But, like, it’s not like the original ratifiers of the Bill of Rights didn’t understand what they were doing. They _knew_ that by outlawing common law enforcement practices like arbitrary searches and coerced confessions, they would be giving up some of their ability to “punish” certain types of “criminals”. They got that it meant they couldn’t listen in on a man’s conversation with God. That’s the deal they struck to try to form a country governed by laws, not by men.
It really seems like it’s not such a new situation, after all; we just have new values.
Imagine billions of unbreakable safes containing secret messages to and from anyone globally, instantly transported to anywhere in the world.
Like, dude, anyone with the appropriate security clearance that is aware of the implications of the encryption status quo isn’t spending time posting here.
Granted, it is new that we can communicate world wide this way, but I don't see how that changes much. "The world" to an individual has always been, and still is mostly, filled with people they could easily meet with for a secret conversation.
Also, are not our minds like an unbreakable safe? Human minds have been around for a long time.
The weakening of encryption, which may allow bad actors to exploit what the government has access to, is the actual discussion that lawmakers are considering.
People have a real hard time with coming to terms with the powers that police have. Those are not in question though. You can get mad about it, downvote me, but powerful law enforcement is a fact of modern life and it's not going away. In the US, you'd need a constitutional amendment, and there's no one calling for it, it's not an issue on any of the major parties platforms.
You're right. The US, China, Russia, and many other authoritarian regimes and politicians are working on further militarizing law enforcement and chipping away at the protections of citizens, such as supporting backdoors in encryption. Not a world I want to live in
The instincts of these organizations is to vacuum up every bit of communication that they can, and figure out how to justify access to it later. In such a world, there is no true privacy. The only method we have to combat this instinct is widely-available and widely-used strong encryption.
Imagine China's social credit score policy expanded in the US to factor in every text message you send or website you visit. It does not end well.
I also get the sentiment that people have more of a problem with the idea of government access to private communications than with weakening the encryption to allow it. I see a lot of the conversation being all about privacy, and not about encryption.
In discussion of the latter I don't have a lot to add, but in the former, the courts have decided many times over that law enforcement and the state can access information about you if they have probable cause that you're committing a crime. If you enjoy living in a society governed by laws and don't tend towards libertarian extremes of personal freedom it's something worth accepting and the discussion on the highest level of whether we should or shouldn't do this doesn't even consider this side of the argument, despite it filling up 90% of the user generated discussion about this topic whenever it comes up.