Re:IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant
by betterunix on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @10:35PM
(#5529625)
"I don't want technology to rule us, I want us, humans, to rule technology"
Personally, I want technology to solve human problems. If technical solutions to problems exist, they should always be preferred over legal solutions. We do not need to increase the size of an already out-of-control legal code, and we do not need more laws that will be selectively enforced (as almost all laws are).
"it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails)."
That is not an insurmountable problem: get an email client that can do full text searches of your email by automatically decrypting it while the search is performed. If for some reason you need to export your search to some server, cryptographers have developed systems for doing that in a secure way, though their computation cost is a bit high (much more than searching the plaintext).
"I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case."
I would be cautious about that. It is almost certainly the case that such a law would not be enforced when a government agency or large corporation are breaking it -- see e.g. the warrantless wiretapping program. More likely, such a law would be used when a whistleblower exploits a weakness in a cryptosystem to expose government wrongdoing.
Expanding the legal code is dangerous. We have so many laws that the government has lost track:
We have seen over and over how this vast legal code is abused to crack down on protesters and dissidents. Adding more laws to it is just asking for more trouble, and doing so when we have technical solutions is a pointless risk.
"while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed."
Sure -- but we are not talking about those problems, we are talking about a specific problems that is well studied and which has been solved for decades.
Personally, I want technology to solve human problems. If technical solutions to problems exist, they should always be preferred over legal solutions. We do not need to increase the size of an already out-of-control legal code, and we do not need more laws that will be selectively enforced (as almost all laws are).
"it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails)."
That is not an insurmountable problem: get an email client that can do full text searches of your email by automatically decrypting it while the search is performed. If for some reason you need to export your search to some server, cryptographers have developed systems for doing that in a secure way, though their computation cost is a bit high (much more than searching the plaintext).
"I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case."
I would be cautious about that. It is almost certainly the case that such a law would not be enforced when a government agency or large corporation are breaking it -- see e.g. the warrantless wiretapping program. More likely, such a law would be used when a whistleblower exploits a weakness in a cryptosystem to expose government wrongdoing.
Expanding the legal code is dangerous. We have so many laws that the government has lost track:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230431980457638...
We have seen over and over how this vast legal code is abused to crack down on protesters and dissidents. Adding more laws to it is just asking for more trouble, and doing so when we have technical solutions is a pointless risk.
"while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed."
Sure -- but we are not talking about those problems, we are talking about a specific problems that is well studied and which has been solved for decades.