[diego_moita]

> You didn't even make an argument

He did. He said the children in Newtown's kindergarden and Columbine School were not killed with encryption. It is a pretty big difference. For a non-American this is a pretty good argument, IMO.

[roughcoat]

What nonsense. It's obvious what the parent comment meant. Law abiding gun owners by definition do not kill innocent children, just like law abiding people do not use encryption nefariously. Encryption and guns are both tools, with nothing intrinsically good or evil about them.

Yet law abiding gun owners were punished and had their rights stripped throughout most of the world on the pretense that it would somehow help stop crime, despite the quite glaringly obvious fact that criminals by definition do not care about following laws. Thus, only law abiding people are hindered. Criminals will still use encryption and guns, while law abiding citizens will be rendered unable to defend themselves, either electronically or physically.

I find it amazing that I need to spell this out for you.

[roughcoat]

Further to this, the reality is politicians who want to undermine information security don't give a damn about protecting their citizens/subjects. That's just the excuse to make the poison pill more palatable. What this is about, and what gun control is about, is right there in the name: control. It's about having a monopoly on security and force, so the populace will be less independent and easier to manage. At the very least, if you make enough things illegal you can jail whomever you like, because at some point it will become impossible to avoid breaking the law. The US is already there.

We've already seen government agencies in the US targeting specific political groups. I don't follow politics in other countries much but it would hardly surprise me if that happens elsewhere. It certainly has throughout history. How far will that go this time? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, it should frighten you, because the tool you use on your enemies when you're in power--and any tool you create to beat them up more effectively--is then available for your enemy to use on you when you inevitably lose power.

I find it shocking how many people who clamor for electronic freedom and an uninterfered-with internet are perfectly happy to cede their rights and independence in other areas to the government without so much as a grumble. Learn from history, FFS.

[babyrainbow]

>I find it shocking how many people who clamor for electronic freedom and an uninterfered-with internet are perfectly happy to cede their rights and independence in other areas to the government without so much as a grumble...

This is absolutely the most shocking thing I have come to notice recently, which just shows that these people have reasons spoon fed to them from somewhere, (knowingly or unknowingly) and have not really thought it through..

What I feel is that the while modern society feels not susceptible to the evils,oppressions and exploitations that were prevalent 100 years ago, while most people were poorly educated, this seems to be just a fallacy. And educated people can be manipulated just as easily by feeding them some kind of "reason" and selective "statistics" from certain "reputable" sources or authority.

[Thiez]

> It's about having a monopoly on security and force, so the populace will be less independent and easier to manage.

Having an entity with a monopoly on violence is like half the point of a government. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

[roughcoat]

Uh huh. Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century? How does a disarmed and helpless populace look in those circumstances?

And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy?

You trust them to protect your physical safety, to protect your life, if you're willing to hand over your right to self protection. Surely you then trust them with your data and property?

[Thiez]

> And since you think the government should be trusted to mete out all force, I'm certain you'll have no trouble handing the government all your passwords and keys, right? Maybe mail them a copy of your car keys and house keys too, since they're so trustworthy?

> You trust them to protect your physical safety, to protect your life, if you're willing to hand over your right to self protection. Surely you then trust them with your data and property?

I don't think that's the same thing at all. I trust my parents with my life, but I wouldn't want them to read my online conversations. They don't have a key to my house, nor the passwords to my computer and various accounts, and I'd like to keep it that way. I see no contradiction here.

[xg15]

> Have you studied the genocides of the 20th century?

Have you?

Before Hitler came to power, the Weimar government was destabilized by - among other things - a latent civil war between armed paramilitary extreme-left and extreme-right groups. Hitler himself relied on such groups (from the right) to stage his first attemt to come to power via a coup. Even after he got elected, the groups were a cornerstone of his power.

[barrkel]

The only purpose of a gun - a handgun in particular - is to wound and kill people, something civilians have no business doing. That's not the case with encryption.

[wayn3]

the primary purpose of a gun is to deter possible aggressors from starting trouble with you.

the ultima ratio is to actually use the gun. for 99% of threats, showing it off is good enough.

[roughcoat]

I've used a handgun to signal for help, to find lost people in the woods in Alaska, to hunt, to scare away bears, and for fun. And on a few occasions, I've been very glad to have a handgun with me stateside, because I came quite close to needing to use it to protect myself. Fortunately I was able to negotiate those situations without using force.

Are you a pacifist, incidentally? Can you really think of no valid reason why a citizen might need to wound or kill someone?

[odonnellryan]

Guns used to be tools, but they aren't in much of the US. That doesn't mean they can't be, but they aren't used as tools, so they've lost a lot of their value.

Yes, if you're hunting, it's a tool.

[cynicalbastard]

> That's not the case with encryption.

sure it isn't.

[diego_moita]

> Encryption and guns are both tools

Fireworks are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous.

Sulfuric acid is a tool, but need to be regulated because is dangerous.

Plutonium is a tool, but needs to be regulated because is dangerous.

Opioids are tools, but need to be regulated because are dangerous.

Cars are tools, but it's use needs to be regulated because are dangerous.

I find it amazing that I need to spell this out for you.

[dang]

Would you please not do flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong or irritating some other comments are? We're really trying to avoid the downward spiral here.

[cmurf]

The analogy is flawed, and the final sentence is condescending.

All things in your list have an inherent physical danger. Neither encryption nor cryptography are themselves dangerous, they're a means of encoding some other thing which may or may not be dangerous into something whose danger cannot be determined.

Imperfect analogy, but crypto is more like a safe than anything you list. An ensuing argument is, we need to regulate (crypto) safes not because they are themselves dangerous, but because their contents might be.

The means of encryption-decryption, code, is considered free speech (Bernstein vs U.S. 9th Circuit, and Junger v Daley, 6th Circuit). Thus far crypto is itself protect, but the usage of crypto is an open question.

With a real safe, police with probable cause can get a warrant, and forcibly gain access to the safe and see the contents. This isn't possible with crypto if the key owner refuses to cooperate, and why there's the ensuing problem of sanctioning the person for contempt of court when ordering access and they don't cooperate.

The dispute has nothing to do with analogies though, it has to do with a power transfer. Crypto permits some transfer of power from the sovereign to the individual. And that has altered the social contract. It's done. And now after the fact we're trying to sort out the consequences of that power transfer, and whether or not the sovereign gets to reign it back in, and how. And that's unanswered.

[cynicalbastard]

> If we could restrict the use of encryption by the bad guys without compromising it's use by the good guys

oh, don't you worry, the politicians will do it anyway, with much public support, and then you will sound like the crazy, paranoid one arguing for military grade assault encryption in the hands of the dangerous, villainous public.

edit: i see you deleted the part i quoted. makes sense. cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing. feels like razor blades in the mind!

[roughcoat]

If your idea of reasoned discussion is responding to my comments with logical fallacies, there's no point in wasting any more time on you. Good day.

[dang]

This breaks the HN guidelines. Accounts that are uncivil and flame others eventually get banned, so would you please (re)-read the following, and abide by them? That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Another thing we're trying to avoid is the generic ideological tangent: that's when a topic with something specific in it (Australian government current encryption plans) gets diluted into topics like "pacifism" and "genocide", about which no HN thread has anything new to say, but plenty of people will get agitated and sucked into battle. This is the reason why the guidelines say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

[xg15]

Nope. The argument was that law-violating gun owners kill children (and others) while law-violating encryption does not.

[roughcoat]

I doubt encryption does anything all by itself. And apparently, encryption-using terrorists--who would be violating the law if such laws were in place--do kill children. Manchester, you know, it just happened. Nice. Berlin. Stockholm. Pretty soon, it'll just be a "name the city" game where the only question is how bad the most recent terrorist attack they suffered was compared to the rest.

And just as gun control laws do precisely dick to stop criminals from committing their crimes--because laws aren't magic, and they don't bend reality to make guns disappear as soon as the law is signed--encryption laws will be just as efficacious at stopping terrorists from using encryption. Like some wannabe martyr gives a shit about a fine he'll never pay and time he'll probably never serve in some resort prison?

[irundebian]

Of course law aren't magic, but of course they can have impact on society such as the reduce of weapons.