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by thisrobot 3721 days ago
I've thought about this quite a bit, and think the tech community is going about this wrong. The public doesn't like being told it can't be done, but I can't explain why, because it's too complicated.

Even though we know it's impossible, we should disregard that and lay out common sense tenants that such system would require, even if it can't be feasibly built. We could then base our arguments on those tenants, and those are public fights I think could be won, because its things non technical people could understand.

For instance, one tenant could be any key escrow system must be open source. We can't base it off keeping the code secret, as then if the code is ever stolen or leaked, the whole system is compromised.

If you can win those arguments, and it just happens such a system can't be built due to the laws of mathematics, you then fall back to arguing which tenants you should break, and ideally breaking any of the tenants would be unpalatable.

2 comments

I think you are grossly overestimating the general public's ability to consume and understand a technically complicated argument no matter how well-reasoned.
*tenet