Well, I can paraphrase my own comment from the thread about Australian elections:
You can slander everyone who discovers vulnerabilities in your software, and you can even lobby to make it illegal to disclose those vulnerabilities, and throw people in prison over it, and so on... and your software will go right on being vulnerable. You can put every security researcher and white hat in the world in prison on trumped-up charges and throw away the keys, and it will not make your software one bit more secure. It will probably make it a great deal less secure.
Which is to say that this EO will accomplish exactly the opposite of its supposed goal.
It's like, even if I convince every human being alive that I am not bound by the laws of gravity, if I jump off a cliff I will die all the same. To think otherwise is insane, but for some reason when it comes to software (and hardware) security we give people a pass. (Not we in the tech community, but we who vote.)
This is one of the Big Problems with human reasoning. Maybe the biggest. It really does seem that most people, if you drill down, truly and fundamentally believe that the laws that govern all of reality, will respond to a popular vote. That if we all believe something hard enough, reality will take notice. Thus we get policy which is totally divorced from the goals it is purported to serve, and not held accountable to them at all. As though the President of the United States can argue with mathematics or psychology and win.
You can slander everyone who discovers vulnerabilities in your software, and you can even lobby to make it illegal to disclose those vulnerabilities, and throw people in prison over it, and so on... and your software will go right on being vulnerable. You can put every security researcher and white hat in the world in prison on trumped-up charges and throw away the keys, and it will not make your software one bit more secure. It will probably make it a great deal less secure.
Which is to say that this EO will accomplish exactly the opposite of its supposed goal.
It's like, even if I convince every human being alive that I am not bound by the laws of gravity, if I jump off a cliff I will die all the same. To think otherwise is insane, but for some reason when it comes to software (and hardware) security we give people a pass. (Not we in the tech community, but we who vote.)
This is one of the Big Problems with human reasoning. Maybe the biggest. It really does seem that most people, if you drill down, truly and fundamentally believe that the laws that govern all of reality, will respond to a popular vote. That if we all believe something hard enough, reality will take notice. Thus we get policy which is totally divorced from the goals it is purported to serve, and not held accountable to them at all. As though the President of the United States can argue with mathematics or psychology and win.