Thank you for pointing this out. It's a key point to make that it's kind of a complex issue.

It's obvious to me that cryptography shouldn't and realistically cannot be outlawed. That doesn't make any sense. On the flip side, I think that most people would accept that targeted surveillance of criminal suspects is a reasonable tool.

The thing is, if it becomes the default for all messages to be encrypted end-to-end – obviously a good thing – then this effective tool becomes useless.

I think any proposals to restrict cryptographic software are obviously wrong and doomed to failure, and I will continue using such software regardless of what laws are passed in the UK. But it is a complex issue, and I wish there was some more acknowledgement of how the field of surveillance has changed.

The Manchester attacker was reported many times as an extremist, and had the ISIS flag on his car. To suggest that he would have been caught if only the Food Standards Authority has constant read-access to your drunk teenage loveletters is ridiculous.

We need more actual police officers to do more actual police work.

Isn't it more a question of what instructions those existing police officers are given? Currently their activities always come a bit late for the innocent dead and injured. A positive check about someone hiring a van is not prima facie evidence of intent to mow down pedestrians.

Comparing

- Running investigations, police officers being known and trusted "faces" in their community, and surveilling people in meatspace

To

- Running grep on every TCP packet of 65 million people, then asking a relatively small number of LEOs to "do something" when analysts see something that could be suspicious

The former seems more likely (to me) to succeed.

Yes, but that would require rolling back some of those cuts. Another thing that would really help is if police officers would make a half decent salary. That would also cut back significantly on corruption.

Is it complex? Even with crypto authorities have more ability to surveil us than any other time in human history. Crypto seems like a very small loss when looking at the way things have trended the last 10 years, much less 100.

Even with end to end encryption they can still hack any current OS. We're a long way from having provably secure operating systems for current devices.

provably secure? I'd almost settle for theoretically secure these days.

That's not an honest representation of the argument given there is no parallel you can make between today's world of electronic communication passing over centralized infrastructure to however people communicated before.

There was no ability for the government to read everyone's (or anyone's) mail at once in the past.

Intelligence services absolutely had the ability to read people's postal mail and intercept their phone calls. For example, the CIA in a declassified report from 1976 opened over 215,000 physical letters:

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/0001420864

I guess that's a very small sample. We are talking about them making copies of every letter ever sent...

What about telephone wire tapping? e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

There is a huge difference in scale. Phone wiretapping required explicit targeting and was not possible at scale modern measures allow.

  > capable of being monitored when there was a reasonable
  > suspicion of a crime about to be committed.

The thing is: they knew about the Manchester attacker, and today on BBC was also a report that law enforcement was informed about one of the London attackers. If they cannot act on the intelligence they already have what's the point of diluting it with even more data?

You can't go back to the previous status quo any more than you can ask your mother to "bear you back" because you don't like living outside.

Trying to pretend you can is one of the most dangerous things a politician can ever do.

yea, its a rejection (a lack of understanding) of the technology of internet. It clearly states in their manifesto that they want to treat the internet the same as the physical world without appreciating that this is impossible.

I look forward to whenever politicians work out that people not under their legal jurisdiction can muck about on their internet thereby making their intent of constraint irrelevant.

> criminals will have crypto, ordinary people/dissidents/journalists etc will not

Does is imply that politicians will have crypto?

Does that mean you open people's letters to make sure they don't commit a crime?

Yes. The overt statements of HMG say they want warrants and court orders and individual targeting, not kibozing or grepping the gmail spool.

They already grep phone conversations and SMS messages, and whatever Internet traffic they can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora