There's a coherent worldview where this isn't hypocritical:
> Encryption is for hiding our comms from China and Facebook, which keeps you safe. Hiding your comms from America makes it harder for America to keep you safe. Encryption should be weak enough to let the US government have the knowledge it deems necessary, but strong enough to build a moat around that superiority.
It's misguided for a bunch of reasons that HN well understands, but it holds water. That's what makes it scary: not that it's absurd, but that unless you're both well educated and skeptical, it sounds downright responsible.
People keep saying that backdoors weaken security in general, but that's simply not true. If you create a cryptographic backdoor that only one third party entity can access (because only they have the private key to do so), this doesn't fundamentally make it any weaker than ordinary end-to-end encryption (where the recipient has the private key to decrypt the messages you send them).
So when the system that contains the key is hacked and the key is exfiltrated? Or if an insider steals or leaks the key?
The effin NSA couldn't keep their most well guarded secrets from the Shadow Brokers and from Snowden, there isn't an entity on the planet we should trust with such key.
> Encryption is for hiding our comms from China and Facebook, which keeps you safe. Hiding your comms from America makes it harder for America to keep you safe. Encryption should be weak enough to let the US government have the knowledge it deems necessary, but strong enough to build a moat around that superiority.
It's misguided for a bunch of reasons that HN well understands, but it holds water. That's what makes it scary: not that it's absurd, but that unless you're both well educated and skeptical, it sounds downright responsible.