U.S. can't ban encryption because it's a global phenomenon, Harvard study finds

The mere fact that the encryption ban is being discussed and bringing it up doesn't instantly end one's political career is frightening. Access to all individual's communications is a level of trust reserved for closest family members if that. And here government nonchalantly goes on to assume this level of trust from every citizen. Yet everyone except a handful of techies is completely oblivious to how monstrously perverted that is. The future looks really dark right now.

The politicians and national security bureaucrats advocating this are idiots. At least that&#x27;s the charitable interpretation. The world is not static. Mass surveillance leads to mass demand, and therefore mass markets, for privacy products (e.g. VPNs, secure messaging). And a product will only be used by the masses if it is easy to use.<p>Can&#x27;t these people see that they&#x27;re shooting themselves in the foot (assuming their true goal is to intercept the communications of the &#x27;terrorists&#x2F;communists&#x2F;lizard people&#x27; hiding under your bed)? Encryption is hard. Properly implementing a system that incorporates it is even harder. I doubt 99.9% of the aforementioned &#x27;enemies of the week&#x27; have the technical capability to do so (ok, maybe the commies do). But that&#x27;s no problem now! They can just buy a product off the shelf thanks to the new mass market you&#x27;ve just created!<p>Now they&#x27;re trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle by banning encryption. Banning encryption? What does that even mean? How are you going to enforce that? I suspect the answer to the latter is: &quot;selectively&quot;.<p>It feels like we&#x27;re only a few iterations of this arms race away from our genius leaders pushing for telescreens to be installed in everyone&#x27;s homes, to ensure they don&#x27;t use any of that &#x27;godless, un-american encryption that only evil lizard people use&#x27;.<p>After all, if you&#x27;re doing nothing wrong you&#x27;ve got nothing to hide.

I support a ban on encryption. &#x2F;s<p>Any time something is banned, it becomes more prevalent and governments lose any semblance of control that they may have had on a thing. Such a ban would also force people to re-think security. There is a false sense of security if a thing uses an encrypted transport, or has an encrypted disk. This only partially hinders accessing data by people that are not supposed to have it. I should not have to start documenting the ways to side-step current implementations of encryption, right? This is the Hacker News, so most of you should already know at least some of the methods.<p>OK, back to reality. A ban would legalize what is already being done. There would be no more need for individuals to risk their own safety by breaking gag orders, NSL&#x27;s, court orders, et al. Everyone would be painfully aware of what is being monitored.<p>BTW, I am being partially sarcastic here. The 3 letter agencies are nodding their heads as they read this. A ban on encryption would be highly detrimental to their operations. Such bans would be dead in the water or have their teeth removed before seeing the light of day.

Hey we banned liquor once too, which I am thinking was somewhat global at the time. Don&#x27;t underestimate the US! USA! USA!

I do believe that the U.S. can&#x27;t &quot;ban encryption&quot;, any more than it could &quot;ban mathematics&quot;.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean the intelligence value to legally enforced backdoors in popular US-created or US-marketed products isn&#x27;t significant.<p>For one thing, your target might not be sophisticated or suspicious enough to avoid these products, or they may be communicating with folks who aren&#x27;t (for example, if you&#x27;re studying recruitment).<p>For another, requiring anyone desiring to hide their communication to eschew popular products itself provides a signal that may be of interest. And a diversity of smaller encrypted products may end up being more vulnerable to subversion and exploitation, vs. widely used, deeply studied systems.<p>I am not arguing that this value is worth the massive privacy and civil liberties tradeoff of giving the government access to products like iMessage. But it&#x27;s not, I think, as simple as saying, &quot;the bad guys will just switch to using other tools&quot;.

Trying to ban encryption is like trying to ban a triangle.

The US government can backdoor all the products they want. The only thing they will achieve is to destroy the tech sector in the US. That&#x27;s no big deal right? Who cares if no one outside the US trusts US companies because all their software is backdoored? Of course, the tech sector will be only the first to suffer. The rest will fall like dominoes.<p>And all for what? So the FBI can catch some people smoking weed and the NSA can perv out to citizens&#x27; pics, that&#x27;s what for.

What&#x27;s sad&#x2F;funny to me is that people are making a bigger deal about this because Harvard study.<p>Encryption is like a knife. It&#x27;s not good or bad. It just is. I find that using that analogy helps a lot especially when talking to lay people. Banning one&#x2F;one kind of knife means a bad actor is just going to use something else. Ergo, it isn&#x27;t a fix.

I often argue this point, however I wonder how other people on HN discuss this issue with their non-technical &quot;real politik&quot; (actually just Political Science majors) friends that suggest that prohibiting encryption for non-sanctioned private entities (for example allowing bank transactions, online shopping, but disallowing encrypted chat protocols, emails, etc) is not terribly detrimental for the state barring &quot;morality&quot; concerns and our commitment to the principals of democracy, free speech, and the like.<p>I often resort to, &quot;You can&#x27;t ban math!&quot;, but wonder if there are more outlined resources for explaining this.

The thing about encryption, you can always roll your own if you are advantageous enough.

But if they ban encryption, there won&#x27;t be any more bad guys.

i agree

&gt; a foundational principle of our judicial system<p>You are sorely misguided if you believe a foundational principle of our judicial system is deliberate and systematic invasion of innocent citizens&#x27; private communications.<p>&gt; no data center any country can build will ever so much as recover a single emoji from a single IM<p>This is fine and how it should be. Historically there has been no way to intercept communications on this level ever before - so why claim it&#x27;s suddenly necessary now? Especially since all of it has amounted to exactly nothing thus far...<p>This analogy has been beaten to death - but the parallels are almost exact when compared to Stasi Secret Police steaming open citizens hand-written letters for inspection... As others have already mentioned, one of the driving forces behind our nation was desire for private communications that the government didn&#x27;t have entitled and unrestricted access to.

Same reason no one can stop cryptocurrencies.<p>So far I don&#x27;t see any reason why Bitcoin&#x27;s exponential adoption rate would suddenly grind to a halt.