[lisper]

> Your initial comment seemed to imply that a warrant to break the encryption was "government overreach".

I have no idea how you could possibly reach this conclusion. My initial comment did not contain the word "warrant".

By "government overreach" I mostly meant spying on me without a warrant, e.g. the activities brought to light by Edward Snowden, and the common practice of seizing devices at the border.

[slg]

Not including the word "warrant" is exactly why I thought your problem was with warrants specifically.

From you original comment:

>The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and the ninth amendment to the Constitution guarantees that the people retain un-enumerated rights. I, as a citizen of the United States, maintain that one of those unenumerated rights is my right to employ technological defenses against government overreach.

I read two ways to interpret that:

- "Government overreach" is to include even searches authorized by a warrant in which case you are defending unrestricted use of encryption.

- "Government overreach" is to only include warrantless searches in which cause you are only defending using encryption in a manner in which a warrant can break the encryption.

Considering the second option is basically the government's position and the rest of your post seemed anti-government, I thought you were advocating for the first interpretation.

[lisper]

> the second option is basically the government's position

The second option is the government's ostensible position. But you seem to have forgotten the central point of my argument which is that the government is not trustworthy. Just because the government says that it will only use its decryption keys when it has a warrant, history shows that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word on matters like this. The government does end-runs around Constitutional rights regularly. Therefore, the power to enforce the Constitution's constraints on government action cannot be entrusted to the government. It must remain with the people.

[slg]

Now we are just going in circles. This goes back to the first sentence of my response to you:

>The problem with this line of argument is that it is a general argument against government and not specific to this issue.

If your argument is that you can't trust the government, you can't trust the government regardless of whether they have a warrant or whether they are operating in the digital or physical world.

[lisper]

> you can't trust the government regardless of whether they have a warrant

If they have a warrant, what exactly is it that you think I need to trust them about at that point?

[slg]

A warrant is a check and balance designed by one arm of the government to give another arm of the government oversight into the actions of a third arm of the government. If you don't trust the government, your trust in the entire system should logically fall apart.

[lisper]

Very different kind of trust. To serve a warrant at my home, agents of the government have to be physically present, and they have to give me a copy of the warrant printed on a sheet of paper. The physics of that situation provides auditability. If the warrant was not genuine, the people who served it would go to prison.

Cryptographic back doors are totally different. It is not possible to build a back door that has auditability built into its basic physics the way warrants do. That the thing that William Barr doesn't understand. His mindset is something like, "If we can send a man to the moon, surely we can make a way for law enforcement to break encryption that doesn't threaten people's rights." Well, no, we can't. Sending a man to the moon is merely difficult. A back door that only "the good guys" can use is actually impossible.