PC Magazine - USA (2019-12)

William

Barr and

Encryption

YOUR COMMENTS

READER INPUT

The article is spot on. It misses a major point,

though. We often use PGP/GPG public key

encryption in email and other forms of

communication. I, for example, have a PGP/GPG

key, and my laptop is the only machine in the

world that knows the private key. The public key

is reachable at keys.openpgp.org among others—

feel free to download it (26A482E54D795725 is

one of them). If I have encrypted something using

a public key technology, the only party that can

decrypt it is someone with the other key in the

pair; something encrypted using my private key

needs my public key (but you know for sure that I

encrypted it), and something encrypted using my

public key requires my private key to decrypt it

(you know that only I can read it). That’s been

true for a long time, and the law enforcement side

of the discussion seems to be blissfully ignorant of

the fact—at least from their public statements. I

don’t know that I would agree that Mr Barr is “an

idiot,” in your words. I don’t possess personal

knowledge regarding that. But from his public

statements, he appears to be missing important

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Well written. Thank you, Max.

—Melo Rix

The author cites the way that the NSA handled its

spying operations in the past. Of course, though,

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operations. It seems to me there is a huge

Max Eddy’s opinion
column, “US Attorney
General William Barr
Has Encryption All
Wrong,” provoked...
a lot of agreement
(which is kind of
surprising, for our
readers!).