anonymous money anonymous communication anonymous residence anonymous weapons
etc
Maybe we should make hands illegal since they do illegal things and you can only use your hand with a license from the smart-over-lord-government, right?
Or less dramatically, all technology and all constructions from home improvements to particle accelerators to hairspray to encrypted internet should pass review from the government and people can only work on what the government approves and use things they have licenses for.
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Do you want to apply your same argument to car manufacturers? Cars can be used by kidnappers, bank robbers, rapists and murderers to flee crime scenes. So car manufacturers should stop producing cars because all of the good they are used for (visiting loved ones in the hospital, visiting your kids baseball game, going to work) isn't worth the carnage caused by the "bad people"?
So you basically get to choose: we stop all tools from being freely available and we open up all our communications to criminals and governments alike or we will have to take the good with the bad.
The people who wrote crypto software (and the people who built TOR and who operate anonymous proxy servers, VPN services and so on, built bitcoin, the internet, your browser and your mail client) all realize their work is 'dual use' and there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it so just let it go and accept it.
That same hammer that can pound in a nail in the hands of a carpenter (skilled or not) can be used to bludgeon someone to death. Should we ban hammers? How should the person who invented the hammer feel?
A tool I invented is used by some pretty bad people. I don't like it much. But I recognize that that same tool is also used for good, and that those good uses are probably the majority of them. It used to bother me, but I got over it, now I do think longer and harder about if there is any possible bad use of the stuff I make that I can make harder by designing the stuff I build in a different way. It doesn't always work out and people are pretty clever about finding alternate uses.
Bad people are people. They will do the exact same things that people in general do. They will use the exact same services that people in general use.
You know what has objectively led to much more innocent people being hurt than crypto? The Internet. Why aren't you out there guilt tripping all people who work on it?
I wonder if anyone believes that the world would be better today if we didn't have airplanes, even if they are sometimes used to hurt innocent people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-Dumont#Death
[2] http://global.britannica.com/biography/Alberto-Santos-Dumont
That's a dangerous assumption in any situation (it's never a good idea to assume your opponent is stupid). We do not have a monopoly on mathematics; you never know who has read [1]الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة.
> I wonder how the people who wrote crypto software and provide secure messaging services feel about terrorists and other bad people using their products
Are you going to ask shoemakers the same question? I'm sure most terrorist prefer the advantage of durable shoes when fighting. While I don't have any numbers, I suspect durable shoes have helped more terrorists than encryption.
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The problem is you're anthropomorphizing technology. Each new technology is neither good nor evil (or neutral). I'll let Feynman explain:
I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good
thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.
Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a
man said, “I am going to tell you something that you will never forget.”
And then he said, “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven.
The same key opens the gates of hell.”
And so it is with science. In a way it is a key to the gates of heaven,
and the same key opens the gates of hell, and we do not have any
instructions as to which is which gate. Shall we throw away the key
and never have a way to enter the gates of heaven? Or shall we struggle
with the problem of which is the best way to use the key? That is,
of course, a very serious question, but I think that we cannot deny
the value of the key to the gates of heaven.”
We keep learning more and more science and technology, and I don't think it is truly possible to stop that trend. I suggest we start finding ways to live with each other in the presence of technologies like encryption, because he problem is only going to get worse. We, as a species, are going to have a serious problem if we haven't learned that lesson by the time someone invents a way to make nuclear weapons with common household parts... or some unknown technology that is even worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compendious_Book_on_Calcul...
It is so easy to do basic crypto if you're a terrorist - to them, whether xMessenger.app has it is a marginal usability difference. Giving terrorists a marginal usability difference, to many, is okay in exchange for securing the bulk of innocent communications from overreaching governments.
Zimmerman's response to being described as "overwhelmed with feelings of guilt" in article following 9/11 and the possibility that his encryption tools had been used by the plotters.
I know there are plenty of legitimate uses, but especially for the services that essentially bill themselves as secure and untraceable, you have to know at a certain point you've designed and built technology that is actively being used to hurt innocent people. For me it would be difficult to quantify if the amount of good is worth the all the bad people in the world.