I'm pretty certain you're correct but I won't attempt to justify it detail here as we have to bring out the political philosophy texts on mass.

In the light of the English Civil War many thought about politics and freedoms Locke being one, his contemporary [almost] Thomas Hobbes with a different position—the Leviathan. Rights, freedoms and social contract theory was still raging nearly a century later with Rousseau whingeing about man being born free but everywhere he's in chains—opening line of the Social Contract. And there's still no universally agreed consensus.

Over the centuries political philosophy has covered almost every conceivable interpretation/position about the rights and powers of the State versus individual freedoms, so it's not for the want of options/choices. Dichotomies still remain because the citizenry is composed of people with wide range of political beliefs many of which are incompatible (this has always been the situation).

We shouldn't expect a consensus.

As an example, the civil rights act necessarily curtails the freedom of association.

For many of us outside the US there's a dichotomy here. The North won the bitterly contested Civil War and freed the slaves but never really afforded them true freedoms. Why?

The perception from the outside is that conscience over slavery per se drove the North to war and not concern for the fact that slaves were actually people who were suffering enslavement and or unfairly treated.

Edit: Given the Civil War why was the Civil Rights Movement 100 years later necessary?

This site is not full of "normal people" and it shouldn't confuse people/ muddy the water if being dicussed here

If your argument for encryption is "we need encryption because if it's banned overnight all our phones will turn into bricks!", then yeah sure I guess it's true. But even the diehard encryption opponents aren't arguing for this. My point is that you can very much have no encryption, but not "anyone could log into any of your accounts, take your money ...".

Nope, it's about exactly that. This policy would work only for law-abiding citizens which terrorists are not, that's the point.

Added: The current gulag expeditions in US nor Guantanamo have nothing to do with US citizens, which is a big difference from GGP's comment.

Not in the vast majority of the United States.

To me, this just means that we must remain vigilant. The slow creep towards authoritarianism isn’t going to go away either. The solution is not to look for reasonable ways for authoritarian rules to exist. Continuous harmful pressure must be met with continuous resistance.

> Every society is a compromise between anarchic freedom and authoritarian tyranny

Except not every society is such a compromise. Some are fully under authoritarian control, and serve as a warning for others who are tempted by authoritarian ideas.

> this is another discussion about how a (relatively) new set of technologies can fit into that compromise in a way that is acceptable and reasonable.

Breaking encryption need not inherently be part of that compromise. And until someone can explain how breaking encryption will actually stop the kind of bad actors used to justify such a direction (vs. driving them deeper underground, i.e. even if you outlaw encryption, it’s not as if law breakers will obey such a law), I see no merit in entertaining such a compromise. The crimes being committed are already illegal.

> It's frankly a bit of an article of faith in our community that encryption == unalloyed good

I don’t think most people in our community see it as inherently/perfectly good, but as extremely important and necessary. This is a critical distinction. As with everything, there are harms that come with the good, and such is the nature of all things. The question becomes: are the harms allowed worse than the good that is preserved? And would the new harms of disallowing the status quo be potentially worse than the harms supposedly prevented?

> I think we'd be right to think more critically about that position.

I agree that we need to think critically about this. But clearly we disagree about what one should conclude from such a critical analysis. I’d argue that taking the position that the government needs more power - especially at this moment in history - is the result of not thinking critically enough.

Also, there is a question if you believe the authorities that without decrypting data, they can't investigate crimes.

Imagine an analogical assertion that without torturing suspects, law enforcement is stymied. Someone might assert that, but we still say no, for all sorts of fundamental reasons. Same with American Miranda rights and others.

Myself, I don't believe in that assertion at all. Most crimes leave a massive real world trace that cannot be encrypted. The ones that don't, maybe should not be crimes in the first place.

Can you do the same thing, but in the other direction? How many people would have been harmed if weaker/no encryption was the standard?

Have you ever called into a bank or brokerage? Most ask "security questions", often ones that you can't even choose, like your address or how many accounts you have with them. It's arguably far worse than speaking your password into the phone.

>2. Is there a way for phone call man in the middlers to get that info without wasting a ton of time listening to calls?

Automated speech recognition has been around for decades. Even before that signals intelligence agencies have shown that widespread wiretapping/eavesdropping is possible and effective.

At least that is how I see the word used.

I just think arguments based on appeals to emotion are very often fallacious. But sure, I guess that means I'm a... whatever you just said.

How many terrorists were not caught by these systems? How many would have actually done these actions instead of just talking about it? How many could have been caught with just standard police work?

Without knowing these variables then there is no way to say if these systems are particularly good at catching terrorists.

This is undoubtedly so; but much turns on the trust in government. In this U.S., the president, himself a documented profligate liar, just invited an equally untrustworthy unelected person into the halls of government to vacuum up whatever data he pleased. Maybe trust in the UK government is higher.

Moreover, it's only a matter of time until the criminal fraternity all catch up and are on the same wavelength. That's when all but the dumbest know exactly what not to do or say on the net.

The Internet is still comparatively young and like everyone else those who've evil intent are still learning exactly how it works. I'd bet money that it won't be long before a 'bestseller tome' of definitive what-not-to-dos cirulates amongst this mob.

The question is at what level will law enforcement's catch have to fall before it has to turn to other methods.

somewhere a piece of code would have to say "here I've got this key, which can decrypt this text, but I'm not going to" and that decision is not protected by math.

Explosives and bulldozers are likely to harm whatever was motivating the entry in the first place. The vault system can be engineered to ensure this conclusion, as well.

My point is that's pretty much all arguments, except maybe some very obtuse ones no one really cares about.

> Or, in your case, subtlety alluding to me being tolerant of CSAM (which was wildly inappropriate, albeit a great example of why I generally just don't talk to people who use those types of arguments).

That's not what I was doing. I was giving an example to show it's a trade-off driven by priorities and values. But if you want to be super-logical about it, supporting strong privacy-preserving uses of encryption necessarily implies a certain level of tolerance for CSAM, unless you support other draconian measures that are incompatible with privacy. Privacy can be used for good and bad.

This is not analogous to a single government having non-transparent, non-auditable access to decrypt communications of its own citizens.

A proposal to backdoor all cryptography is worse than having pki as a think we opt in to for the sake of convenience

Classic strawman argument. Where was anything like this suggested? Are they barred today under existing legislation?

The eventuality of this line of reasoning is that: "special interests who control the DSM (or whatever standards body governs these soft sciences) can influence and determine the outcome of custody battles."

DSM-4 defined "gender-identity disorder" as a thing, that's now been de-pathologized to "gender dysphoria."

Under your framework, a body of unelected, politically and financially-motivated "experts" can now determine the imposition of legal consequences on a whim.

> Not to be too pedantic, but I think the distinction between privacy and encryption is incredibly important: almost everyone agrees that privacy is a gradient. The disagreement is whether or not encryption can be a gradient. Most people do not think it can reasonably be without undermining ~everything relying on it.

That is a fair criticism. I would answer that by saying that encryption is just a technology, and you can employ it in very flexible ways (including e.g. n-of-m style keys) which if thought through well and legislated carefully could give the authorities more reasonable access to data when it is legally warranted.

There's no denying your examples but here we are discussing war. In times of war the normal order of things and ethics fall apart no matter which side one's on. During war, people are very scared and they act outside the box, they do strange things they'd never do in peace time. When I was conscripted I was not only furious but also shit-scared that I might be killed in an unethical war that my side should never have been involved† in (why die in the name of a wrongful cause?).

If you've never been in that situation then you would never know what it's like. (You may think you can imagine the situation but when you actually experience it you know damn-well your initial thoughts were wrong and way off the mark.)

Some of those matters to which you've referred are of my generation and right they're unforgivable by any standard, but again that was the time of the Cold War—and people acted as if there had been an actual war in progress. I know, I can never forget the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and how people reacted, for thirteen horrific days days we wondered if we'd live until the next morning. Again, people act very strangely in such circumstances.

Did you actually live through the 1950s and 60s? I did, so I speak from actual experience.

"…and much higher abuse of power or corruption in politics and in policing."

How you can say that just beats me given the unmitigated mess that politics and governance is in today (and I'm not only referring to US politics, democracy is in real trouble everywhere). If I were blogging on my own website I'd ask you to provide solid references to back your assertions—ones that can be authenticated.

Moreover, how do you know what abuses of power are taking place today if they're hidden? Of which jurisdictions today are you certain that are free of human rights abuses, if any? Do you actually believe what you read in the media and or on social media? Where do you get your verifiable facts from?

"Which freedoms existed then that don't exist today?"

There are many—actual and implied. I'll steer mainly away from legislated matters because that would require more than just a paper but a whole book, and even then it'd fall short. Let me just say that despite the fear of the Cold War and nuclear armageddon, when I was a child and later as a teenager we kids had a much more carefree existence than today's kids—and that's important for mental health. Here are a few freedoms that don't exist today (there are many more):

• There was no drug problem, we were free of that dreaded vice. We kids were never offered drugs, in fact most of us wouldn't have known the names of them (moreover, many designer drugs had not been invented then). Cleary, none of us died from overdoses.

• Kids were free to roam without fear, we ranged and did what we wanted without question from parents (except to take advice to take care). We played without parental supervision (unfortunately today that childhood right (freedom) has been lost to childhood).

• Kids were not wrapped in cocooned protection as they are today. We walked to and from school without our parents although sometimes we caught the bus. (I walked home from school by myself from age six onward and that involved crossing a busy main arterial road). If parents had picked me up I'd have be hounded as a sissy. It was just not done—that's why we kids developed a much stronger resilience to life's knocks than kids of today (there's substantial evidence for that).

• The term 'helicopter parenting' had not been invented, and kids would not have stood for it (if a parent were to so act people would have thought such action as peculiar). Today, helicopter parenting is ruining many kids' lives.

• Many kids today are so protected and mollycoddled that they are actually frightened to leave the house. If a kid is sacred just to leave the house then it's a freedom lost! When I first heard of this I thought this must have been a gross exaggeration but in fact it's a real problem nowadays. If there were such cases when I was a kid then they would have only applied to very few kids with severe mental problems. What I am saying is that back then that actual instances must have been so rare that the notion of a child being scared to leave the home just wasn't in the public's consciousness.

Now take today's situation. If nowadays parents are so frightened of the outside world then something has happened to make them so act. Whatever the reason, valid or imaginary, there's something wrong with today's society that was OK when I was a kid. Arguing the contrary would simply be a fallacy—a non sequitur.

• Teenage suicide likely happened when I was a kid but it would have been such a rare event that none of us had ever heard if it, again it was not a notion of public importance as it is today. As kids, the notion of suicide never encompassed our thoughts. Kids today are aware of it and some mull over the possibly—we were free of such destructive thoughts.

• No one had ever heard of school shootings, it was so far off the radar that no one would have thought of the notion. School was a place that no kid feared (other than those few who dreaded school for the more usual anti-school reasons).

• Mass shootings were almost unheard of, especially so outside the US.

• Government interference in and intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens was only a fraction of what it is today, no mass spying etc. Sure, the Cold War wrongly targeted mostly innocent groups (but again a wartime mentality was alive and at work here). That said, the US was gripped by fear far more than any other country with ratbags like Eugene McCarthy fuelling the flames. Otherwise, people in most other Western countries were spared from such human rights indignities and violations.

And that's just for starters. Have things gotten better? No doubt some things have, and no doubt some are definitely worse. And some are just the same—war is just as ugly as it's ever been, perhaps even worse with weapons targeted on civilians (certainty so at any other time since WWII). Witness the current Ukraine, Palestinian and other running conflicts—clearly, things are the worst they've been in many decades.

Am I biased? Yes, everyone is to some extent, but my political science and philosophy training taught me to at least look at the facts objectively.

___

† I am of the firm opinion that to invade another country without, say, imminent annihilation is the gravest and most egregious action that any country can take. To defend one's country from unprovoked invasion is another matter, but even then one's defense must be measured and appropriate. Defending one's country out of sheer patriotism and bravado alone doesn't make sense. As Wilfred Owen said "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is a lie and I agree wholeheartedly. No, I'm not a pacifist, just a realist.

Is the appeal to emotion really necessary? Surely we can discuss the facts without devolving into some kind of "But I want that!!!" toddler behaviour?

No need to reply within the first second. Take your time.

In fact, consider taking a lot more time as you still haven't named the specific vault, or set of vaults, that is causing such a big problem for the government. If we don't know what vault it is, even if your description is vague, how would anyone come to think of it as a problem? Laws are not created by some all-knowing deity. It is just people.

That such a vault might be theoretically possible to build is irrelevant.

As it pertains to this thread, where the sole key holder is dead and took the knowledge with him, how do you anticipate to carry out gaining access to the data using live attacks? There are plenty of reasons why the government wants access to data even where prosecution isn't necessary.