I think the strongest argument for an American audience who is unfamiliar with technology is that encryption should be included under second amendment rights.

"Guns don't hurt people, people hurt people", "blaming the manufacturer for the actions of the operator", "even if we ban them, bad guys will still use them", etc.

If the right to bear arms is defined as the right to protection against totalitarian government I would think that encryption falls into that bucket.

Maybe we should get the NRA involved in this argument...

Strong crypto used to be considered 'arms'; export was forbidden under ITAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

If one accepts that part of the intent of the Second Amendment was to allow citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government (but please, let's not start the usual argument about asymmetric warfare), strong encryption capabilities would certainly be an important component of that in the modern era.

But that's just my stance, as someone who likes guns and crypto.

As predicted by Randall Munroe some years ago: https://xkcd.com/504/

Granted, guns have serial numbers and there is a list of registered owners. My argument falls apart there.

In most of the US, no registration or license is required to legally own a gun, and the Federal government is barred from attempting to create a registry.

They literally can't even use computers to match weapons to owners. It's all on paper.

Legal guns have serial numbers and legal gun owners are registered. My grandpa has a house full of guns with no official registration.

I wouldn't look to that as an example of a well-functioning regulation system.

> It will stop the 'good' and generally innocent populace using it and severely infringe on their right to privacy, but the 'bad' people will just fork an open-source messaging system that uses E2E encryption and start using that.

And that would be the point of the ban - anyone using E2E is bad therefore, gov attacks them.

People smart enough to do this are also smart enough to anonymise their online identity. Banning it will just push the determined further beyond the reach of the security services. Services will either become peer-to-peer (and therefore un-interceptible) or use servers hosted in countries where our governments have no sway. The politicians want the playground to be supervised, but they're going to wind up with no-one in it.

Rather than the dragnet approach favoured by the NSA and an increasing number of politicians, security services need to properly investigate targetted individuals. The panopticon approach is never going to work.

The government can legislate the pipes. It's possible to DOS strong encryption at the ISP level. Look at China...

Yep, look at China and see how it only affects common people. Anybody with a minimum of knowledge is able to open a VPN out of the country.