… but I wonder if we can go a little further sometimes. Ryan Hagemann has published a commentary and entreaty in Lawfare on another encryption draft proposal, the Digital Security Commission Act, leading off with the observation,
The current encryption debate is gridlocked. For the past year, privacy advocates, civil libertarians, Department of Justice attorneys, cryptographers, and others have been stonewalling one another, exchanging a barrage of bumper sticker slogans. These engagements have drawn attention to an important issue, but have largely failed to illuminate the path forward.
Mr. Hagemann summarizes the Act as the creation of a commission of experts to make recommendations, etc. He ends the piece thusly:
We have but one path forward in this debate, and that’s the one that treats all the competing equities and stakeholders as equals. The intellectually honest and ideologically neutral option is to embrace politics as the art of the possible, not as a war of all against all. To do so, civil society, law enforcement, the technology industry, economists, cryptographers, and other leading experts need to sit down and reason through competing interests to arrive at a solution that protects encryption, the digital economy, and the security of all Americans.
Which strikes me as perhaps a trifle naive. It may, in fact, work – but today we don’t appear to understand that we have to come together to construct useful solutions, so I have to wonder if this call for civility and honorable conduct will really be respected.
But it struck me that a more aggressive approach might be considered. I would like to suggest that each person coming forward to assert a solution to the problem be presented with what the general consensus believes is the most pressing objection to the general class of solutions to which their solution might be considered to belong, and be required to explain how their solution adequately treats it. It’s one thing to explain the strengths of your proposal, but quite bit more interesting to explain how a proposal solves what is generally considered a weakness of that class of proposals. Those who refuse to honor such a request may be ignored as unserious about the debate.
The downside of such a proposal is that now the group has to identify solution categories and the best objection to each. Of course, the best proposals will resolve the objections by turning them into strengths, usually by incorporating the objection as an honest and serious assertion, and then use the strengths of their proposal to resolve it – and not just ridicule all opposition as we often see happen.
