I'm in the same position. It's getting harder to stick to my principals. The way I'm trying to think about it though is this: banning encryption and destroying privacy will not fix terrorism. Governments should be focusing on actual solutions to the root cause. Maybe we should stop blowing up the middle-east. We need to work for stability in those regions. Ban encryption and the terrorists will find another avenue to communicate and we'll lose freedoms for nothing.
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Franklin
If the price for living in a free society is that the same freedoms are abused by a vanishingly small minority of people then I'm ok with that, I'm not ok with what those people do but I think the loss of freedom for 60m people is a greater problem than some brainwashed idiots going on a rampage once in a while.
> Maybe we should stop blowing up the middle-east.
Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan all need secular dictators who can keep the populations under control.
From what I read, the police arrived within 2-5 minutes after the attack started. The only way to pre-empt it would be to have information about the terrorist's plans beforehand. Encryption on phones is widely available to the average person, and this makes it very difficult to stop terrorists from planning attacks.
In the grand scheme of things, terrorist attacks do not kill very many people. However, they brutalise public discourse. Every time this happens it draws us closer to authoritarianism: loss of privacy, mass internment, ethnic cleansing. The conversation after attacks seems to be becoming more and more sarcastic and bitter on one hand, and counter-establishment/authoritarian on the other. For example, photos of Sadiq Khan telling the population that these attacks are 'part and parcel' of living in a major city; and the mockery of people saying "we don't yet know if this is a muslim".
I'm pro-free-speech and pro-encryption, but I am not sure whether grinning and bearing it is really an effective weapon against terrorist activity, considering its ratcheting effects on public opinion. So, if we don't ban encryption, what are we going to do?