Reply to post: The cat is out of the bag

Hillary Clinton: Stop helping terrorists, Silicon Valley – weaken your encryption

choleric

The cat is out of the bag

So what they want is for all law abiding citizens to use compromised encryption, while the terrorists etc. will still presumably use strong encryption, just fairly undetectably.

Really, on the wire, how do you spot the difference? How can you quickly tell that an encrypted stream of bits is encrypted using, for example, DES or AES128? Presumably they both look similar in their apparent randomness until you try to crack them.

Surely it just muddies the waters? The security services get a warm cozy feeling knowing they can decrypt 99.999% (most of it will be spam or adverts) of encrypted comms easily, and they pass that on to their political "overseers" who in turn repeat the reassurances to a worried population. But all the while the 0.001% the security forces should be keeping an eye on is inaccessible to them. And this is only discovered when they try to crack the messages they want. At which point they realise they have damaged everyone's security except for those they should have been targeting.

Meanwhile, following the principles of "unintended consequences" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely", other uses are discovered for the weak encryption on the bulk of the population's private conversations with one another.

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