The argument “lol u can’t outlaw math” in favor of encryption isn’t convincing. That’s like saying building bombs should be legal because it’s just chemistry.
The points are:
1. Strong encryption is necessary for the modern world
2. Backdoors & golden keys will always fail
“Hacking should be legal because you can’t outlaw altering the charges in the transistors of someone else’s CPU!!”
I’m pretty sure the reason it always comes back to “you can’t outlaw math” is nerds want to (rightfully) show contempt for politicians not understanding technology.
But they don’t give a shit. Literally not at all. They just want to spy on you because it advances their careers.
@hakan_geijer Nerds and not understanding law and politics, name a more iconic duo etc.
@hakan_geijer It's amazing how folks say this when a sharing fucking individual number was illegal.
@RC @hakan_geijer now that i think about it, there's a ton of information that probably _should_ be illegal to publish (credible threats of violence, other people's private information...) that could be converted to a number (whether from a string or from a file) and where a particularly pedantic person could say "it's just math".
@RC @hakan_geijer having said that, i _do_ think that laws like the d.m.c.a. that automatically rule all drm-breaking code to be illegal, are absurd.
@devurandom @RC UTF-8 strings can be reversibly converted into very larger integers so all sentences are just math
@hakan_geijer Also backdoors and golden keys /miss the point/! I don't want them snooping on our private conversations online any more than they could our private conversations offline, because uh we don't /have/ offline people to have conversations with.
@IceWolf I agree that privacy is a sufficient right but it’s probably easier to convince some old MP fucker that his bank will absolutely get hacked if they ban crypto than convince him to care about privacy.
Yes, you totally can outlaw math by crushing papers on it or using GitHub takedowns. Or distributing compiled apps with crypto in them.
And yes people will resist this, at first, until it becomes easier to go with it.
Like. That’s how authoritarian creep always works. It doesn’t matter that it’s just math.