Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Encryption Ban Would Only Send the Market Overseas (dailydot.com)

Posted by timothy on from the captain-obvious-on-the-encrypted-line dept.

Patrick O'Neill writes: As U.S. legislatures posture toward legally mandating backdoored encryption, a new Harvard study suggests that a ban would push the market overseas because most encryption products come from over non-U.S. tech companies. "Cryptography is very much a worldwide academic discipline, as evidenced by the quantity and quality of research papers and academic conferences from countries other than the U.S.," the researchers wrote.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Only Outlaws will Have Encryption by NReitzel · · Score: 5, Informative

    You would have thought that our government would have learned when they attempted to ban PGP, decades ago.

    For those of you who don't remember, the software got classified as a munition, people who sold it could be arrested as arms trafficers. Downloads instantly moved from US servers to those in Finland (and elsewhere) and the end result was a big spectacular nothing.

    Calmer heads prevailed, in the long run.

    The technology is out there, the knowledge of how to do encryption is impossible to stuff back into the bottle.

    --

    Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.

  2. Re:If a person doesn't already see this point.... by MitchDev · · Score: 3, Informative

    Except the police aren't there to protect you....they are there to protect "the state"

  3. "Send the Market Overseas"... Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think the headline was missing something:

    "US Encryption Ban Would Only Send the Market Overseas".... Again.

    They tried this ITAR ban on exporting encryption back in the 1990s and people just moved open source software projects to overseas servers and were careful not to openly contribute encryption code to those projects.

    It is complete idiocy and fatally undermines US national security to ban encryption or put restrictions on its use. The US has the most to lose security-wise by making it harder to secure communications in the US. Everything we do and say is track-able online.

    For every potentially missed terror cell you might find by trolling through unencrypted communications, there are millions of government employees walking around vulnerable to having their personal (and official) communications hacked by all sorts of state sponsored and non-state sponsored groups all because the government has put pressure on providers not to make communications "too secure".

    I don't want terrorists to kill people, but I also don't want to have our national security so vulnerable as collateral damage.