No because they're not using it in the first place. It's a totally unrelated issue, dear to some for reasons entirely their own. The fear of terrorism is just a convenient little button to press to get their cookie.

Maybe, but I'd rather not send my financial information over the Internet in cleartext every time I buy something from a web site.

You wouldn't.

The government would just have the private keys so they could decrypt traffic easily.

Kind of like the TSA approved locks for your baggage. Those are very secure and can be opened only by the government officials, last I heard. The only downside is that those TSA master keys might become available to the third party somehow, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, since we can always trust the government to keep such information secure.

Not "might become available", they already are - https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys

Someone posted a photo of master keys and Internet was, as usual, the Internet.

Call me crazy, but I think that may have been the joke.

No lock is secure, ever.

Then the terrorists would just use non-encrypted communications and blend in with the massive flow of everyday data...

...Unless you're intercepting and sniffing everything that's unencrypted. Then we're back to square one.

Indulging this fantasy, it begs the question of whether those (enencrypted) communications would have been targeted and flagged for analysis

How does it beg the question?

There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'

Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.

In 20+ years of learning English I've heard it used several times to refer to an obvious question or lack of information

"$noun did $verb which resulted in $result and $result is $something interest which begs the question $question."

well, your confusion of tenses kinda colors your knowledge about grammar rather questionable and i say that as a foreign speaker

Until it changes meaning, I cannot give it up. A curse I tell you!

Not really, because the proposals aren't to go to no encryption but to go to government-backdoored encryption. To an observer you've still just a random stream of bits until someone tries to decrypt it with the backdoor key. Pretty easy to hide in unless we're monitoring every message.

And terrorists would be smart - they'd employ non-backdoored encryption, hide that in "legit" communications, and encrypt that with the proper back-doored government encryption. They'd appear to be a totally normal snapchat user, or whatever.

If we actually meant to give up all encryption, card-kiddies would destroy civilization in three weeks.

And when the next Snowden publishes the global decryption keys we'll all just update our software together.

Surely you mean "the next Impact Team" (those behind the Ashley-Madison breaches) because Snowden actually went through painstaking lengths to not reveal stuff that would put the public at danger like that.

If there was some way to learn the identity of said terrorist simply by observing the origin and destination of an encrypted message, then perhaps. It would possible for them to coordinate and avoid this outcome. And there are still plenty of secure crypto systems out there so we wouldn't be able to decrypt their messages (unless quantum computers turn into an actual thing).

I don't think so, as far as I know encrypted data doesn't really have a signature that can be easily spotted

It does, it looks random (hight entropy).

Yes, measured data and unmarked compressed data have this same property, as do actual random data. But is does not look like 9 nines of false positive rate are a concern to those people.

You can set the entropy to any amount you want. You need to consider encryption methods that put in at least a bit of effort to hide themselves. It could select random phrases and pretend to be a spambot.

Or it could look like the output of a Markov chain sentence generator on the topic of religion and post the messages in some well-known forum.

Well, where's the boundary between cryptography that hides itself and stenography? Is there one?

If you include stenography, yes, it's certainly not easily recognizable. I don't think good stenography can be recognized at all, but that's not my area and I've got people contradict me at this (without further info), thus I'm not sure.

There's not much of a boundary, but that wasn't exactly the point I meant to make. You can do something like encode as ASCII 0s and 1s and have low entropy without that hiding anything.