[tptacek]

So, the many downsides of implanting backdoors into cryptography are most of why I oppose them, and support the global deployment of default-unbreakable communications, so that people don't even have to think about whether their communications are electronically protected but simply always are.

But that's not what I'm taking issue with. What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence, as part of the social contract that animates the country, and that technology is in fact poised to overrule that entitlement without due process of law or politics.

It's a simple and sensible issue to have with crypto. Crypto is important and valuable technology, but that doesn't mean everything about it is good. It has downsides, too. We should be honest about them, and less shocked when people weigh the downsides differently than we do.

[pdkl95]

> What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence

I don't think many people have any significant objection to the state acquiring evidence, as long as proper procedure (warrants/etc) is followed.

While the repulsion is primarily over breaking encryption (key escrow nonsense, etc) and the damage that would cause, there is another problem with the Government's desire for "access" that I haven't seen much in the reprisal of the Crypto Wars compared to the previous round in the 90s.

The government is implicitly demanding additional work be done on it's behalf. Managing a key escrow system (or part of it) isn't free. There is a labor cost and a cost in damage to a business's market position and reputation (their product will be seen - rightly - as less valuable).

A warrant isn't a guarantee that a search will produce the desired evidence. It is unreasonable to demand that we (everyone, before any warrant is involved) should change our behavior and try to preserve evidence or compromise our own security to make it easier for the government at some hypothetical time in the future.

[tptacek]

I think government interference in the engineering decisions of private companies are a valid reason to oppose crypto backdoors. I don't think it's the strongest reason --- we ask private companies to expend extra effort to comply with engineering requirements in all sorts of other products. But I sympathize with the argument.

A warrant isn't an engineering technique or a mathematical axiom. It's a directive from a court that its recipient must comply with a demand to produce some information. Warrants are, in some sense, about people.

If you encrypt some piece of information such that you retain the ability to decrypt and recover it, then as far as the law is concerned, you're capable of responding to a warrant for that information. Technology is going to make it possible for everyone, not just the tech savvy, to refuse to comply with those kinds of warrants. Public policy will need to adapt. As I said, we may not like how it adapts.

[mvitorino]

I think most people have repulsion, as you say, towards the idea because a lot of them consider crypto a weapon (the only one actually) to defend themselves from unprecedented violations of privacy that are possible with today's technology.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, if the government actually can get the evidence when they have legally-valid reason to do so, then they don't have to violate everyone's privacy all the time in order to get evidence for when they might need it. So there's a basis for a truce here.

Unfortunately, you'd have to trust the government to keep their end of the deal...

[the8472]

> the state is entitled to evidence

But it is not entitled to the existence of evidence. It can only collect what still exists at the point of collection.

Using encryption keeps the plaintext of communication ephemeral, even if the ciphertext is persistent.

Mandating backdoors means mandating persistence.

[tptacek]

That same argument could have been used to ban wiretaps, which after all synthesize permanent evidence from ephemera. But it didn't: instead of banning wiretaps, we systematized and legitimized them, and refined that understanding over and over again for 50 years.

[the8472]

Wiretaps generally do not come with time-machines that can resurrect past conversations.

[tptacek]

You mean like tape recorders?

[the8472]

No, tape recorders are not part of the normal operation of phone networks.

The point is that even if a user intends to have an ephemeral conversation over an internet service all kind of middle-boxes may keep more persistent copies.

Something that normally does not happen with either face to face or telephone conversations.

With unencrypted digital communication on the other hand past conversations can be dredged up from all kinds of places.

End-to-end encryption basically abstracts ephemeral communication over channels with some sort of persistence.

[mvitorino]

But there isn't an (at least widespread) equivalent of crypto for phone calls. So not really comparable.

[tptacek]

There will be. Of course there will be. Encrypting phone calls isn't a particularly hard problem; the hard problem has been getting the audio frames of a phone call into the clutches of software to begin with, and we've already just about killed that problem.

[mvitorino]

Absolutely. But my only point is that we can't directly transpose the legal experience over 50 years in wire taps since there was never an equivalent debate over it's privacy. Wiretaps weren't really questioned because there wasn't a real expectation of privacy on phone calls since we started out with human switchboards.

[schoen]

Wiretaps were really questioned in court. Maybe there was less public debate about them at the time or less awareness of how widespread wiretapping could become; I'm not sure.

[mvitorino]

Also, before computing, wiretaps were extremely labour intensive. So mass surveillance wasn't a possibility. This is what repulses people.

[tptacek]

I think I'm suggesting that mass surveillance can also be repulsive to the people who are concerned about "going dark".