[FORGED] Re: UK To Ban Crypto In Devices, Email And More

[Joseph Gentle]

On 7 Nov 2015 11:34 AM, "Peter Gutmann" <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Joseph Gentle <me at josephg.com> writes:
>
> I don't really want to get involved in this debate (who has that much
> asbestos?), but wanted to comment on one thing:
>
> >You just don't see guns in Australia. I don't know anyone who has one.
>
> You're a townie then?  If it's like NZ, pretty much every farm in the
country
> has (or had) one or more rifles, typically a .303 because they were cheap
and
> a .22 for dealing with rabbit infestations (they're mostly useless against
> possums, another major plague).  Also, the fact that you don't see them
> doesn't say anything about whether they're there or not.  At the time of
the
> gun grab, a friend of mine who lived in Queensland and was doing some
work on
> his house found it more or less impossible to buy PVC fittings of
particular
> sizes and types, the explanation being that the stocks had been drained by
> people using them to sequester their firearms.  So they may have managed
to
> destroy large numbers of firearms, but they also drove large numbers off
the
> books and underground (literally, in many cases).
>
> Peter.

Yeah I've lived in Sydney most of my life.

But this goes back to my original point - despite lots of guns being
quietly hidden around the place, most crimes still don't use them! Which is
not at all an obvious outcome. It implies that most crimes aren't well
planned and premeditated, and that simply making something *inconvenient*
goes a long way toward banning it, even if people have strong incentives to
overcome the inconvenience.

We've seen exactly this with crypto too. Industry grade crypto has existed
for years, but things like PGP being simply *inconvenient* has resulted in
it having virtually no adoption. The big threat to pervasive surveillance
isn't pgp, its companies like apple and whatsapp bringing that technology
to the masses. The UK government only has to outlaw the big players
implementing decent crypto, and 90%+ of communications will still be
visible to surveillance. Even amongst criminals.

We should be worried, but this isn't a play for us.

-J
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