<story><title>Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-keynote-address-international-conference-cyber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ngngngng</author><text>Sure, but I can just refuse to decrypt my data. They can just break physical locks.</text></item><item><author>phkahler</author><text>He claims encryption is &amp;quot;warrant proof&amp;quot; which is not true. You can have a court order someone to open the lock. They want the ability to dig through people&amp;#x27;s stuff without them knowing. That&amp;#x27;s what it&amp;#x27;s really about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rndgermandude</author><text>Encryption is nothing like a lock. We should stop using that analogy.&lt;p&gt;Encryption relies on a secret. It&amp;#x27;s like burying a treasure in a place only you know, and keeping the location a secret (e.g. in your head). Encryption just gives you a huge digital space where you can bury your treasure instead of a physical space where you can bury it.&lt;p&gt;Sure, people can just search everywhere for your pirate gold (brute-force attack), use advanced reasoning to narrow the search space, like &amp;quot;you lacked the means to &amp;#x27;bury&amp;#x27; it in solid stone&amp;quot; (cryptanalysis), develop technology to speed up the search like ground-penetrating radar (e.g. GPUs, asic, special purpose programs) or try to coerce you to reveal the location (monkeywrench-to-knee passphrase cracking).&lt;p&gt;What the governments wants is that the maker of the shovel you used to bury your treasure not only has to track where you took that shovel but also has to tell the government that information without you telling the government got the information.</text></comment>
<story><title>Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-keynote-address-international-conference-cyber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ngngngng</author><text>Sure, but I can just refuse to decrypt my data. They can just break physical locks.</text></item><item><author>phkahler</author><text>He claims encryption is &amp;quot;warrant proof&amp;quot; which is not true. You can have a court order someone to open the lock. They want the ability to dig through people&amp;#x27;s stuff without them knowing. That&amp;#x27;s what it&amp;#x27;s really about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>This is what a lot of people in our community seemingly refuse to recognize.  For all intents and purposes, encryption is a unbreakable lock that can serve to perfectly hide valuable criminal evidence.  Such a thing wasn&amp;#x27;t possible when our laws were written and has never before been possible in the physical world.  Its existence has potential to be a huge shift in how we enforce the law.  Regardless of our views on encryption, we need to have a conversation about that shift.  Refusing to have that discussion is likely a quicker path to things like government enforced backdoors than if we engaged with government and law enforcement on possible alternatives.</text></comment>