[Cryptography] Schneier's Internet Security Agency - bad idea because we don't know what it will do

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Mon Feb 27 10:35:48 EST 2017


At 06:36 AM 2/27/2017, Nicholas Bohm wrote:
>On 26/02/2017 21:16, Henry Baker wrote:
>When I was growing up, there was a daily newspaper cartoon entitled "There oughta be a law!"
>>
>>http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/there_oughta_be_a_law/
>>
>>However, after I grew up, studied computer science, and finally understood *undecidability*, I realized that a "legal"/"lawful" solution to every problem was logically and mathematically impossible.
>>
>>Here we are 80+ years after undecidability raised its ugly head and destroyed the "Age of Enlightenment"/"Age of Reason", and yet no legal scholars, lawyers, economists, or public policy people living today have even heard of this concept of undecidability, much less understand that it renders most of their efforts more futile than Sisyphus's.
>
>What you say would be true if law worked like an algorithm, but it doesn't.  "The Life of the law has not been logic.  It has been experience."  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
>
>A court can and will decide every justiciable issue presented to it.  It can do so because the law is not a system of rules but a system of action proceeding under the guidance of rules but in so proceeding modifying and adapting those rules.
>
>(I write as a former practising lawyer who got his understanding of undecidability from Hofstadter's famous book.)

(I'm very sorry that you never got beyond Hofstadter, which is now incredibly dated; what he says is correct from the perspective of computer science, but he didn't do a good enough job explaining the implications for non-CS people.  See Propublica link below.)

You (and OW Holmes, whose views on eugenics [Buck v Bell] led directly to the Holocaust) are so, so, naive!

What you are describing is the rule of *men* (and women), not the rule of *law*.

Replacing the precise operations of computers with the "black box" approach of the administrative state doesn't improve things one bit, and certainly doesn't fix the undecidability problem; it merely obscures the operation of the law so that it becomes too difficult/expensive to challenge it.  But just as security through obscurity doesn't work, neither does justice through obscurity work.

Propublica has been exploring at length the nightmare that this muddled legal thinking has produced:

https://www.propublica.org/series/machine-bias



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