Painting cryptography as a 'weapon,' as the header image of this article does and as was done in the past with the ban on it's exportation, is a completely wron

Painting cryptography as a 'weapon,' as the header image of this article does and as was done in the past with the ban on it's exportation, is a completely wrong analogy. Cryptography simply translates to the digital world mankind's right to be secure in our personal effects, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Unencrypted digital communication removes the temporal aspect of surveillance. If you have a conversation with somebody in the physical world and you are secure that that conversation is not being spied on, you can be sure that at no point in the future will that conversation be spied on. Encrypted digital communication simply translates that right to the digital world. If an authority has pretty good knowledge that someone is in possession of encrypted digital files that only they have the password to access, this is simply the digital version of an authority having pretty good knowledge that someone has a buried treasure that only they have access to. This person cannot be coerced against their will to travel to the location of the buried treasure an dig it up just because an authority is pretty sure it is out there somewhere. Others in this thread have pointed out that this is just law enforcement being lazy. And that is a very good point there are plenty ways to do law enforcement even if your target is communicating in codes and crucially it causes resources to focus on the important targets. This is really crux of the matter, encrypted communication is not going to prevent law enforcement from doing their jobs. Crucially, what it does prevent, is the nation/world wide digital-technology enabled surveillance dragnets. This is what must be kept in mind when considering this issue, we must make sure that we are creating future societies that are under no threat of nationwide spying from tyrannical governments. In fact, any non-sense about 'going dark,' or terrorism and criminals is a smokescreen and should be struck from any reasonable, level-headed discussion of this matter. Terrorism and crime are rare enough and law enforcement is good enough that we are under no risk in seeing an upswing in crime and terrorism due to continued proliferation of strong(that is, actual) encryption. The continued development and use of cryptography is entirely about preventing the kind of massive scale, unlawful spying that has been shown to be taking place.