Terrorism kills fewer people than almost every hazard Americans face. Cancer, auto accidents, drug resistant bacteria, and hundreds of other risks are how 99.5% of Americans will die. So, for the minuscule risk that terrorism presents we've spent billions, give up privacy and consider ever more extreme measures?

How about instead we instead acknowledge the risks are small to Americans, and refocus our attention, our lethal attention, to the clerics, organizations, bankers and states that sponsor terrorism.

Let's talk giving up civil liberties after we have run out of accountable parties to bring to justice.

Sometimes there's just not a good answer to problems. The rhetoric on the anti-encryption side is "We need to be able to break encryption because if we can't then bad guys will do bad things with it". This is true. There is no way to make it so only good people can do only good things with it. It's either secure/unbreakable or it is not. There's no middle ground that won't lead to it being worthless.

Maybe there is no solution to this problem. I have yet to be convinced that surveillance has been effective at all at combatting terrorism, and even if it's been occasionally effective its ROI is terrible.

Our various societies are generally willing to accept certain tradeoffs because there are no black and white answers. In the US, society as a whole is currently willing to accept a relatively enormous amount of collateral damage to allow widespread gun ownership. This causes multiple orders of magnitude more deaths than terrorism, and yet for now, it's deemed acceptable to protect certain liberties.

If encryption is allowed to be truly secure, it's possible that more people will die in terrorist attacks. It's also possible that more people will get away with truly terrible things like child pornography. But the freedoms that we give away generally never come back, or they take an enormous amount of time to come back. For me, maintaining those liberties is worth the tradeoff.

Maybe there is a way.... Let’s say every person gets a public and private key. Private key is only known to the individual. The only exception: your private key is immediately encrypted with public keys of large number of random strangers (10K?) and in its encrypted form sent to some government registry.

You encrypt all of your content with your own public key and have reasonable expectation of privacy as long as at least one of those 10K people feels you deserve your privacy.

If you happened to be a terrorist and the consensus of 10K strangers who encrypted your private key is to let the government snoop on you, they can choose to decrypt your private key and turn it over to the government.

Well for one thing we could open up all the secret courts that these people use to do what they do with no accountability.

Oh wait, were you talking about "terrorists", or government agents? It's not clear.

I'd need enough cash to hire Tom Cruise and at least three half-dozen rotating shift blue goo tub people. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can write a $100,000,000 check payable to the Church of Scientology, and they'll supply the whole package.

The truth is, in a free society, it is not a problem that cannot be completely solved. As long as people want to harm others, they will find a way.

This is a great question, but it's not HN's job to answer, it is the DOJ's.

We really need to get the point across that no government would be able to enforce a law that requires a certain software design (in this case, back doors) in all commercial and free software.

It's the equivalent of requiring people to say or write only certain things. Even China and North Korea do not do that successfully, and they try really really hard.

Our representatives and law enforcement are woefully uninformed about this issue, and it hurts the public because fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. While we are infighting, terrorists are making strides.