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.

> 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.

Also, too much privacy can also support defection rather than coordination. The government may look at this and see something else: that in the arguably much more likely scenario criminals will use encryption to defect against the social order. Enough untraceable trade and then when there's a nuclear or biological attack you may think about reconsidering just how much privacy do you want general population to have.

I don't want to defend or support the surveillance state here, just pointing out that, especially from government's point of view, them turning totalitarian seems much less likely than criminals and terrorists doing their crime and terror things.

Rarely is someone in technology upset over, say, the lack of use of encryption when sending e-mails. While when you talk to say lawyers or journalists, for which privacy is the basis of their activities, they are often quite upset over the tech industries cavalier attitudes.

More than anything I think you can't effectively defend something if you don't know the issues or peoples concerns. It's great that there is a lingering support of privacy from hackers subculture, but if you can't oppose someone saying "but terrorism" it might not be worth very much. It might actually be more damaging, because you don't see how you could be the "bad" guy (in terms of privacy).

Their alternative to real police/intelligence work is indiscriminate surveillance 1984 style.

If there was no strong, public key encryption, the bad guys would still find ways to coordinate without it, it's been done since times immemorial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Unio...

The issue is that it won't work. If you introduce mandatory backdoors into any commercial messaging system, it will not be used; the Bad Guys(tm) will simply return to using open source crypto, like pgp-over-whatever that we've had for decades.

I.e. if strong crypto is outlawed, then only outlaws will have strong crypto.

The intelligence agencies know this. Anyone pushing for backdoors in the name of counter-terrorism is either a fool or a liar.

Here, read and understand.

Any data to back that up? 9/11 was by far the worst and that was 14 years ago. Seems to me Islamic terrorism is hanging pretty steady at a 'virtually non-existent' level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_%28non-state%29_terror...

Besides, mass surveillance in itself is an attack on human rights, and as such not terribly useful for defending human rights. Maybe if it could avert millions of murders each year, we could talk about it. But with it averting nearly nothing, it's like cutting off your arm because you have an ink stain on your finger.

Personally, I'd rather die free than live surveilled. You can call me young and naive and say my principles just haven't had time to be challenged. I don't care. I stand by this completely and don't apologize for it. Freedom is the basis for a meaningful life.