Re: OK...so public encryption gets banned...
The issue is trust. We presently have a reasonable stable system which has people actively digging for weaknesses which then get published (OK, that's an assumption, so let's add "most of the time" - an assumption in itself but borne out by recent publications of issues), and people coming up with new approaches such as elliptic curve which then get a good shakedown in that community.
In other words, the openness and collaborative/competitive nature engenders good protection that you get get secondary opinions on, and there's a good standard of quality of which you can base a risk assessment that says "yeah, we're OK with this, if we have really scary/expensive/secret things to transmit we may need to go deeper, but we can live with this"
If you want to lower that standard, you change the risk equation, and that results in a lot more problems as well as a FAR higher cost as you have somehow cover the resulting exposure. Given that even with today's theoretical standards we see seriously shoddy real life implementations (witness all the exposures), LOWERING standards an any aspect of the chain of trust is world's worst idea ever.
But hey, that would be the logical conclusion. The political, backstabbing, point scoring and fake expertise conclusion clearly differs. And those idiots get to write laws.
To me, that's yet another argument to make sure that the US influence over the rest of the world is curtailed. There's no reason for the rest of the world to be torn down with it, there's far too much leverage and dependency as there is.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
