British PM Seeks Ban On Encryption After Terror Attack (boingboing.net)

"British Prime Minister Theresa May has used last Saturday's terrorist attack to again push for a ban on encryption," according to ITWire. Slashdot reader troublemaker_23 shared their article, which quotes this strong rebuttal from Cory Doctorow: Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the "good guys" are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption... Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for. For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction... any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in 'golden keys' that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

Comments

Re:Wouldn't that make the government vulnerable?

[AHuxley]

The thinking goes back to Defence of the Realm Act 1914 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Breaking Enigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . The Uk looking at all other nations 1910 to 2017 embassy codes.
Every call in the Soviet Union, East/West Germany, France, Japan been looked at for things of any interest to the UK.
Crypto was great for the UK in the Falklands War too. The UK could read everything in real time. Except some South African hardware, but that was solved too.
That was all hidden away from the wider public and interesting people kept chatting away thinking that call could never be detected.
The first changes to that was a policy shift between the UK and USA.
The USA wanted to share results within the USA, to allow police, mil, contractors to use raw collection results and get results.
More people looking, more results.
The UK knew results would leak to lawyers, police, human rights groups, spies, criminals and bad people would just understand not use phone/internet again.
The US policy finally won and now collect it all and using the results in public.
Courts, police, mil, gov can share results and the public soon knows its been collected on 24/7.
So who is right? The US with collect it all, sort it all, study it all, police it all?

Or the UK method of the 1970-80's? No courts, no police, no lawyers, no human rights groups, no media, no political groups working out methods.
Just groups like the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch worked with raw material. Action was then taken and nobody knew anything or could request any details.
Was it an informant? A phone call? A copied paper file? A computer file? Something in the funding from the USA to Irish groups? The UK police was kept away from any and all raw information, the UK press did not know who to ask, UK lawyers did not see anything in any type of courts. Telco workers did not see changes to the amount of police/court requests.

Its a generational change between a US view of more contractors, the private sector, courts, police, lawyers, telcos been fully trusted. Collect it all, use it all.
Or the older UK view of only trust the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch.
Breaking encryption only works if nobody ever knows and the UK mil, GCHQ and RUC Special Branch could then go get results.

Re:real world

[chihowa]

The Nazis were socialist. The rise of the Nazi party was in large part due to Germany's situation after WWI and the rejection of international socialism (proto-Marxism, the step before the abolition of the state) and capitalism. The goal was to create a "national socialism", that tied the ownership of the means of production to a nationalistic state. It's basically fascism, except with the corporations subordinate to the state instead of the state subordinate to, or on equal footing with, the corporations.

I know you're thinking that "Nazi == bad; socialism == good; therefore Nazis weren't socialist".
If you stop assigning intrinsic value judgements to economic and political systems, you'll have a much easier time making sense of the world around you.