everything because it gives you at least partial control. Your options are much, much better if the government can't build their case without your cooperation, even if a judge compels decryption, because your lawyer can try to get the order rescinded before you comply, or at worst, he can at least stall for a while, you can claim you forgot your password and take the risk of an obstruction charge if the risk of said charge is lesser than the risk of charges that would be made after prosecutors gained access to your decrypted content, etc.

If you leave everything plaintext, you have no possibility of option or control; the government gets access to the whole kit and caboodle instantly.

Chaffing and winnowing[1], as proposed by Rivest, can handle this. It'd be interesting to use this as a trunking mechanism to bundle many conversations together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing

Could there be an encryption mechanism that outputs valid sentences? If anyone tries to ban encryption they'd have to argue your text is encrypted because it doesn't make much sense to them.

Such steganography is sort of possible, though it's hard to make it not look like the output of a markov babbler.

I and my friends regularly sound exactly like the output of a markov babbler.

"Hey, look, this is not encryption, we're just dumb!"

Yes, there even was such a tool posted on HN some time ago. I can't remember its name, but basically it got its corpus from twitter data. Maybe someone else can post a link?

One example is Bananaphone [0], which is designed to help Tor traffic look more like normal traffic to evade DPI.

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November...

Computer-based steganography is destined to failure in the same way DRM is destined to failure. If a computer program can interpret the data, someone else can reverse engineer the formats until the solution is found. It might slow something down slightly, but is not likely to be effective alone.

The reason computers and networks are useful to us is because they can instantaneously create perfect copies of long strings of numbers, which programs interpret to have specific meanings. If we have a use case where perfect, rapid proliferation may be problematic, computational digitization should be considered a suspect mechanism for the implementation of that use case.

tl;dr: implement [at least most of] your steganography the old-fashioned way.

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