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I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. I'll take the privacy side in most any discussion of

I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. I'll take the privacy side in most any discussion of privacy-vs-security, but categorically denying the possibility that some crimes could be aided by encryption seems a step to far. It's also bad PR strategy: anybody not already on your side will be put off by your apparent lack of reasoning skills. Instead, acknowledge the possibility and show them why you consider the benefits outweighing the risks.

kyboren 7y ago
Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office? The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony. Encryption does nothing to change the availability of information through testimony. Previously, remote conspirators could collaborate through the post, and their conversations could only be accessed with a warrant specifically targeting those communicators. End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation; it just means it's a little more difficult to access the information than entering a phone number into XKeyscore. Investigators can install malware on the device, or microphones and video cameras in the suspect's home to hear or see what is being communicated. Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible to the government.
- hashkb 7y ago
  Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos is a new kind of crime, which whispering would not have aided.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    Why should anyone give a shit? Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I for one am not willing to give up any freedoms in order to prevent the sharing of such vile material. Perhaps the creation, but not the sharing.
    - selectodude 7y ago
      >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I'm sure some of the kids in those videos would have something to say about that.
      - ryanlol 7y ago
        Do you regularly run into child porn on the internet? I don't. I don't see those kids getting hurt any further unless they happen to be the sort of people that go out of their way to seek out child abuse material. It's hard to imagine anyone ever accidentally running into images of themselves being abused. You can't possibly be re-victimized if you don't know. I don't mean to sound heartless, obviously these are horrific acts which hurt people deeply. I simply don't think banning encryption or otherwise eroding our rights to go after distributors and consumers is really going to have much practical effect on how the victims end up feeling. E: HN doesn't let me reply to selectodude below >the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with I absolutely agree with this. I just know that nobody can ever go tell the victim that now those pictures are forever gone off the internet.
        selectodude 7y ago
        I don't disagree. We catch child pornographers all the time and they are on the bleeding edge of encryption. There's no practical benefit to banning encryption. The .gov just doesn't feel like going through the effort and would rather enjoy, say, the ancillary benefits to being able to read all of our messages forever. But yes, the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Maybe not the best direction to go in when arguing.
        michaelmrose 7y ago
        If you don't see a reply link below on the main comments page try clicking their comment link which looks like "7 seconds ago" and you should find a reply to link there. I think hacker news is designed to make it harder to have a quick back and forth discussion for some reason.
- godelski 7y ago
  I think your point is very important. Forbidding e2e encryption only enables mass surveillance. It does not affect traditional investigative work. There are other existing tools for the job. Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? Other tools exist to do targeted surveillance and targeted attacks. Only authoritarians want mass surveillance.
  - crummy 7y ago
    > Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? To be fair, Apple is working to ensure FBI won't be able to do that next time.
    - godelski 7y ago
      I'm not saying anything bad about Apple here... I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'm actually saying (as an anti-Apple person) "good job Apple".
- MadWombat 7y ago
  "The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph was invented. And even before that people used security measures, such as wax seals on letters to prevent tampering or at least have an ability to detect whether or not the message has been tampered with. You seem to think of messaging systems as if they were spoken conversations in private. They are not. Just because you are chatting with someone from the privacy of your own home, doesn't negate the fact that your words are traveling through a lot of wires and boxes belonging to all sorts of private and public entities. During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? I am not saying we should not have end to end encryption. I am saying that government spying on citizens is nothing new, it is not something that was ever limited to totalitarian dictatorships and it should not be surprising to anyone that the government is trying to fight it. The news is not that the government wants to keep an option to read your communications. The news is that first time in history there is a chance people might want to and be able to stop them.
  - Animats 7y ago
    During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? It wasn't done that way. Envelopes were opened, and stamped "Opened by Censor". Material was cut out of letters. Censorship was not concealed at all.[1][2] [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/mail-censorship-in-world-war-two-1.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m... [2] https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg
    - MadWombat 7y ago
      I never said they were secretive about it. I said they opened, read and edited people's letters and the public was completely OK with it.
- Animats 7y ago
  * Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office?* "Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - 1984 The day will come when not having an Amazon Echo or Google Speaker will be considered probably cause for a search.
- sjy 7y ago
  > End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation A secure E2EE system must resist even targeted, legally authorised attacks. Are you suggesting that secure, practical E2EE systems do not currently exist? Would a world in which law enforcement must install physical listening devices and exploit unpublished software vulnerabilities to surveil suspects be more private than our current world, where E2EE is available but often disabled by default, and trusted intermediaries like Facebook and Google can be legally compelled to disclose non-E2EE messages? > Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible That is not (publicly acknowledged to be) the case today, even though non-E2EE platforms like Facebook are widely used. While Facebook could currently comply with laws authorising mass surveillance, and implementing secure E2EE would prevent them from doing so, the warrants under which they currently hand over non-E2EE messages are at least somewhat targeted. This controversy is not about a proposal to relax the need for warrants, it's about asking Facebook to preserve their ability to comply with them.
reggintoggaf 7y ago
The clever nickname is not to invalidate them, it is to address the invalidation the government does by misusing these laws to make its job easier when it comes to lesser crimes. I am a hardcore privacy advocate, but if these laws had a provision that they won't be used for other crimes, and if misuse such as parallel construction would be seriously punished, I'd have nothing against them.
loup-vaillant 7y ago
> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. They're not. A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption. However. You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone. It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape. Nevermind the false dichotomy. The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. Such situations rarely present themselves. (We rarely condone murder in the name of the betterment of humanity: some tried, didn't go so well.) End to end encryption (and metadata hiding while we're at it), is such a situation. The harm, though hard to perceive, is significant, affects everyone, and can potentially grow into full blown totalitarianism (possibly enforced by incentives rather than violent policing). Preventing that is totally worth killing a few children… or at least spend resources on properly policing the problem, like going undercover. Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.
- lisper 7y ago
  > I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here. Yep. I'm pretty sure you just torpedoed any hope you may have had at a political career.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tw04 7y ago
  >It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing the rape. But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else. And ALL of the above assumes that there are no criminal programmers and thus they have no ability to just write their own tools if there isn't something sitting on the shelf. We know with 100% certainty this is also a false assumption.
lrem 7y ago
The same crimes can be aided by accepting any other form of payment than credit card.
Kalium 7y ago
> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. It's not supposed to invalidate the reality of the matters concerned. It's supposed to suggest that that they're not actually the issues at hand, with CP and Drugs and Terrorism being used as stalking horses because being in a position of being seen to defend the privacy rights of terrorists makes for terrible PR.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
There are ways for them to investigate via warrants. That covers all use cases for FBI/CIA/cops. They don't need any other techniques. It's the only logical interpretation of the US constitution to modern electronic communications. Otherwise you become what China is currently.
- sjy 7y ago
  The controversy is about Facebook's proposal to implement E2EE on Messenger, thus ending Facebook's ability to comply with warrants ordering them to disclose Facebook messages. Due to the lack of E2EE, Facebook can currently detect and report a lot of crime to law enforcement; some of this crime may go unpunished if E2EE is implemented.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throw_xyzyz 7y ago
To go for the nuclear option, are you prepared to support Auschwitz to stop child porn? China already has the concentration camps, it's one step away from extermination camps, all empowered by the same surveillance tech we in the west are creating.
michaelmrose 7y ago
It's not necessary to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. It's trivial to show that in a free country where people are allowed to control their own devices and create and install software of their choosing its trivial for bad guys to communicate in such a fashion as to be 100% immune to any sort of dragnet style surveillance while being equally vulnerable to targeted surveillance whether end to end encryption is banished from mainstream platforms. There is no benefit to outweigh. For there to be benefits one must convince oneself that we will actively prosecute bad actors via intelligence gathered via holes we will publicly announce we are drilling into previously secure platforms and drug dealers and terrorists will never figure out how to embrace free open source p2p software that doesn't share these disadvantages. There isn't even one smart person among the bad guys or even among the good guys who will create a platform one can connect to with a few clicks amenable to even techno morons. What could possibly go wrong.
tikiman163 7y ago
Implementing end to end encryption in these messaging apps won't make any of these issues worse. The criminals this will supposedly help already have easy and convenient ways to do the same thing. The government has not caught anyone of any importance this way, so encryption of Facebook messages won't hinder any real investigation methods. This won't increase the number of people affected or reduce the number caught. The only thing encryption can do in this case is make it more difficult for the government or foreign governments to read personal messages. Not implementing encryption here can only help people violate people's privacy, it cannot help the government do its job.
- sjy 7y ago
  > The government has not caught anyone of importance this way The letter specifically describes an offender who was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, detected when Facebook read his non-E2EE communications with a child victim. Are you suggesting this was an unimportant or unrepresentative case?
vast 7y ago
Basic human rights prevent people being jailed on sight. Some of them are criminals. Some of those rights are constantly challenged, yet no one questions their general value. Privacy, thus end to end encryption is a basic human right. There shouldn't be any reason to require proof of this. What we have here is simply the fear of the loss of an extremely powerful tool.
- sjy 7y ago
  Privacy is a basic right; it is even constitutionally protected in the United States by the Fourth Amendment. However, it has always been accepted that gross invasions of privacy can be authorised in appropriate cases – for example, warrants to search houses, or warrantless searches of immigrants and prisoners. Why must the right to use end-to-end encryption, unlike the right to privacy in your home or at the border, be accepted without proof as inviolable?
realid 7y ago
Those four examples are not sufficient reason to deny good encryption to anyone...and denying good encryption to anyone is denying good encryption (privacy) to everyone.
qwerty456127 7y ago
> some crimes could be aided by encryption Some crimes could be aided by virtually anything. E.g. let's destroy all the roads so criminals won't be able to travel.
dontbenebby 7y ago
Unfortunately vast swathes of the population are not able to process nuance. Even if you gently point out that North Korea is probably one of the few "crime free" societies they don't seem to parse that a world of total security cannot coexist in a nation that values freedom.
rocqua 7y ago
What about the 4 Trojan horse of the apocalypse?
asjw 7y ago
They are already using it and not on Facebook. It's silly to think that terrorists use Facebook Very silly
- sjy 7y ago
  It's well-documented that terrorists use Facebook and other social media. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_social_media

kyboren 7y ago

Some crimes can also be aided by whispered in-person conversation. Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office? The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony. Encryption does nothing to change the availability of information through testimony. Previously, remote conspirators could collaborate through the post, and their conversations could only be accessed with a warrant specifically targeting those communicators. End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation; it just means it's a little more difficult to access the information than entering a phone number into XKeyscore. Investigators can install malware on the device, or microphones and video cameras in the suspect's home to hear or see what is being communicated. Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible to the government.

hashkb 7y ago
Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos is a new kind of crime, which whispering would not have aided.
- ryanlol 7y ago
  Why should anyone give a shit? Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I for one am not willing to give up any freedoms in order to prevent the sharing of such vile material. Perhaps the creation, but not the sharing.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    >Sharing unlimited copies of child abuse videos does not actually hurt anyone. I'm sure some of the kids in those videos would have something to say about that.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      Do you regularly run into child porn on the internet? I don't. I don't see those kids getting hurt any further unless they happen to be the sort of people that go out of their way to seek out child abuse material. It's hard to imagine anyone ever accidentally running into images of themselves being abused. You can't possibly be re-victimized if you don't know. I don't mean to sound heartless, obviously these are horrific acts which hurt people deeply. I simply don't think banning encryption or otherwise eroding our rights to go after distributors and consumers is really going to have much practical effect on how the victims end up feeling. E: HN doesn't let me reply to selectodude below >the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with I absolutely agree with this. I just know that nobody can ever go tell the victim that now those pictures are forever gone off the internet.
      - selectodude 7y ago
        I don't disagree. We catch child pornographers all the time and they are on the bleeding edge of encryption. There's no practical benefit to banning encryption. The .gov just doesn't feel like going through the effort and would rather enjoy, say, the ancillary benefits to being able to read all of our messages forever. But yes, the mere knowledge that pictures of you being abused on the internet is extraordinarily difficult to deal with. Maybe not the best direction to go in when arguing.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        If you don't see a reply link below on the main comments page try clicking their comment link which looks like "7 seconds ago" and you should find a reply to link there. I think hacker news is designed to make it harder to have a quick back and forth discussion for some reason.
godelski 7y ago
I think your point is very important. Forbidding e2e encryption only enables mass surveillance. It does not affect traditional investigative work. There are other existing tools for the job. Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? Other tools exist to do targeted surveillance and targeted attacks. Only authoritarians want mass surveillance.
- crummy 7y ago
  > Anyone remember the FBI and Apple case a few years back? How quickly the FBI hacked the phone after Apple wouldn't cave? To be fair, Apple is working to ensure FBI won't be able to do that next time.
  - godelski 7y ago
    I'm not saying anything bad about Apple here... I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'm actually saying (as an anti-Apple person) "good job Apple".
MadWombat 7y ago
"The societal default used to be that substantially all conversations were inaccessible to the government except through testimony" Sure. Before the telegraph was invented. And even before that people used security measures, such as wax seals on letters to prevent tampering or at least have an ability to detect whether or not the message has been tampered with. You seem to think of messaging systems as if they were spoken conversations in private. They are not. Just because you are chatting with someone from the privacy of your own home, doesn't negate the fact that your words are traveling through a lot of wires and boxes belonging to all sorts of private and public entities. During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? I am not saying we should not have end to end encryption. I am saying that government spying on citizens is nothing new, it is not something that was ever limited to totalitarian dictatorships and it should not be surprising to anyone that the government is trying to fight it. The news is not that the government wants to keep an option to read your communications. The news is that first time in history there is a chance people might want to and be able to stop them.
- Animats 7y ago
  During WW2, American federal government established Office of Censorship whose sole purpose was to review and censor all communications coming into and out of the country. Now imagine them finding that someone is mailing letters written in an unbreakable code. How long do you think it would take for the FBI to break down that person's door? It wasn't done that way. Envelopes were opened, and stamped "Opened by Censor". Material was cut out of letters. Censorship was not concealed at all.[1][2] [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/mail-censorship-in-world-war-two-1.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/m... [2] https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg https://sparks-auctions.com/SAN/28/281401a.jpg
  - MadWombat 7y ago
    I never said they were secretive about it. I said they opened, read and edited people's letters and the public was completely OK with it.
Animats 7y ago
* Should we require all in-person conversation to be shouted near a government office?* "Why isn't your desk in front of the telescreen?" - 1984 The day will come when not having an Amazon Echo or Google Speaker will be considered probably cause for a search.
sjy 7y ago
> End-to-end encryption does little to change the availability of information in a targeted investigation A secure E2EE system must resist even targeted, legally authorised attacks. Are you suggesting that secure, practical E2EE systems do not currently exist? Would a world in which law enforcement must install physical listening devices and exploit unpublished software vulnerabilities to surveil suspects be more private than our current world, where E2EE is available but often disabled by default, and trusted intermediaries like Facebook and Google can be legally compelled to disclose non-E2EE messages? > Forbidding end-to-end encryption, in combination with our mass surveillance apparatus, changes the societal default to be that substantially all conversations are trivially and automatically accessible That is not (publicly acknowledged to be) the case today, even though non-E2EE platforms like Facebook are widely used. While Facebook could currently comply with laws authorising mass surveillance, and implementing secure E2EE would prevent them from doing so, the warrants under which they currently hand over non-E2EE messages are at least somewhat targeted. This controversy is not about a proposal to relax the need for warrants, it's about asking Facebook to preserve their ability to comply with them.

reggintoggaf 7y ago

The clever nickname is not to invalidate them, it is to address the invalidation the government does by misusing these laws to make its job easier when it comes to lesser crimes. I am a hardcore privacy advocate, but if these laws had a provision that they won't be used for other crimes, and if misuse such as parallel construction would be seriously punished, I'd have nothing against them.

loup-vaillant 7y ago

> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. They're not. A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption. However. You have to run the numbers here. On the one hand, perhaps a bit more crime, some of which horrible. On the other hand, the privacy of everyone. It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing rape. Nevermind the false dichotomy. The horrible fact is, the value of human life is not infinite. A mere inconvenience, suffered by enough people, is worth killing a few. Such situations rarely present themselves. (We rarely condone murder in the name of the betterment of humanity: some tried, didn't go so well.) End to end encryption (and metadata hiding while we're at it), is such a situation. The harm, though hard to perceive, is significant, affects everyone, and can potentially grow into full blown totalitarianism (possibly enforced by incentives rather than violent policing). Preventing that is totally worth killing a few children… or at least spend resources on properly policing the problem, like going undercover. Still, go say that on TV. I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here.

lisper 7y ago
> I'm not even sure I'm safe writing it here. Yep. I'm pretty sure you just torpedoed any hope you may have had at a political career.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tw04 7y ago
>It's a hard sell. Just picture a politician on live television having to choose between having this cute little child being raped for years before they commit suicide (letting the perpetrators off the hook), or ramp up the surveillance a bit. Picture them choosing the rape. But the argument doesn't even make sense. It makes the horrible assumption that pedophiles will continue using a service they know to be insecure. That's literally a provably false assumption. The second they realize it's insecure (which will take exactly one raid), they'll switch to something else. And ALL of the above assumes that there are no criminal programmers and thus they have no ability to just write their own tools if there isn't something sitting on the shelf. We know with 100% certainty this is also a false assumption.

lrem 7y ago

The same crimes can be aided by accepting any other form of payment than credit card.

Kalium 7y ago

> I'm not entirely sure how those four examples are supposedly invalidated by giving them a clever nickname. It's not supposed to invalidate the reality of the matters concerned. It's supposed to suggest that that they're not actually the issues at hand, with CP and Drugs and Terrorism being used as stalking horses because being in a position of being seen to defend the privacy rights of terrorists makes for terrible PR.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

There are ways for them to investigate via warrants. That covers all use cases for FBI/CIA/cops. They don't need any other techniques. It's the only logical interpretation of the US constitution to modern electronic communications. Otherwise you become what China is currently.

sjy 7y ago
The controversy is about Facebook's proposal to implement E2EE on Messenger, thus ending Facebook's ability to comply with warrants ordering them to disclose Facebook messages. Due to the lack of E2EE, Facebook can currently detect and report a lot of crime to law enforcement; some of this crime may go unpunished if E2EE is implemented.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

throw_xyzyz 7y ago

To go for the nuclear option, are you prepared to support Auschwitz to stop child porn? China already has the concentration camps, it's one step away from extermination camps, all empowered by the same surveillance tech we in the west are creating.

michaelmrose 7y ago

It's not necessary to prove that the benefits outweigh the risks. It's trivial to show that in a free country where people are allowed to control their own devices and create and install software of their choosing its trivial for bad guys to communicate in such a fashion as to be 100% immune to any sort of dragnet style surveillance while being equally vulnerable to targeted surveillance whether end to end encryption is banished from mainstream platforms. There is no benefit to outweigh. For there to be benefits one must convince oneself that we will actively prosecute bad actors via intelligence gathered via holes we will publicly announce we are drilling into previously secure platforms and drug dealers and terrorists will never figure out how to embrace free open source p2p software that doesn't share these disadvantages. There isn't even one smart person among the bad guys or even among the good guys who will create a platform one can connect to with a few clicks amenable to even techno morons. What could possibly go wrong.

tikiman163 7y ago

Implementing end to end encryption in these messaging apps won't make any of these issues worse. The criminals this will supposedly help already have easy and convenient ways to do the same thing. The government has not caught anyone of any importance this way, so encryption of Facebook messages won't hinder any real investigation methods. This won't increase the number of people affected or reduce the number caught. The only thing encryption can do in this case is make it more difficult for the government or foreign governments to read personal messages. Not implementing encryption here can only help people violate people's privacy, it cannot help the government do its job.

sjy 7y ago
> The government has not caught anyone of importance this way The letter specifically describes an offender who was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, detected when Facebook read his non-E2EE communications with a child victim. Are you suggesting this was an unimportant or unrepresentative case?

vast 7y ago

Basic human rights prevent people being jailed on sight. Some of them are criminals. Some of those rights are constantly challenged, yet no one questions their general value. Privacy, thus end to end encryption is a basic human right. There shouldn't be any reason to require proof of this. What we have here is simply the fear of the loss of an extremely powerful tool.

sjy 7y ago
Privacy is a basic right; it is even constitutionally protected in the United States by the Fourth Amendment. However, it has always been accepted that gross invasions of privacy can be authorised in appropriate cases – for example, warrants to search houses, or warrantless searches of immigrants and prisoners. Why must the right to use end-to-end encryption, unlike the right to privacy in your home or at the border, be accepted without proof as inviolable?

realid 7y ago

Those four examples are not sufficient reason to deny good encryption to anyone...and denying good encryption to anyone is denying good encryption (privacy) to everyone.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> some crimes could be aided by encryption Some crimes could be aided by virtually anything. E.g. let's destroy all the roads so criminals won't be able to travel.

dontbenebby 7y ago

Unfortunately vast swathes of the population are not able to process nuance. Even if you gently point out that North Korea is probably one of the few "crime free" societies they don't seem to parse that a world of total security cannot coexist in a nation that values freedom.

rocqua 7y ago

What about the 4 Trojan horse of the apocalypse?

asjw 7y ago

They are already using it and not on Facebook. It's silly to think that terrorists use Facebook Very silly

sjy 7y ago
It's well-documented that terrorists use Facebook and other social media. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_social_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_and_social_media