Could We Ban Encryption? - Computerphile 

Totally agree!

kevnar That is what Freedom of Information tries to solve

Nick Pearson except it doesn't. The same people who're required to give you those government documents are in charge of ensuring that no data gets released that can compromise naitonal security. So they strip out 99% of all text and other content in most things you request, and simply deny the request for 99% of the rest of your requests.

kevnar i agree to an extent. i think policy and spending should be visible. all their communications leading up to it? ... not so much... and absolutely any military action should be kept under locks. we're talking about information that could be abused to end lives here

RockOnBuckethead I was mostly being sarcastic. I know they're supposed to have privacy, but they should extend the same respect to us, too.

GeekIWG become? They already are.

***** true dat. :(

GeekIWG The bigger problem is that opening ANY backdoor into a given encryption technique is a major security hole that diminishes its usefulness altogether. If it's penetrable anywhere except the endpoints it's a flawed encryption method. So governments mandating access is fundamentally opposed to how encryption works.

Mamish Demamish If they also had the backdoors, not only would rouge governments use the backdoors but also so would hackers.

GeekIWG buuht terrorrism and pedophiles!! Think of the children!! No one should have anything to hide if they're innocent!!! These laws obviously won't in any way be abused now until the end of time!

"Some people commit violence, so let's disarm the population." Government gonna government.

Gonchy D It does have 425k subscribers.

AprimalDwarf When I say I just got the notification, I mean it popped on my phone and I clicked it. That means that 70+ people simultaneously watch the video the moment it was released.

Gonchy D Yes, the channel is very popular which is great. But there is usually a delay in the system before you get the notification. Some mobile devices only send heartbeats that trigger push notifications every 30 minutes when they are on the mobile data network for example. So it might not have been as simultaneous as it looked like. Just wanted to point that out this being a computer related channel and all. :)

CNVideos Government doesn't want online finance to work for the same reason they want to ban paper money; if they cannot snoop on every transaction they want it to be illegal.

CNVideos what they usually mean is that they want to ban people from encrypting private communications (iow, emails, instant messages, phone calls, etc. etc.). The people calling for the bans never realise that their overly broad statements would mean the end of online banking, online commerce, etc. etc., they just have no idea that such things rely on encryption to be possible. And of course they usually end up when confronted with such things by either ammending their proposals with elaborate schemes in which encryption of business transactions is allowed as long as the government gets to have a copy of every algorithm and key pairs used, or they end up making their proposals far more specific to only ban certain things from being encrypted (like email messages and things like that). Of course a lot of those encrypted business transactions run over the systems that would have encryption banned... Or the things where encryption is now banned get rewritten to use a protocol where encryption still is allowed. And then the whole circus starts again.

CNVideos It would not. As we are here in Austria close to let go of the banking secrecy, things certainly go the wrong way. If encryption is banned, privacy will be dead forever.

jwenting for a while 56bits was the only size legally permitted in the US, this allowed only supercomputers to brute force decrypt some encryptions, but thankfully 56bit was retired as computers turned in to supercomputers themselves. "In 2000, all restrictions on key length were lifted, except for exports to embargoed countries.[5]"

Yep... Insanity I know.

soylentgreenb I wouldn't think so, as long as you can prove that you can decrypt it in order to create more gobbledygook. If I was located in UK I would just do that 10 times, rinse wash and repeat. I would suggest you start studying Computer Science in your spare time and get some encryption programs and then just say you did it as a research project. Encryption itself is not illegal, only hiding illegal information. Whatever that may be. The point is the law cannot reasonably demand to _make it easy_ to get at all your information at the push of a button, just in order to maybe prevent some crimes; politicians and governments will always try that, but that doesn't make it reasonable. Watch some of Justicar's channel to find out about the method behind the madness.

soylentgreenb omg. Flood the court system with 100,000s of these cases and then counter-sue the government when no encryption or patterns can be identified. Ruin these idiots. :)

soylentgreenb Would not innocent until proven guild apply? The burden of proof should be on the police in this case I believe . But I might be wrong. Would not be the first time there is reverse proof of burden (Even if it rare in western courts.)

soylentgreenb No. If it is shown to be encrypted data you can be charged if you fail to provide the keys to decrypt it. If you have a random set of numbers unformatted there must be a reason, that reason is your defense. I created it to prove how ignorant of IT you are or something like that would be worth a shot

lol as usual.

Morru Qu'aan David Cameron doesn't know what he is talking about? You should get an award for understatements. The guy is a complete nutcase who is becoming a threat to everyone's livelihood.

Morru Qu'aan Politicians in general are completely lost with this stuff.

the problem is that the people who want to be politicians have the traits that should (in a reasonable world) ban them from being politicians.

Morru Qu'aan The way politics works is that the person with the lowest moral values and the greatest ability to manipulate others always wins. A person with a self-imposed high moral fortitude simply would not attempt to deceive and thus would never succeed in manipulating voters to vote for them. A person with no morals or conscience but who lacks the skills to manipulate would likewise fail to gain enough votes. Thus, by default, the person with no conscience who is skilled at manipulation will get the most votes.

Physical world analog, TSA luggage master keys, leaked through a photograph.

@@hanelyp1 Yeah, TSA-locks are more just straps to hold your luggage closed than actually lock it :D

Can't pass laws at all is more accurate.

ericsbuds I laughed too but unfortunately it's not true. They seem perfectly capable of passing laws that give themselves or their corporate cronies more power. Just look at the USA Freedom Act. Also, never trust a law that has the word "freedom" or "patriot" in it.

***** Haha,sometimes they can't even agree on something to save there lives.

+Gooberslot They always name bills on opposite day.

Idk what country has that messed up law, but in america, the "I don't recall" defense gets people off scott-free. just check Jan 6 MTG trial for proof of that.

You can tell the police that you used Vernam's chiphr to encrypt that data. And you can make up a key that will turn that random data into picture of kittens for example.

vonkruel In the US, we have the 5th Amendment in the bill of rights that protects us from self-incrimination. We have the right to withhold possible incriminating information, and in theory, withholding information as a suspect has no bearing on innocence or guilt.

Seaprimate Jenkins Nah, the founding fathers forgot to add "with a computer" to the 5th so it doesn't count. This is the circular bullshit logic politicians use and thrive on and people eat it up. They love to live vicariously though others, anytime someone finds a loophole or exploit in law they all act like they had a hand in it and the circle jerk continues.

Not in the UK it isn't. used to be if a judge ordered you to decrypt and you didn't you would be locked up for contempt. Nowadays they have cut out the middle man and if the police ask and you refuse you are arrested for obstruction. Problem occurs if you do not actually have the key because you cant actually prove that you do not have it. I stopped using truecrypt for this reason. You cant prove that you do not have a hidden partition.

Wait, you have to prove your innocence? Shouldn't they have to prove you have the key?

How are you going to know?

samramdebest David cameron, UK President.

NighcoreReflex Prime minister.

Agreed.

kingemocut that he is

samramdebest all tyrants.

There's this guy on a mailing list of mine which has the following statement as his email signature: "The NSA neither confirms nor denies it intercepted this message". The statement is of course 100% true :D

YoYoYonnYOfficial -Of course the statement is 100% true, it is a tautology!- Trueness of this statement can not be decided without additional information.

linkviii doubt very much encrypted data and compressed data look the same. Encrypted data is conspicuous in that it looks very uniform.

***** So does compressed data, provided the compression was done well. If there are discernible patterns present (i.e. entropy of the data is not close to 1), it can be compressed further.

***** no, it is not a tautology it is a contradiction. If we are to believe the NSA actually added this message, (just for the sake of the argument) This addition implicitly confirms that they intercepted the message, therefore contradicting the statement.

Realraven2000 ... which is also a reason why I still prefer a solid desktop OS with a critical amount of _open source software_ that doesn't store every little thing in the cloud to a mobile OS like Android.

***** So a 400gb C:/ drive on a 2TB disk wouldn't look suspicious at all? :)

SerBallister No that's not how it works. You would create a partition on the 2Tb disk that uses all 2Tb of space and then put some dummy data there, and the hidden partition is stored in the empty space on that 2Tb partition. Because the empty space in truecrypt partitions is encrypted equally as randomly as if it contained data it's impossible to prove if there's really any meaningful data there or not.

***** Yeah that would make most sense.

Abel Carbonell I hope you're not talking about Facebook *cough*

NeXtDracool No, why would I do that? They *clearly*respect privacy.

Any encryption method you design will probably be much weaker than AES256 with a proper block cipher mode and random initialization vectors, though.

@@coolguy284_2 if u have a perfect random key with Vigenère cipher it would be perfectly secure

If they believe you, nothing. If they don't you will be accused of contempt of court

d4m4s74 That is taking away reasonable doubt.

chickenmonger123 Indeed. It should be noted however that 9/11 and what might very well be called a Propaganda Of Fear that was spread afterwards, mainly from the US but also from the UK and elsewhere, pretty much destroyed any interest in Reasonable Doubt the governments of the world _might_ have had prior to it.

neurotoksin a great idea, and while we're at it also open up their financial information, they post and all calls they have, meetings they attend... and so on. We won't have any politicians left cause they'd all go to jail, but hey!

"At the moment" said someone at every moment...

This has aged well. And will likely continue to be the case in six more years. See y’all in 2028

+Abdulla Al Suwadi This video was rendered on an Xbox 360? No! lol

Don't use windows

thepokkanome It's sad because laws in the US are far, far from flawless, they'd need serious changes.. but if they could make laws it would only get worse.

I don't trust them to write anymore laws. We tend to do better with them doing nothing, and we could be better still if they got rid of some of our really terrible and counterproductive laws

thepokkanome With all the in-depth analysis that's on the RU-vids and elsewhere about how the ineffectiveness of Congress has screwed your country over and over and then some more over again, it would be clear that your statement factually incorrect.

@Yummy Spaghetti Noodles First off, your accusation of racism is absurd, because no specific race was mentioned. Secondly, psychopaths are not mentally ill, and it is clear that you did zero research on the subject, because the people who are experts about psychopathy including Dr. Robert Hare have established that psychopaths are perfectly sane, and know exactly what they are doing. Some of them are evil geniuses. They are not "sick", they are simply predators and parasites who view YOU as food.. something to conquered, enslaved, exploited, used and abused. If you want to try to be nice to a psychopath though, I guess have at it. You will most likely win a "Darwin" award by ending up murdered by one of these people. Let me know how it works out for you.

Criminls would still use encyrption even if it was banned

Roedy Green We already have post-quantum crypto, it's just not in common use yet.

quantum computer only can decrypt some cryptography like RSA but can't decrypt aes