Would you please not do flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong or irritating some other comments are? We're really trying to avoid the downward spiral here.

The analogy is flawed, and the final sentence is condescending.

All things in your list have an inherent physical danger. Neither encryption nor cryptography are themselves dangerous, they're a means of encoding some other thing which may or may not be dangerous into something whose danger cannot be determined.

Imperfect analogy, but crypto is more like a safe than anything you list. An ensuing argument is, we need to regulate (crypto) safes not because they are themselves dangerous, but because their contents might be.

The means of encryption-decryption, code, is considered free speech (Bernstein vs U.S. 9th Circuit, and Junger v Daley, 6th Circuit). Thus far crypto is itself protect, but the usage of crypto is an open question.

With a real safe, police with probable cause can get a warrant, and forcibly gain access to the safe and see the contents. This isn't possible with crypto if the key owner refuses to cooperate, and why there's the ensuing problem of sanctioning the person for contempt of court when ordering access and they don't cooperate.

The dispute has nothing to do with analogies though, it has to do with a power transfer. Crypto permits some transfer of power from the sovereign to the individual. And that has altered the social contract. It's done. And now after the fact we're trying to sort out the consequences of that power transfer, and whether or not the sovereign gets to reign it back in, and how. And that's unanswered.

> If we could restrict the use of encryption by the bad guys without compromising it's use by the good guys

oh, don't you worry, the politicians will do it anyway, with much public support, and then you will sound like the crazy, paranoid one arguing for military grade assault encryption in the hands of the dangerous, villainous public.

edit: i see you deleted the part i quoted. makes sense. cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing. feels like razor blades in the mind!

If your idea of reasoned discussion is responding to my comments with logical fallacies, there's no point in wasting any more time on you. Good day.

This breaks the HN guidelines. Accounts that are uncivil and flame others eventually get banned, so would you please (re)-read the following, and abide by them? That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Another thing we're trying to avoid is the generic ideological tangent: that's when a topic with something specific in it (Australian government current encryption plans) gets diluted into topics like "pacifism" and "genocide", about which no HN thread has anything new to say, but plenty of people will get agitated and sucked into battle. This is the reason why the guidelines say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."