CGP Grey
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2016–2025
4:38 · 4.1M views · Apr 14, 2016
A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.
HN commenters use it as a short, persuasive primer to send to non-technical people in debates over encryption backdoors and decryption legislation.
9 comments from Hacker News
> The FBI asked Apple to put a build on a phone that would allow them to brute force the passcode, leaving the device and the build on Apple's premises the entire time. It doesn't matter how well it might be locked down or secured. If the government coerced them into building it, it wouldn't be difficult to go one more step and require apple to hand over the modified OS. This [1] does a great job of explaining why building a master key is just a bad idea. This is a pandora's box we do not need to open. [1] this video
If you need to explain to non-technical friends and family exactly why this is a terrible idea, CGP Grey offers an easily digestible 5-minute primer: this video Computers either have unbreakable locks, or no locks whatsoever. There's no stable middle ground.
If you have five minutes, please see this short video from CGPGrey, which summarizes succinctly why access to your phone is akin to access to brain: > this video
Yes. this video is a pretty good video for persuading people why this legislation is a bad idea. We might still be able to beat it by rallying support.
As much as guns have grown deadlier since 2A was penned, they ultimately scaled linearly; we don't currently have weapons available to citizens which can destroy a city. If the police need to counter a citizen's misuse of guns, they can easily deploy 10x guns of their own. This used to be true of secrets: if there was a legitimate reason for police to crack a safe, it was difficult, but possible. But with encryption, you no longer need 10x force; you need closer to (10^100)x force (not an expert, but close enough for illustration). What's neglected/forgotten is that weakened crypto creates a power asymmetry in the other direction : while there's no way to scale safe-cracking to (10^100), such that the feds can auto-crack every safe at will, that is absolutely feasible for digital locks, if those locks are forced to be arbitrarily weak. The NSA would have the resources to pre-crack and cache every single encrypted signal, "just in case". The nature of the mathematical asymmetry leaves no middle ground: either every citizen has access to unbreakable locks, or no one will [0] (except for the Feds themselves, of course): this video [0] There is one cogent comparison to the arguments of 2A advocates here: "if you outlaw crypto, only outlaws have crypto". In fact, it's even worse: hypothetically the feds can track gun-running, and guns are (currently) non-trivial to manufacture oneself. But all it takes is a small snippet of GitHub code and/or a white paper to craft an unbreakable loc