<story><title>Americans&apos; Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress</title><url>https://rietta.com/blog/2017/05/03/americans-access-to-strong-encryption-is-at-risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sanderjd</author><text>Disclaimer: I agree with you but I always struggle to convince people that this line of reasoning makes sense.&lt;p&gt;The government can already enter anybody&amp;#x27;s home upon receiving a warrant to do so. If you don&amp;#x27;t let them in, they can bust through a door or tear down a wall. We trust the government not to do this without court oversight. We trust courts to provide good and honest oversight. It is far from a perfect system, but we set up lots of human-level checks and balances to keep power distributed enough that this basically works.&lt;p&gt;The problem with strong encryption is that this is impossible. Even if there is a very good reason signed off by an honest court, it is impossible to get in. This breaks that human-level checks-and-balances system. What replaces it?</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>Just think of the outrage if the government required master keys to everyone&amp;#x27;s homes? 
I know there is a difference, but it&amp;#x27;s not a huge leap to compare the two. We don&amp;#x27;t want the government to have such easy access to our homes because we can&amp;#x27;t trust every government employee not to abuse it. I think the same goes here. No mater what safe guards you put in place it&amp;#x27;s a scary thought that you simply can&amp;#x27;t keep the government out of your affair&amp;#x27;s. Sure now you think you have nothing to hide. But what if your political views become criminal, what if your religious views become hate speech? We&amp;#x27;re not there yet but times can change quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ploxiln</author><text>Another difference from the metaphor is that busting down doors is visible and obvious, and doesn&amp;#x27;t scale.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if the government busted down a quarter of all doors in the country - that&amp;#x27;s a lot of industrial-scale police work, and it&amp;#x27;s very visible to all citizens. On the other hand, the government can tap half of all phones in the country, or intercept half of all emails sent by US residents, and we&amp;#x27;re not even legally allowed to know it happened, so we can&amp;#x27;t even argue against it in a public court of law.&lt;p&gt;Atomic-grade offense requires atomic-grade defense. We will have un-breakable encryption, or we will be crushed by secret intelligence agencies with immense power and no public accountability. It&amp;#x27;s a whole new game.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I&amp;#x27;m not too worried, strong encryption is open source and widely available already (even if not used in nearly all the circumstances it should be yet). This cat isn&amp;#x27;t going back in the bag.</text></comment>
<story><title>Americans&apos; Access to Strong Encryption Is at Risk, an Open Letter to Congress</title><url>https://rietta.com/blog/2017/05/03/americans-access-to-strong-encryption-is-at-risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sanderjd</author><text>Disclaimer: I agree with you but I always struggle to convince people that this line of reasoning makes sense.&lt;p&gt;The government can already enter anybody&amp;#x27;s home upon receiving a warrant to do so. If you don&amp;#x27;t let them in, they can bust through a door or tear down a wall. We trust the government not to do this without court oversight. We trust courts to provide good and honest oversight. It is far from a perfect system, but we set up lots of human-level checks and balances to keep power distributed enough that this basically works.&lt;p&gt;The problem with strong encryption is that this is impossible. Even if there is a very good reason signed off by an honest court, it is impossible to get in. This breaks that human-level checks-and-balances system. What replaces it?</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>Just think of the outrage if the government required master keys to everyone&amp;#x27;s homes? 
I know there is a difference, but it&amp;#x27;s not a huge leap to compare the two. We don&amp;#x27;t want the government to have such easy access to our homes because we can&amp;#x27;t trust every government employee not to abuse it. I think the same goes here. No mater what safe guards you put in place it&amp;#x27;s a scary thought that you simply can&amp;#x27;t keep the government out of your affair&amp;#x27;s. Sure now you think you have nothing to hide. But what if your political views become criminal, what if your religious views become hate speech? We&amp;#x27;re not there yet but times can change quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcbits</author><text>My preferred analogy is paper shredders. Imagine if any criminal could just walk into a store and buy a paper shredder so effective that it&amp;#x27;s impossible for the FBI to piece the data back together, with or without a warrant, no matter how many resources they throw at it.&lt;p&gt;Clearly the solution is to require every paper shredder to be equipped with a camera to scan documents and upload them to cloud.gov before shredding. Of course, nobody would be authorized to look at the data without a warrant, and we should trust that nobody working for the government would ever break this law.</text></comment>