Cryptocurrency is bad and must be banned because ransomware. Encryption is bad because pedos, let’s ban Tor and Signal. We need a permanent surveillance state and forfeit most of our rights to privacy because terrorists bad, what do you have to hide?
Sounds a lot like the argument the government makes about encryption. "Do you really want terrorists and pedophiles to be able to hide from law enforcement? What about a ticking timebomb scenario?"
It's difficult to have an actual discussion when the same old platitudes keep reappearing in every crypto discussion.
I can rephrase as a question: Should we stop using groundbreaking and individual-empowering technologies just because some criminals benefit? Every single technology is exploted by criminals. I fail to see how that is an argument for its disavowal. If anything, we need to normalise privacy and encryption among virtuous everyday individuals.
I think for me it's terrifying because it sounds like the same line of reasoning as, "Why should I care about encryption? I don't have anything to hide," and people say (and mean) that a LOT.
So many people genuinely don't understand what would be wrong with this scenario, and that's why I'm afraid.
I never understand the thought process here.
If you ban or cripple encryption by demanding backdoors, criminals will just use "illegal" real encryption and the rest of us will be stuck with unsafe "encryption" susceptible to mass surveillance and forementioned criminals.
Explain the gain for society without using the words "terrorism" or "child porn"
So, the many downsides of implanting backdoors into cryptography are most of why I oppose them, and support the global deployment of default-unbreakable communications, so that people don't even have to think about whether their communications are electronically protected but simply always are.
But that's not what I'm taking issue with. What I don't get is the repulsion people here seem to have with the simple idea that the state is entitled to evidence, as part of the social contract that animates the country, and that technology is in fact poised to overrule that entitlement without due process of law or politics.
It's a simple and sensible issue to have with crypto. Crypto is important and valuable technology, but that doesn't mean everything about it is good. It has downsides, too. We should be honest about them, and less shocked when people weigh the downsides differently than we do.
Anticrypto arguments like "it can be used for crime", "you have nothing to hide", "it's easier to give my credit card to the merchant" are obviously aligned with normie mentality.
> privacy is a fundamental human right. Law enforcement doesn't understand this, they only know "getting the baddies"
Law enforcement doesn't have any issues with their understanding or their clarity of thinking, but frankly I think people like us on tech forums often do.
Remember: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The difference between "terrorist" and "dissident" is mostly nuanced definition, depending very much on whether the observer supports the people at question or doesn't. People trying to overthrow the Chinese government are 'dissidents' unless you're a member of the Chinese government, in which case they're terrorists. The fighters in eastern Ukraine are either pro-Russian rebels or anti-Ukrainian terrorists, again depending on who is talking. Islamic mullah's are either exercising their inalienable right to freedom of speech, or spreading extremism and brainwashing people ... probably depending on whether you grew up in the USA or the UK.
It's for these sorts of reasons that the UN has never been able to arrive at a working definition of terrorism.
So now look at the arguments deployed by the technical community for strong encryption. Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it's important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government. It is easy to find encryption products that make this sort of argument.
In short, the tech community argues that strong government-proof crypto is important because dissidents must be protected (who else is both sympathetic and needs the ability for their communication to have court-order-proof levels of privacy?). But those same governments hear these arguments and say, wait, the dissidents we're dealing with are not dissidents, they're terrorists!
So this is an unresolvable conflict of views. The tech industry will unfortunately always be in the position of explicitly supporting terrorism, from at least some observers point of view. It's inherent in the idea that sometimes governments must not be all powerful.
The right against e2e encryption will ultimately be lost, IMO.
There is just no concrete, tangible reason why sex predators and terrorists do need to have this protection from law enforcement. Meanwhile, there is no concrete, tangible need for the average citizen to be able to foil lawful access by police (say after a warrant was issued - you do have protections!).
I say concrete and tangible, because while I strongly support e2e, it is impossible to justify on purely objective, let's weigh specific pros and cons grounds. It's essentially an ideological position, where you are willing to accept a lot of concrete downsides for the idea that the right to privacy is a tool in the balance between the individual and the state.
I'd venture to say that very few people here actually deeply believe this though. Rather, it has been adopted as commonly accepted wisdom within our community. Your supposed to support encryption. Within the larger culture wars and the techslash, I have serious doubts as to how many people are willing to defend e2e encryption once the wider public turns against it. This just needs persistence and the right political trigger.
By the way - the argument for cryptocurrency, or for Tor, is exactly the same as the argument for e2e encryption. You are supposed to accept all the bad stuff (crime), not because the average Joe needs the tech, but because it serves as a counterweight against the tyranny of the majority. You don't need to be a libertarian to believe that.
How about the argument that although browser crypto won't render your communications reliably secure, widespread adoption could make it significantly harder to transparently implement mass surveillance?
I'm not sure if this argument is actually flawed, or just anathema to grown up cryptographers who prefer hard maths to wishy washy politics/economics?
E2E encryption doesn't need an argument for it, it has specific, valuable and demonstrated uses, and I reject the premise of the question that the technical and business use cases for it need an accompanying rhetorical justification.
The people asking for the arguments are not people who can be persuaded by argument, they are looking for ways to drive another agenda. It's disingenuous and not a matter of reason.
To respond to the question itself, let's start with what we actually do. We make the stuff people actually want, and thanks to abuses by authorities around the world, today they want privacy and trustworthy tools. We build things that facilitate growth and massive improvements in quality of life for literally billions of people around the world. That growth comes from building the things they both want and trust, and use each day to improve the quality of their own lives and of their families. I would encourage governments to get better at offering the same things.
The extreme cases cited in the OP are abused by people with agendas to use them as levers to assert their narrow interests, and not because they want to solve those particular problems. Parading victims of abuse and violence to bolster a narrow surveillance agenda is the rhetorical equivalent of using human shields. Hardly anyone is actually stupid, and everyone sees it. Further, why would you ask technologists to presume good, altruistic and aligned intentions in governments who want to conduct surveillance, yet not among ourselves and our users of encryption services? We can't make that altruism generalization about our own governments, let alone ones in other markets. I would reject this particular premise in being asked to make an argument "for," as well.
The question, "I need you to justify your view to me, and with it, these objectively terrible things" is disingenuous.
The short answer is technologists do not have the solutions to niche social and political problems any more so than anyone else. Terrorism, abuse, and porn exist independently of tech. The "arguments," against E2E encryption are made by people who don't have responsibility for the outcomes of their efforts, and are using these threats to deflect that and make others responsible for them.
If we all gave up E2E encryption, the value people entrust to networks would be reduced to where it would derail and destroy the economic growth trajectory which that trust facilitates to improve peoples lives. The solution is not for tech to do less of what people demonstrably want and willingly pay for, it's for governments to be smarter about their own roles and responsibilities.
If you want to solve the problems of abuse and terrorism directly, there are a ton of solutions that don't involve destroying the trust people have in each other that has improved our collective quality of life immeasurably in the last 30 years.
Scary that something so important will be determined by the perception of the vast majority of the public, who has no understanding of what's at stake.
To most people arguments like "it will help us find terrorists and pedophiles" and flawed analogies with doors and keys are much more appealing, only because they are easy to understand, while the opposite arguments sound philosophical, alien or carry less weight because they contradict what "the experts" (i.e. the FBI) claim.
But they shouldn't sound so: what's happening is wrong not just because of the practical fallacies of the pro-restrictions arguments -in which most discussions focus currently- it is wrong because the only way for government monitoring to be effective in the end, is to outright criminalise secure encryption by everyone. It should be blatantly obvious that the most dangerous of their claimed target group, wouldn't be dissuaded by the inconvenience of using custom/non-friendly software/hardware, so any lesser measure would be just useless.
And on that premise, how can many people not see how wrong it would be if one day we are called criminals for exchanging a truly private message with someone? In what words and with what simple examples can you make non-technical people see how bad this reality would be and how far it can stretch to things that they do care about? And that even if it didn't, it would still be fundamentally wrong...
Not a rhetorical question by the way, I've tried to participate in such discussions and failed miserably to be convincing -so any tips are appreciated.
I used terrorism as my man of straw, but the same point applies to any other illegal activity that encrypted communications would help facilitate. That's not a consequence we as technical professionals can ignore if we want to win this debate.
The first step to making a convincing argument is acknowledging reality: the proliferation of hard encryption will alter the balance between individuals and the state.
Because encryption is math and knowledge. Banning it will only stop legitimate users while bad actors can still just go ahead and encrypt their stuff.
If politicians consider leaving everybody vulnerable to catch criminals, this is a incredibly high price to pay. I’d argue that the price is so high that even with evidence that this would help catch criminals we should still consider not doing it. However there is no evidence for that and my argument above explains why criminals would still be able to encrypt.
We should really stop implementing any security legislation without checking whether it actually achieves the stated goals.
The point is, “if a technology exists, you cannot tell people to not use it” is a terrible argument for anything.
We restrict people’s use of technology in all sorts of ways to protect the basic order of society. For instance we restrict people from driving 150mph rocket cars or armored tanks with cannons on residential streets, we disallow radio jammers, we carefully regulate access to radioactive material, we don’t let unlicensed doctors implant untested medical devices, and so on.
More generally, gun control is almost entirely irrelevant to encryption. It’s an emotionally charged non sequitur which derails the discussion.
That's an interesting analogy, because I often find that the counterarguments sound a lot like techies arguing that encryption cannot have negative consequences.
I understand where the sentiment is coming from, but the point you are making here is incoherent. Your argument is literally this: people need encryption so that they can conceal evidence of crimes.
I think next time you pose this argument, you should remove the bit about how your actions might be illegal in some jurisdiction or other. It isn't doing the work for you that you think it is.
Sure, but at this point isn't it about security infrastructure? As long as we frame it as Liberty vs Security, then there will be people who disagree and the side with the stronger emotional salience will win.
The response to "if you have nothing to hide etc." Should be "What is the password to your bank account?", not a more abstract philosophical argument.
There will always be monsters, and they will always find a way. That is why vigilance and law enforcement exist.
End-to-end encryption is important because the same thing applies; by creating a system to counter the pedophile, you open the door to other monstrosities through the abuse of that mechanism.
End-to-end encryption is not an inherent issue. Ineffective, untrustworthy, and overly violent/destructive law enforcement agencies, combined with victim disarmament are. End-to-end encryption does not render law enforcement ineffective. It merely means they have to resort to well established investigatory methods instead of getting a free pass in the form of being able to trivially access content that would have been secured in the first place.
You can argue that warrant-proofing is an undesirable characteristic, but at least in the U.S., I argue the 5th Amendment covers most cases where end-to-end encryption would normally apply.
The world was never open and unencrypted by default before the Net, there is no reason it should be now.
Cryptocurrency is bad and must be banned because ransomware. Encryption is bad because pedos, let’s ban Tor and Signal. We need a permanent surveillance state and forfeit most of our rights to privacy because terrorists bad, what do you have to hide?
Is it an appeal to emotion? Fear?
reply