I feel like they missed the primary point which is that E2E encryption is the primary thing protecting everyone from hackers/criminals/other-governments. Without it the criminals WILL have access to your systems and data and then you can basically say goodbye to anything being valuable at all.
Locking your door at night is a poor metaphor. A criminal can literally infiltrate and search through every unsecured computer connected to the internet in a matter of minutes and using almost no resources and with little risk. This drastically diverges from physical assets.
Making encryption illegal will ensure that only criminals use it, thus making only criminals safe online.
> Banning encryption is such an attack on privacy that it's closer to banning clothes and easing concerns by making looking at naked people illegal.
This is completely missing the point of why one needs privacy. Lack of it harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.
Yes, and the government has created convenient carve outs for its self. For example in Carroll v. United States, the judicial branch surrendered its authority to authorize searches to the executive branch. For searches of your vehicle, all the police need is probable cause. The police, of course, determine if they have probable cause. So this makes the 4th amendment irrelevant in these circumstances.
Throughout US history, there is a march towards ignoring citizens rights, through political, judicial, and bureaucratic maneuvering. The constitution is a piece of paper. There are people who’s full time job is to separate your understanding of your rights from what is written in that document. When they’re clever enough, they will allow state violence to be imposed on you with no repercussions.
> For example in Carroll v. United States, the judicial branch surrendered its authority to authorize searches to the executive branch.
The judicial branch can choose not to enforce the Constitution, contrary to its duty and purpose, but what they can't do—what no branch of the government can do without amending the Constitution—is legally authorize any agent of the government to perform a search or seize property (i.e. issue a warrant—whether they use that term or not) without "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The text is perfectly clear and permits no exceptions or "carve outs". I doubt the intent was for the police to issue their own warrants, but even if the judiciary grants them that power they still have to fulfill the requirements.
Of course if you're just saying that what they can get away with in practice and what the Constitution actually allows are two different things, I agree. There are rights, constitutional and otherwise—and then there is power. Every time they do this, however, it undermines whatever legitimacy or respect they might have otherwise had. Any thug can steal your stuff or invade your privacy and have a chance at getting away with it. To the extent a government wants its actions to be seen as legitimate it can't afford to ignore that "piece of paper" it was founded on.
> The police, of course, determine if they have probable cause.
What counts as "probable cause" is indeed the weakest part of the 4th Amendment. At the very least, if a given "cause" does not lead to the target's conviction in a majority of cases, of a crime sufficient to justify the search, then you cannot reasonably consider it "probable". Unfortunately that can only be observed in retrospect. It would have been better to require full compensation to the victim for any search or seizure which does not lead to their conviction, ensuring that the incentives are properly aligned.
I considered writing that it's more like building your house out of glass.
The important point I'm trying to convey is that banning encryption is so extreme that it makes invasion of privacy something that someone can accidentally do. You have to try not to look, similar to if a person was nude in front of you against their will.
The FSF isn't the EFF. The FSF is supposed to advocate why the stupid law is an affront to user freedom and the EFF is meant to be advocating why the stupid law makes people vulnerable to criminals.
The FSF has a complicated and niche advocacy position, they should stay focused. If they don't advocate software user freedom, nobody will. In this case, there are already lots of people against encryption restrictions.
That is probably why the FSF has published an article with the title "EARN-IT threatens encryption and therefore user freedom".
But the point that the FSF needs to focus on is that EARN-IT is bad because it limits user freedom. The fact that users may choose to use that freedom to protect themselves from criminals isn't the issue. There might be an obvious and compelling reason users need freedom or there might not be. The FSF doesn't need to care and should be against the bill regardless.
Much like how the FSF doesn't care about whether the GPL is economic or not - they think software projects should all be licensed under it (or an equivalently free license). The point isn't whether freedom is good or necessary. That is taken as a priori truth. The point the FSF advocates is whether users have it.
> Without it the criminals WILL have access to your systems and data
Replacing criminals and state overreach with foreign adversaries may be more salient.
Our encryption debate came of age after the Cold War. The boogeymen of that era have been surpassed. We have new ones, and they're more sinister than thieves and more tangible than a your government turning on you.
> Replacing criminals and state overreach with foreign adversaries may be more salient.
For you and me, certainly. For the members of Congress you need to convince of this? They ARE the state. Outside of a few ideological libertarians, protecting the people from the state is not on their agenda.
Completely agree. Encryption is subversive. It has the power to defeat governments, judges, armies. They can't tolerate mere citizens being in possession of such technology. They are tempted by the complete visibility and control afforded by the digital world of the 21st century, but encryption is already denying them information and they can't stand it.
Which is strange because our security is their security. If we don't have security then we are more vulnerable to foreign influences. We are more vulnerable to foreign attacks. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either everyone has security or no one does, including politicians and elites.
This is an interesting angle I´d not heard before, as cryptography had at least at some point been classified as munitions (maybe still is, I haven't been watching that).
"Okay, in that case, the constitution says you can't infringe my right to it."
Although I would fear going down that path would lead to them saying, "Well, we already infringe on access to certain kinds of munitions, so you can still have encryption, but only the stuff we have a backdoor to." which has been on the agenda before.
Interesting bit of history, PGP was publicly released by Phil Zimmermann. The US government went after him with criminal charges for violating munitions export laws.
He won because he published his source code in a printed book, and was able to effectively argue that his act was protected under the first amendment right to free speech.
The munitions angle for cryptography didn't prevent us from having it, but it did prevent us from EXPORTING it globally. At least if I remember the debate correctly.
This makes me wonder how one would even prove that something were encrypted.
Do encrypted files/data universally follow any sort of pattern? If not, then how would they be discernible from transmitting random bits? Will that be illegal, too?
Note that I'm not talking about any specific existing encryption algorithms or protocols. I am positing that someone could devise a new one that outputs data that is indistinguishable from noise (without breaking the cipher/keys).
That and I think it is pretty safe to say that the reasons most constitutions specifically prohibit governments to access these kind of private correspondance are quite obvious too.
> I feel like they missed the primary point which is that E2E encryption is the primary thing protecting everyone from hackers/criminals/other-governments.
Implementing a backdoor securely which only allows some government agencies to snoop in the decrypted data could technically be possible but I never happened to see a secure implementation of such a scheme – probably every cryptographer of name would refrain from contributing to insecurity.
So, IF a backdoor would be implemented securely, that would increase the power of the current government over all the people, including the opposition. If the US would go ahead with such legislation, countries like Hungary and Poland would follow soon, in which the new tool would be welcomed to suppress opinions diverting from the governments ideology, undermining freedom of speech further and increasing the "chilling effect".
In the mean-time, terrorists (etc.) would switch to steganography and add an undetectable layer of encryption on top.
I am starting to wonder if this bill is why CNN published an article on FB allowing some violence posts, but not others riling up people like me, who likes rules applied consistently and without favoritism.
Missing the point is part of their strategy in passing this. They don't make these decisions without input from people who actually understand these things. They will play the tech illiterate boomer as part of the strategy. They're creating "rules for thee not for me". They will selectively choose who can and can't use things they see as a threat to their hegemony.
"Making dealing drugs illegal will ensure that only criminals can profit off dealing drugs, thus making only criminals rich."
We can play this game all day with many forms of abolition for any good or service that has a relatively inelastic demand and/or is impossible to effectively enforce.
Locking your door at night is a poor metaphor. A criminal can literally infiltrate and search through every unsecured computer connected to the internet in a matter of minutes and using almost no resources and with little risk. This drastically diverges from physical assets.
Making encryption illegal will ensure that only criminals use it, thus making only criminals safe online.