Comment by rich_sasha
11 days ago
I find this argument incredibly frustrating.
My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.
It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.
OK but how exactly do you propose to make that work? With current encryption technology there is no way to give up a bit of privacy: it's all or nothing. Either you have the keys or you don't. If a government has the key then it will inevitably be leaked or misused. The UK government in particular has long been heavily penetrated by Soviet / Russian intelligence.
They can physically search a device (like silk road) put malware on a device, use encrypted metadata on who's calling who and so on.
If you really want to catch serious criminals like mafia you have to do something they are not really expecting.
I don't trust anyone to handle my private details properly, especially not an institution that will suffer no repercussions should it mishandle those data.
Bits on a storage device can never (in anywhere remotely resembling a free society) be a crime by itself. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason for unfettered access to it.
If someone has done a crime, they must have done something, other than store bits on a disk. So go catch them in that act, the way criminals used to be caught before computers existed. If there is no act, there is no crime.