Why Governments Lie About Encryption Backdoors (vortex.com)

Lauren Weinstein says there are smart people in government, "who fully understand the technical realities of modern strong encryption systems and how backdoors would catastrophically weaken them," but asks So why do they continue to argue for these backdoor mechanisms, now more loudly than ever? The answer appears to be that they're lying to us. Or if lying seems like too strong a word, we could alternatively say they're being 'incredibly disingenuous' in their arguments. You don't need to be a computer scientist to follow the logic of how we reach this unfortunate and frankly disheartening determination regarding governments' invocation of terrorism as an excuse for demanding crypto backdoors for authorities' use.

Comments

Re:Lie?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I don't understand why people believe a single word from the (US) government

It's part of their religion.

Every time, on nearly every topic but especially security / military, what they say turns out to be not true.

Talking snakes poll even better - objective truth has little relevance.

But also consider the mental load of admitting that they're being economically and culturally ruined by these people. That would imply a moral imperative to action, which would require them to get off the couch. Technology has created the best living conditions in human history which brings comfort. They don't realize that fascistic regulations prevent that technology & comfort from being many times better. That's where the flying cars are.

Re:They got used to it

[Kjella]

Well I think it's just as much the general public not being used to early, brutal death anymore. I just checked the mortality statistics here in Norway:

0-1 years old: <0.25%
0-45 years old: <2%
0-66 years old: <10%

That is rather amazing when you consider there's still fatal accidents, diseases, murder and suicide. But we're chipping away at it bit by bit, adding safety measures, advancing medicine, reducing crime, improving mental care. Then a guy with a Kalashnikov fucks it up good, killing lots of people who with 98-99% probability should have lived decades, minimum. I'm not sure how they really coped with that during WWI and WWII when young men (and quite a few others) were dying left, right and center but I know today it's such an abomination we don't deal with it at all. We want it solved and eradicated, not just make the reasonable precautions and live with the residual risk.