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Comment by ben_w

7 hours ago

The EU delegates stuff to the member states, those states enforce laws, that could in principal include requiring everything up from the physical link layer to scan for watever they say so.

> Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.

Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send.

"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.

> policy/economic problem instead

Instead? Everything about this is about groups wanting to act in secret for their best interests, and other people wanting to ensure that only the interests they share get to do that. This is true when it's me logging into my bank and criminals trying to get access to the same, when it's the Russian government sponsoring arson attacks in Europe and local police trying to stop them, and when it's the CIA promoting Tor for democracy activists in dictatorships and those dictatorships trying to stop them.

We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.

It is possible for unauthorized hardware to exist. People who want to do illegal things to begin with won't mind so much if their methods of communication happen to be illegal.

  • Irrelevant.

    1) Illegal telecoms equipment can be seized

    2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets *never ever* went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.

> "white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.

It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.

It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

  • > It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what?

    If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail.

    > It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.

    It's also economically unfeasible.

    Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?