No kidding. Even something as simple as keeping track of what one can do as you drive across country requires an app, or at least http://www.handgunlaw.us/. This is with a state issued carry license that has a patchwork of reciprocity. Literally what is legal in one place, is illegal in the next, and vis versa, just by crossing invisible lines.

Yup, Federal regulation is definitely the way to go. No more state regulation. Wait a minute...

Yes, I am not in favor of Federal regulation here, but that is somewhat off topic. Even still, I wanted to purposely point out information to those on HN who might not be familiar with the complexities of such a legal patchwork and what it results in.

I love having the "what makes an assault weapon an assault weapon" discussion with people - its usually a discussion that changes their views on how we regulate firearms. I fear encryption is going to go down this same road.

> people with no technical understanding of the subject matter

Hanlon's Razor is usually a good idea, but it should only be used when all else is equal. That is not the case here, as we know there are long-term (since the first crypto wars) attempts to restrict encryption.

Whoever wrote this bill has a very good understanding of the subject matter. What you call "incoherent" is a feature in the eyes of anyone trying to restrict crypto. Poorly-specified laws provide room to selectively enforce the law or reinterpret what it means.

Then the judicial system is tasked with case after case of having to discern the meaning of the law and how to interpret it legally within the confines of the state and federal constitutions.

I wish I had a dollar for every case I've reviewed where a judge had to interpret a poorly written(bad or ambiguous grammar) statute. Many of the judges got it wrong, probably intentionally in a few instances, and the decisions were later overturned, sometimes after the defendant had spent years in prison. And that's just the ones with happy endings.

Please don't hijack the discussion with flamewar-prone tangents. HN guidelines:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

It's not strictly a tangent. The GP pointed out that the tactic being tried here is "tried and true" and well understood by many. Although the GP should have gone further and said that we should all be against such tactics regardless of which side of any issue we should find ourselves on. It's a very underhanded, anti-democratic scheme.

I've also seen guns and gun control discussed many times on HN without flames. So I'm not quite sure it qualifies as a "classic flamewar topic" on HN even if it qualifies as such among the general population. I would also argue that the GP did, in a sense, have something new to say about it.

It also gives us an answer, the National Encryption Association should be formed with the exact same tactics.

While fiatmoney may have been able to state the correlation better, there are parallels between the regulation of encryption and the regulation of firearms. And this goes beyond just that encryption is considered a munition within the regulatory framework of the U.S. government. There are lessons to be learned by studying the legal history there.

I think this comment is relevant.

I've wondered for a while if you might make a case for a right to encrypt around the second amendment. If anything encryption seems more relevant today than gun ownership in terms of the second amendment's original reason for being. Nobody could stand up to a modern army with personal firearms, but encryption does allow an individual to limit the power of the government to surveil or persecute them.

Strong encryption used to be classified as munitions under ITAR, so maybe there's some precedent there.

This is a great point, and one that I've been meaning to write about either here or elsewhere ever since the issue starting coming up.

Scaring people into giving up their rights is a tactic that's been used by both the right and the left for decades.

I think there's a general point that can be made about understanding restrictions in general and about when and why we should support them, but I don't know exactly what the general point is without resorting to a thing that most people write off as a meaningless platitude (e.g., "Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.")

I'm going to riff a little bit here, if that's okay.

I think it's worth asking--at each moment that any basic liberty that's even talked about in the constitution comes up for discussion, regardless of how you personally interpret that liberty--who benefits from a reduction in that liberty?

It's perhaps easy to say, for some people, that reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a net benefit for "the people" as a whole.

But I don't think that's a correct answer to the context of my question above. If you view the constitution as a social contract between the citizens and the government, reducing freedoms of any kind is always to the advantage of the government and always to the disadvantage of the people, even if in the short run fewer people die from firearms-related deaths.

Similarly, I would suggest that in terms of privacy, there are people who are willing to sacrifice their own privacy (as well as mine) by outlawing certain encrypted devices because they think that will make us all safer from--something? Are we going to define certain phones and tablets and computers as Assault Devices and make them illegal if they have a pretty fruit logo? Or run an OS named after a cute robot?

The problem is that our government is made up of people. People who are trained just exactly the same ways that we are: by positive and negative responses to actions. People who learn by experience that doing a thing that makes their lives easier (removing freedoms) can be accomplished by stigmatizing the exercise of that freedom.

Voila. There you have all the explanation of why freedoms are in a constant fight against being reduced. It's not because of any conspiracy or because governments are bad by default, or anything nutbaggy like that. It's because the basic approach of human nature is to make your life a little easier. That's it.

Reducing freedoms make the lives of the people in government agencies easier. That's all there is to it.

My opinion comes from some odd experiences in my life. I'm from Texas, but I live in NYC. I like guns, but I also support abortion rights. I was trained as a classical violinist but write code for a living. I studied Aristotelian philosophy and categorical, deductive logic; I work on data with inductive methods.

I think that a lot of the disagreement between parties is manufactured, that people who care deeply about liberty in whatever form it takes: guns, abortions, free speech, privacy . . . whatever--people who care about these things have a lot more in common than they often realize.

I wish there was a better way for us to work together and understand that all freedoms live or die based on our group commitment to all freedoms, not just one or two that we happen to feel good about right now.