There's no way a single country can block secure, end-to-end encryption forever, but they can sure make things hard for a while.

At that point, they can simply listen to all traffic and, if there are packets that aren't listenable due to encryption, assume ill intent, then be free to react appropriately.

Assuming high enough signal ratios in detecting encryption, it might actually prove that encoded messages, or steganography proves to be more effective at preventing state-level eavesdropping... they won't prevent a determined state from getting your secret content, but it could be enough that, if the messages looked unencrypted, they would be passed over for the more obviously encrypted messages -- hiding in plain sight, as it were.

Note, this is not an endorsement of any privacy invasions whatsoever, but musings on what a post-4th-amendment-obliteration world might look like for the privacy-minded.

An inter-country agreement makes us interoperable. All comms are monitored for anything looking encrypted but not decryptable by the state using their keys.

It will be an easy sell because those who want full personal privacy will be seen as suspect. It will also make money from licensing.

Only for their own citizens and trade partners that cooperate with their unrealistic demands.

We've been able to send end-to-end encrypted messages to multiple simultaneous recipients, via arbitrary de-centralized transports, using standardised protocols & open-source tools, for decades.

[1]http://www.brighthand.com/news/rim-vs-india-and-saudi-arabia...

It's one thing to ask a cell member, hey, here's a phone, it only has this app on it. Don't mod it, don't do anything but use this app.

Versus, hey, please implement a secure encryption protocol and make sure there are no exploitable bugs.

Also, if the government controls the carriers, they ultimately control what can run on the handset [if they choose to be draconian].

Also, for a big enough growth market, I think they'd be willing to centralize encryption. They'll outwardly say, no impossible, can't be done. Host country will say, sorry, you can't sell here, can't be done. Secret high-level talks happen and mysteriously the handsets are available again.

What is an encryption vendor, exactly?

Is Open Whisper Systems an encryption vendor? They're pioneers in secure messaging, and they give it away for free. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id8...

Is Paragon Initiative Enterprises an encryption vendor? We published Halite, a PHP library to wrap libsodium and make it even harder to use incorrectly. (Users don't even have to know what a nonce is.) https://paragonie.com/project/halite

Or are you speaking about software vendors that erroneously implement their own cryptography features? If so, I totally agree. They do sloopy work.

If it's so easy, then, go ahead, replace all your daily encryption with gpg and couriers, see how effective you become.

Just as with disease, you're not looking to eliminate it, you're looking to minimize it.

If it's based on requiring a specific amount of computation, the neighborhood despot buys a billion dollars of computers instead of feeding the people and destroys the modern economy.

If more than one government requires such interception capabilities for a single transaction, and the communicating parties involved don't trust all the governments involved, they won't communicate which will destroy the modern economy.

If, magically, none of the previous scenarios play out, anybody who wants to communicate securely will have the enormous burden of complying with the regulations of all of the involved governments, slowing down commerce and innovation, and potentially destroying the modern economy.

If there's a government key server that dispenses a public key for government snooping and it goes down/a competing government redirects to its own key/DNS or BGP is poisoned/etc. then someone else gets all the traffic and destroys the modern economy.

Beyond the economy it's a matter of trust. For the relatively small benefit of a very slight (or even zero) reduction in terrorist incidents, there's simply nobody who can be trusted with the power to snoop on everything.

What I don't get is one the one hand it's too expensive for governments to do effective snooping (too much data to sift) but on the other hand trust would be broken because everyone could find anything... but governments would be incapable of finding information that same trust breaking information.

1. despots already leave their populations unfed, the world keeps on going.

2. commerce happened before encryption. There hasn't been good reliable and easy to use encryption till the last couple of years. it's not as if the world hadn't globalized despite that.

3. There are already a lot of rules which apply to international commerce, this add very little in comparison.

4. Govt's who want to share in this scheme agree to rules and penalties for breaking them.

It's possible for both to be true. The price to snoop effectively is too high (wasting money), so either the government is wasting ridiculous amounts of money and violating everyone, or they're not wasting the money, not catching terrorists, and just using the information to violate specific individuals.

despots already leave their populations unfed, the world keeps on going.

It's the computers, not the food.

commerce happened before encryption. There hasn't been good reliable and easy to use encryption till the last couple of years. it's not as if the world hadn't globalized despite that.

Encryption is essential to modern commerce. Businesses and banks need to be able to transfer files between offices without fear that an unfriendly corporation, government, or hacker can intercept those files. Customers need to be able to download software and send payment information to companies without having a virus inserted in the download or their payment details stolen.

There are also free speech, whistleblower, and related considerations that I don't want to take the time to argue here.

But foremost, beyond all that it's still not established that forced MITM will reduce terrorism. That fundamental idea needs to be established first before any other factors are worth considering, and even then the net benefit to the world may still be greater with encryption than without.

That's the only criterion.

All the rest are excuses because people can make a calculus and by and large people and corps, if MITM would be proven to be effective, would likely go for it, given alternatives, despite any other objections put forth by people who believe in opposing this alternative.

It's almost as though people wish it would be ineffective to prove the opinion right. Is it effective? I don't know, I don't have the data but neither do others with opposing views -it's conjecture. But, one would imagine a few governments must have the answer to that but aren't saying.

>or they're not wasting the money, not catching terrorists, and just using the information to violate specific individuals.

Isn't that what one would want from such a regime? Be able to dedicate resources on following the right graphs?

That's saying, well, they have the capability to follow known targets, but when it gets to terrorist targets they become dumb -even though the mission of such orgs is to follow those specific targets.