The difference is that strong encryption is an all or nothing proposition. You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried.

Selective censorship by central authorities can be granular, choosing to create a legal process for selective censorship doesn’t suddenly allow any person on the internet to potentially censor any thing they want. Weak encryption however allows anyone, anywhere, with enough effort to break all encryption everywhere, and do so without without detection or needing to expose themselves via a legal system.

Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.

>You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried.

This is always stated as a universal truth of the technology, but this mostly seems like a people and organizational problem. We already have encryption algorithms that can encrypt content for decryption by multiple optional keys. Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities? That would require coordination and agreement to decrypt anything. That wouldn't be a true backdoor anymore than the original key is a backdoor, it would simply be overhead on the existing encrypted content to allow it to be decrypted by multiple keys.

>Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.

This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption, but the people who do that will be a tiny share of overall communication. Laws like this aren't meant to completely stop something. Putting in financial regulations to crack down on money laundering doesn't stop money laundering. The goal is to make it more difficult and prevent the most egregious cases.

> Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities?

There would be thousands if not millions of legitimate decryptions every year. At each instance all of the fragments will need to be put together, creating an opportunity for the data to be exfiltrated.

Additionally your making the assumption that legal agencies will be able to securely store these keys long term (I.e forever). Regardless of your view on the operational and security competency of these agencies, it’s extreme difficulty to keep cryptographic keys secure long term if you need to be able to access them on a regular basis.

Even if you don’t think most criminal organisations will manage this, you can pretty much guarantee that large nation state actors like China and Russia will find a way to get hold of these keys. You then give your largest competitors the ability to seriously damage your economy or steal secrets by either using the keys themselves, or leaking them on the internet. Suddenly every single message sent by every citizen, politician, bank, weapons company etc becomes public for all to see.

> This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption

You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code, or pre-built binaries for a working crypto system, of which there are many. Banning the big companies from using crypto isn’t enough, you also need to ban anyone from talking about crypto as well.

This is very different to money laundering rules. Realistically you can’t opt out of the modern financial system, regardless of what blockchain proponents say, so introducing rules to gatekeep money flows at system choke points makes sense. Also one ability to censor money at choke points doesn’t also create an opportunity for enemies to exploit those same choke points.

The money laundering equivalent of crypto censorship would be like the US deciding that it was going to switch to Bitcoin so that all transactions are public and accessible to law enforcement. Then just kinda hoping that a country like China isn’t going to launch a 51% attack.

Your first three paragraphs are all focusing on structural flaws with my suggestion and not technical limitations of encryption itself. The debate has already moved from this is impossible to this is impractical. We can fix impractical. For example, we can design a way for content to be reencrypted with new keys if anything ever leaks.

>You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code...

Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law. That is the point. You would need to jump through a variety of hoops in order to avoid this. It wouldn't be impossible, but it won't be the default and most people won't go through the effort to do it.

> Your first three paragraphs are all focusing on structural flaws with my suggestion and not technical limitations of encryption itself. The debate has already moved from this is impossible to this is impractical.

I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.

In theory traffic laws should prevent 100% of car accidents. Yet people die every day in traffic accidents.

In theory the judicial system should never execute an innocent person. Yet the US sends people later proven innocent to the electric chair on a semi regular basis.

In theory everyone should have a strong interest is keeping planet earth healthy enough to support human life, yet we’re on a course to cataclysmic climate change.

Alcohol addiction should have ended during prohibition, and weed should be impossible to buy in the US. Yet neither is true.

What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?

> Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law.

Cool we’ll host it on Gitlab then, or one of many no US hosting providers. We can’t even stop people pirating movies despite the media industry throwing billions at the problem. Do you honestly think we’ll have better luck with crypto?

You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?

>I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.

Then let's as an industry try to think through ways to fix these impractical problems. My original goal was not for you and me to design the perfect system in a quick HN conversation. I was instead pointing out that the tech community too often treats this issue as a mathematical impossibility and refuses to engage anyone who pushes back on that. Admitting that something is not impossible but rather so impractical as to be essentially impossible is the first step in figuring out a solution. It is unlike the tech community to see an extremely difficult problem and just refuse any attempt to solve it because of the difficulty.

>What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?

I am repeating myself here, but the goal isn't 100% compliance. No law can achieve that and I don't know you you are projecting that expectation on this conversation. The goal is to address most occurrences.

>You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?

People want to engage in vices. I'm not convinced that people have nearly as strong of a desire for complete privacy as evident by all the behavior we have seen over the last few decades in responses to how governments and corporations invade privacy. It is a popular conspiracy theory that Facebook is secretly recording audio on your phone 24/7 and uses conversations it hears to better target ads. I have multiple friends who genuinely believe this. This belief isn't enough to get them to uninstall Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from their phones. Some people will certainly be willing to go the extra mile for privacy, but most people won't.

> People want to engage in vices. I'm not convinced that people have nearly as strong of a desire for complete privacy as evident by all the behavior we have seen over the last few decades in responses to how governments and corporations invade privacy.

The people law enforcement wants to access is supposedly those traffic CP, terrorise or similar crimes. Those individuals 100% want privacy and will get it.

As for the remaining 99%, there’s no evidence that strong encryption prevents law enforcement from doing their job effectively. Want to see examples of law enforcement circumventing perfect encryption, then look to British police. They solved this problem quite elegantly, you wait for someone to unlock their phone, then you grab it out of their hands.

> Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities?

Because crypto is implemented in software and it’s trivial to remove the part that encrypts for the government’s key.

You completely ignored the last paragraph of my comment where I addressed this type of concern.

Because it’s detached from reality and shows a misunderstanding of how deeply embedded secure crypto is into everything. Nearly every X86 processor now supports AES intrinsics that are used in the building blocks of far beyond encrypting messages (e.g. golang’s hashing).

Additionally, a from scratch implementation of AES in JavaScript or any other modern programming language is a junior level task. Unless you propose trying to ban every copy of the AES algorithm, it will be trivially implemented and passed around regardless of what FAANG does.

Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.

>Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.

You are treating encryption as an independent end goal by itself when it is only a tool that is used during communication and storage. Communication and to a lesser extent storage are highly centralized. How much of the average person's encrypted communication occurs in a channel that is not touched by some US company?

It's not all or nothing, at all. The argument is about whether the material can be theoretically legally recovered like Gmail and Facebook Messenger (currently), or not, like WhatsApp. All these services use encryption and are secure.

I wouldn't say it's all or nothing. Several of the more regressive countries already demand access to decryption keys. The government gets easy access to the data but it's still hard for the non-state bad guys to intercept.

Doesn’t help if people are using end-to-end encryption.

They can block any traffic that they can't decode

Huh? The google example is about content being available in public, essentially the equivalent of someone posting dirty / embarrassing pictures in a public square and needing there to be a way to take them down. That sounds pretty reasonable.

The encryption example is about being able to intercept private communication (never mind outlawing math) because someone could use that private communication for something illegal.

The two examples have nothing to do with each other IMO.

Personally I'm not convinced the rewards outweigh the risks in regards to encryption, at least not at this moment in time. But again, I'd much rather issues like these were debated democratically than some tech company deciding one day that they need to view my private messages to "protect the children".

But to your point, if the sharing of child porn or other illegal content ever got so bad that something urgently needed to be done I would personally be open to limiting the use E2EE (if there truly was no better option) and I'd assume most people here would agree, although I would argue in many cases it's E2EE that prevents you from becoming a victim of things like revenge porn in the first place.

The thing about E2EE is that it's not something that you can meaningfully ban in a non-totalitarian society. RSA boils down to one fairly simple formula, for example, or a Perl one-liner. People who really need it will figure it out.

Besides, there would be quite a few people who'd be actively circumventing any such law if it were enacted, e.g. by hosting the apps in other jurisdictions. And I think that's a good thing! There should be fundamental limits on the power of governance, regardless of how democratic said governance is; and democracies can be no less abusive than other forms when it comes to minorities etc. Or even majorities, when established public mores essentially require widespread hypocrisy - the Prohibition comes to mind. "Think of the children" (or terrorists, or whatever is the go-to political excuse at any particular moment) is not a valid exception.

>I'd much rather issues like these were debated democratically than some tech company deciding one day that they need to view my private messages to "protect the children".

I agree with your general point except most people in the tech community are not willing to even have these debates. It is often treated as an issue with a single right answer and that encryption can never be compromised.

Removing ourselves from the debate is only going to end up with the decision being made without our input.