[Cryptography] What if Responsible Encryption Back-Doors Were Possible?

[Ray Dillinger]

On 12/8/18 11:09 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> 
> It's probably obvious but seems to get forgotten a lot
> by all sides in this discussion, so...
> 
> On 07/12/2018 22:21, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>> We need a system for accessing the systems of a few dangerous criminals
>> that allows the government
> 
> There are O(200) governments in the world, yet all depend
> on the same mathematics (no matter what they think in Oz:-)
> and we all use the same Internet. Those are important reasons
> why there is no such thing as a responsible back-door. 

Okay.  Consider the idea for allowing it but not allowing it to remain
secret withdrawn.  It sort of works when there is only one government
you're talking about and they are answerable to the public or at least
capable of shame...  But that, is not the world in which we live.  There
are too many entities who just plain wouldn't be at all restrained by
that fact.



Your point being that even given the inability to use it *in secret*, as
has been the preference of the US with its mass-harvesting programs,
there are plenty of people who just plain don't give enough of a crap
whether anybody knows they're mass-harvesting everybody's data, and
they'd just do it and probably covertly sell it to everybody else who
didn't want to be on record as having mass-harvested everybody's data.

That ... is probably true.  China, for example, really and truly doesn't
give a crap whether its snooping on everybody it can remains secret or
not.  Having a snooping-but-no-secret-snooping mechanism would just
result in them methodically harvesting everything.

And once that started, it would be harder for people to care about
someone else doing it.  And someone else, and someone else....



				Bear

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20181210/c2a4d8e3/attachment.sig>