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July 24, 2019 02:49 pm PDT

William Barr's terrible, stupid idea to ban working crypto is slightly less terrible and stupid than earlier ideas

Proposals to ban working cryptography were all the rage in the Clinton years, but then they fell out of vogue for a decade, only to come roaring back in the form of bizarre proposals each stupider than the last, with Australia bringing home the gold in the Dumbfuck Olympics.

One feature of all this foolishness is the oft-repeated claim that it is possible to produce cryptography that fails every time the cops need it to, but never fails when criminals, spies, stalkers and identity thieves need it to. This is so implausible and obviously wrong that even people who only have the vaguest idea of how crypto works still immediately grasp that it is either a) bullshit or b) wishful thinking.

Enter William Barr, the new US Attorney General, who also wants to ban working cryptography. Though Barr's desire to ban working crypto is no less deadly and awful than, say, Rod Rosenstein's, Barr is doing one thing different: he's admitting that banning working crypto will make all the people who rely on crypto less secure, with the "trade off" that it will make society more secure because cops will find it easier to spy on "bad guys."

Even if Barr less wrong than other people on his side, he's still wrong. For one thing, it's impossible to keep working crypto out of the hands of bad guys, because working crypto tools are made all over the world and are licensed as free/open source software, and they run on any general-purpose computer, which is every computer, so as a practical matter, any ban on working crypto will only work if people who are willing to commit acts of terror and other bad deeds are intimidated at the thought of facing civil penalties for installing illegal software. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/swAKm-75er0/math-denialism.html

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