What we’ve seen is governments subverting encryption and systems repeatedly, in ways they wouldn’t if they had other methods.
I’m not trying to accomplish some absolute ideological position, I’m trying to shift the state of affairs to realign incentives for several players. If some people write their own encryption, or the technologists use GPG everywhere, whatever.
> allow them to have a society-wide dragnet
I don’t think you even read my proposal: the mechanism I proposed makes that impossible, which is in contrast to the current state of affairs, where they subvert the security of the entire system instead of targeted people. Allowing for targeted cracking at a certain level of expense and requiring physical possession of the device in no way enables mass dragnets, and in fact, removes their legal cover by providing alternative means.
I’m not saying people can’t invent their own security — just that factory made safes need to not be “unbreakable”, because it just incentivized bad behavior when they discover a flaw and/or subverting the integrity of the factory.
You did.
Any attempt at right of privacy must be mercilessly crushed with maximum force
Further, I’m actually trying to increase privacy, by negotiating a compromise that’s workable for society as a way to remove the excuses bad actors are using, and shift the legal framework around the topic. That’s not an absolute ideological position, by any definition.
By contrast, you do adopt such an absolutist position — which isn’t grounded in law, and fails to provide for other societal needs. Such stances lead to failure, because of their absolutism. Your stance is why Australia passed an internet wiretapping law, not mine — because you refused to acknowledge a societal need until they employed force.
If your approach worked, we wouldn’t have the state of things we do now.
I appreciate the motivation but it's very naive.
Sure, you give them access after 1 month. Next they'll say 1 month is too long, they need to be able to do it within hours to be able to catch criminals before they run to another city. Then it'll be minutes so they can stop crimes while they're happening. Then it'll be real-time on everyone so they can use machine learning to predict crimes minutes before they happen.
> Your stance is why Australia passed an internet wiretapping law, not mine — because you refused to acknowledge a societal need until they employed force.
> If your approach worked, we wouldn’t have the state of things we do now.
They would still have done, and more. You think police and intelligence agencies will one day just say "yeah, that's enough, we're good"? No, they'll want anything that makes their job easier and gives them more power, always.
It's very much the other way. Strong encryption algorithms have been available to the public for a long time now. You can ban using them, but the only way to effectively enforce that ban would be for the government to require that all devices capable of running code from external sources run only code that's signed by that government.
Without that, you can ban all you want, but terrorists and others who need that stuff will have it anyway. So the only effect would indeed be no privacy for saucy emails. Of course, intelligence agencies would love that, since it would allow them to have a society-wide dragnet.