This is a fair counter, but I feel like we already have examples of how the government would respond there. We might have to switch analogies, but wouldn't encryption then be like a weapon. The goal would then shift to being about deproliferation. The fact that nuclear weapons or AK47s already exist doesn't prevent the government from preventing regular people from acquiring or using them. Maybe preventing new products from entering the market and flooding the market with faulty products (encryption with backdoors) is a good way of combating what is already out there.

I don't think non-proliferation would be a good idea for encryption technology:

1. Depriving the the public of decent encryption does a lot of harm. If you let some people in through the backdoor you're going to let bad people in too.

This is different from nuclear bombs. It doesn't harm the public to deprive them of nuclear weapons. I like having my financial information encrypted, but I don't want a personal nuclear bomb.

2. Non-proliferation of encryption wouldn't work. The algorithms and ideas are already widespread. Every university teaches it. Millions of computers have the code already. The code and ideas can be proliferated anonymously, instantly, undetectably and cheaply.

This is different from nuclear bombs. Nuclear bombs are much more complex and expensive to transport, manufacture and hide.

(I haven't mentioned AK47s, but I'd say they fall somewhere between between encryption and nuclear bombs in benefit vs harm to the public and in ease vs difficulty of non-proliferation, which is why there are more of them around than there are nuclear bombs.)

The terrorists will use encrypted, unbreakable methods no matter that Google or Apple use is their OS. That's really the only point that matters.

And I might be able to get my hands on an AK47 if I really wanted and had enough money to dedicate to it. That is the truth of the world. But do you believe that making it harder to acquire a weapon like that doesn't have some benefit?

Back to HN's world, one of the basic principles of human factors is "make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard." You might not be able to prevent people from doing the wrong thing, but there is still value in making it harder to do.

It's not hard to download some software while sitting in your house. Much easier than buying an illegal gun.

"Deproliferation" is impossible. It's not like banning guns. It's like banning the idea of how a gun works from ever being communicated, burning every book that contains the concept, erasing it from all electronic records, and strictly monitoring anyone with chemistry or metallurgy knowledge.

All you need to write an encryption program is an explanation of the concept behind a single algorithm, someone with math smarts, and almost any computer.

I think there would be an ever better angle to this. If the government can listen to any legally encrypted communication via their backdoors, then by definition any communication they can't listen to is illegal and they can focus their intelligence resources people communicating in such way.

But honestly, I think it'll result in bad guys using the same backdoored crypto that everyone else will be using, relying on steganography and disappearing in the noise - so basically, they'll do things in the same way as they always did, since assuming all communications is broken by the government is simply good OPSEC.