>I'm talking about the government's ability to collect information about conversations you had 10 years ago after a suspected crime which occurred, say, last week.
You know that people used to put a lot of their conversations onto paper, right?
If you kept your ten year old letters, and the government had cause to believe you'd committed a bunch of crimes (maybe you hadn't? you seem like an all right guy, the government probably just goofed, these things happen), it could go and search your ten year old conversations and see if they contained proof of you committing a bunch of crimes.
The fact that we uses electrons and binary math instead of paper and ink doesn't change anything at all.
>Here are detailed responses to Sam Harris [1] and President Obama [2]
I appreciate the effort but these read like the same doomsday scenarios where it's just treated as an inevitable given that providing a method of government access is directly equivalent to providing access to any and every hacker.
>there will be data breaches, people will be upset, they won't buy iPhones, and this industry will disappear from the US overnight
This is the kind of doomsaying I'm talking about. Most people don't buy iPhones for their disk encryption, they buy iPhones because they're shiny and have the apple logoand you can do facebook with them. The PSN breach didn't stop Sony from selling 35 million playstation 4s; an iPhone breach would inconvenience some people, be embarrassing for apple, and then everyone would continue on buying iPhones because the alternative is to not buy an iPhone, which most iPhone owners would consider about as acceptable as cutting off one of their own hands.
>You do realize the Freedom of Speech was literally created to enable political dissent that used to involve criminal acts?
key word: used to.
The people, via the vehicle of the government, collectively decided to make those acts legal, thus giving people the freedom to commit legal, non-criminal acts of speech, which were 1. legal, and 2. not illegal.
It is trivially easy for anyone not emotionally invested in failing to understand it, to understand how this is different from giving people the freedom to commit acts that everybody agrees are illegal, should be illegal, and should stay illegal, just because apple has figured out how to engineer a product 100% immune to government scrutiny.
Is there some reason why the government wouldn't be able to license the use of unadulterated crypto for purposes it doesn't give a shit about, like you transmitting your credit card number to online retailers, while mandating some form of government access in situations where it does give a shit, such as being able to access the data stored on disk-encrypted cell phones?
>These are new powers that the government started to acquire
Why do people here persistently insist, even after being corrected, that the government's 228 year old authority to conduct warranted search and seizure is some kind of shadowy and scary "new power"?
The government has always had the right to look at your photos, listen to your calls, and read your mail, when you are legitimately suspected of a crime.
Nowadays all those things are on your phone, so the government has the right to search your phone, when you are legitimately suspected of a crime.
Nothing about this is in any way new, and it's grossly dishonest to continue to claim that it is.
>By definition of guaranteeing access to encrypted data, they will be required to maintain such weaknesses. It'd be catastrophic for our tech industry and my future as a software engineer.
Maybe it legitimately is the case that it's impossible for techies to ensure warranted government access without guaranteeing that same access to any and every hacker on Earth.
But the more I read these doomsday scenarios from people who are mystified by the one-sentence, 64-word text of the 4th amendment, the less I'm able to believe them.
>The government is demanding new powers: the power to search our communications
This is an embarrassingly bad opinion and it's embarrassing for HN that it's at the top of the thread.
The constitution does not require a rewrite to the fourth amendment every time some nerd comes up with a new widget.
The government has always had the right to conduct warranted searches of communications, whether that was opening mail, wiretapping phones, or just good old-fashioned eavesdropping.
Strong unadulterated crypto threatens to take that existing, longstanding power away from the government. The government is hardly going to give up without a fight.
Because the government correctly perceives unbreakable crypto as an assault on its sovereignty.
Sovereignty is the principle that the government can do whatever it decides to do. Stuff like the 10A doesn't infringe on sovereignty because that's the government itself deciding that it shouldn't do certain things. Like if the goverment decided to, it could kick your door in, find your private diary, and read everything you've written in it. Our government has regulations moderating the use of that power, because it has decided that in most circumstances it shouldn't do that. But if the government has good reason to suspect that you're using your diary to, say, make plans for murdering people? Then the government can go right ahead and break your door down and read your diary and see if you're doing that.
(unbreakable) Crypto is different. Crypto is an infinitely high, infinitely deep wall around your house that the government can never breach, no matter how justified the government decides it is in breaching that wall. Crypto is the government sending combined might of the entire US army, navy, air force, and national guard to breach your wall, and failing. Are you within your wall engaging in acts of political speech? The government cannot stop you. Are you within your wall raping your child slaves? The government cannot stop you. Are you within your wall building a nuclear weapon that you plan to use to blow up everyone outside your wall? The government cannot stop you.
Within the cryptographic envelope, government can't govern. This isn't something the government can tolerate, because governments that can't govern aren't governments, they're just a bunch of people with opinions. So yes, the government will continue to fight these battles, because for the government these battles are an existential concern.
I'm not sure why San Francisco being an enormously popular place that lots of people want to live in is a reason why we need to raze San Francisco and build something else there instead, vs. and not a reason why we shouldn't go to one of the many other shite places that everyone hates, raze that, and build more San Francsico.
Yeah I think the best lesson to take from the parable is to keep the ego and corresponding negative emotions out of it.
There's nothing really wrong with what he told the guy (at least, what he says he told the guy), it's just that by his own words, the way he said it came across like him being a .
When instead if he'd been able to get past his anger/offense at being questioned, he could have done the same thing but positively, like "dude check out all this awesome shit i am literally already doing for you, for free! Doesn't that actually look like you are getting a pretty sweet deal?" And so then instead of this client being like "oh well fuck me for asking I guess" he could have been like "whoa shit this guy is giving me the sick hookup, I better hire him all the time from now on forever!"
Unflappable except supposedly they literally can't read this website out of the inescapable fear that someone will make a pun about man pages, and then someone else will be unimpressed with their outrage at a pun about man pages.