I cannot imagine anyone here on HN arguing in good faith in favor of crackdown on encrypted messenger "because terrorists". This is retarded and illiterate, and

I cannot imagine anyone here on HN arguing in good faith in favor of crackdown on encrypted messenger "because terrorists". This is retarded and illiterate, and the same goes for gun analogies. I get that many Americans are concerned with gun violence, but at least here you ought to be able to try to not think with your hindbrain, and instead consider whether your concern has any relevance. Normally that should be enough. Let me elaborate, though. First, there's extremely little chance of uncovering any "terrorists" or any major criminals by investigating the extant chats: competent lawbreakers delete incriminating messages as soon as possible or communicate in secure chats to begin with, and would do so especially if Telegram showed signs of cooperating with FSB. There would, however, be a guaranteed influx of falsely accused. VK is a good example: there are cases when people are incriminated for inciting hatred because of something like a closed album with Nazi caricature memes, on the grounds that "everything on VK is public"; there were multiple trials for reposted messages. And so on. Most of this is simply due to some random asshat spook trying to furter his career by hauling in a lot of "extremists" and surpassing average "productivity". This is both inhumane and not economical. More importantly, encryption is not analogous to guns because guns are hard to manufacture and even harder to conceal, but software is different. You can easily create your own encrypted messenger and nullify whatever efforts the government is putting in suppressing current platforms. Signal Protocol is open source, you know. Blocking Telegram would merely speed up the transfer of terrorists to their own networks, and/or increase the popularity of platforms which would not even shut down the channels with terroristic propaganda (something Durov actually does). There is no replacement to actual investigation, to fieldwork, to international cooperation, to training of competent agents and infiltrators. This is hard and risky, it's so much more easy to vantonly gather data, threaten average citizens with your overreach and pretend to save the day. Well, let me remind you that Boston bombing did not rely on any sort of encryption. FBI received hints from FSB and interviewed Tamerlan way before the event; Dzhokhar’s Facebook was insanely suspicious. They failed to notice the threat. If the intelligence cannot successfully work with open information like this, what more could they gain from Telegram?