[schoen]

We had a mini-debate about this with rayiner in another thread pointing out that people have always been allowed to use cryptography in America and have always done so, and that it's often made it harder and occasionally impossible for the government to figure stuff out. It's true that it was always a very deliberate decision and effort in the past, rather than something particularly convenient or automatic, but people have had ciphers for centuries, and some of those have been successful at obscuring communications from governments, and in the U.S. there was no apparent suggestion that this was legally improper.

[tptacek]

The problem policymakers are faced with is:

* Everyone is going to use encryption by default, without trying or even knowing what cryptography is.

* That cryptography is going to be unbreakable, not just by today's investigators but possibly for millennia. Even if quantum attacks on crypto are possible, we have ciphers that will hold up, and computers are already small and fast enough to make their added expense a rounding error.

This is a very different situation than the Barksdale crew using a keypad code. 70 years ago, military grade crypto was crackable (and doing so helped us win World War 2). That isn't going to happen in 70 years, ever again.

[schoen]

In this case I think the strength of my argument is just about whether people are allowed to try to conceal their communications from the government, and the historical legal answer is yes, not no!

I agree that they're likely to do a dramatically better job of it in the future than they could have before and that it will be easier.

[tptacek]

I'm not sure I follow, since knowingly concealing evidence is itself a crime in a lot of places.