> That's terrible comparison. To be clear, I'm not arguing that encrypted communication is a 1:1 analogue to license plates. I'm arguing that they both reduce

> That's terrible comparison. To be clear, I'm not arguing that encrypted communication is a 1:1 analogue to license plates. I'm arguing that they both reduce privacy to some extent, and therefore it's not right to simply say the tradeoffs are never worth it. (I would also quibble with your application of social contracts, but I don't think the details are actually that relevant given the above.) > I'm sad to inform you that cat is out of the bag for decade or two now I didn't intend for this to be an actual policy debate; I understand that you can't legislate away encryption. I was simply making the point these debates (is encrypted communication a social good?) aren't totally tradeoff-free, and pretending they are won't get us anywhere constructive. > There is no tradeoff here - bad guys can do it already using many other ways, it's just trying to limit it for the normal people. While you can't legislate away encryption itself, it's naive to think that governments have no control over how popular and widespread encryption becomes. "Bad guys can do it" doesn't mean "bad guys will do it" - the mountain of unencrypted communication used as evidence in the criminal justice system proves that. I'm firmly pro-Signal, but my guess is that if the government banned Signal tomorrow, fewer bad guys would use encrypted communication just because Signal is easy to use and most criminals aren't James Bond-style supervillains. (There are, of course, second-order effects that I wouldn't want to start speculating about.)