Item — HN Reader

A government's ability to control its population weakens as subversive technology evolves. The law is always behind the state of the art. This frustrates officials so much they react with incredulity and throw childish tantrums. In order to maintain control, the government must ask for more and more power and become more and more totalitarian. It's like a politico-technological arms race.

What will be the end of this? Will the technology evolve so much the government won't be able to win no matter what it does and surrender? Or are they going to ban encryption, non-vulnerable computers and everything that could stand in the way of prosecuting people they don't like?

2 comments

No need to ban encryption, you just create a state sponsored encryption system on a chip, and if anyone is caught trying to break/hack it you get life in prison / death penalty. /s

I read something similar to that in "Rainbows End: A Novel with One Foot in the Future" by Vernor Vinge. A really interesting take on the soon to be future of 2025.

Technology can already more or less deal with this.

Encryption plus a hidden volume (the existence of which cannot be proven) provides the ability for someone to 'unlock' the phone but still not provide access to the real data.

It would be quite difficult to ban encryption without causing a ton of other problems.

But the argument being made is that in the face of such technology, the government will make increasingly drastic laws to compensate. E.g. require you use vulnerable phone software approved by them, and allow inferences of guilt if you use something else.