To be honest the second amendment, for all the out-sized media attention it receives - is a rather ineffective and unimportant portion of the Bill of Rights - falling quite far down any reasonable ranking.... Still more important than the third though - especially since the US routinely ignores the spirit of it.

That said amendments 1 & 4 are probably quite relevant, especially 4 - this law, while covering a novel subject not previously assumed, aims to specifically deprive persons of their rights to private communication including in cases where just cause cannot be established.

Particularly since most of the US's peer countries manage to get along quite well without anything like it.

There are many “freedom” indices[1] that measure the rights afforded to individuals in each country. These indices are published and maintained by groups all along the political spectrum. They all include things like due process and free speech but I’ve yet to come across one that gives weight to an individual’s access to weapons.

The “Human Freedom Index”[2] published by the ultra-libertarian Koch-funded Cato Institute doesn’t even include it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

[2] PDF page 24/numbered page 18 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/human-fr...

The USA went from being a backwater that produced cotton and tobacco to being the pre-eminent global economic and military power, and it did this while avoiding totalitarianism and (devastating) war on the home front (i.e. WWi and WWii did little damage to the continental USA). Even the countries that started off far ahead of the USA (Germany, England, Sweden, etc.) have had much worse journeys over the past 240 years.

I don't think that social evolution is an individual journey for countries. England as a nation might have a founding date around 927 though there have been some pretty major upheavals since then - it isn't fair to measure modern day America a success by comparing it to 1120 England - I think that as a global community all but the newest countries are on mostly even footing with those more aged and ancient countries being at someone of a disadvantage due to having much less solid bases in their constitutions/founding documents - more recent organized countries have been able to learn from history and create founding documents that allow them to have a more stable society... though many of those are in extremely volatile areas of the world.

Canada is like a hundred years younger than the US and doing a fair bit better and Australia founded a mere twelve years after the US is clearly within the peer range and is pretty close to the top of that list with New Zealand (founded slightly more recently than that in 1840 which puts it closer to US unification following the civil war) is usually really close to the top of most of these rankings.

Additionally, I'm not certain the validity of some of the points mentioned above:

In terms of the US's journey it gets the advantage of geography and the same advantage Canada and New Zealand received - it wasn't a theater of war during WWI & WWII, Australia actually suffered catastrophically during WWI with massive numbers of casualties received when participating in the Asia Minor theater (Gallipoli is part of the Australian cultural memory) and in WWII Papau New Guinea was a territory (albeit a relatively autonomous one) of Australia and was a heavily contested theater.

In terms of economy, the USA wasn't a cotton churning backwater on founding, it had a strong plantation based economy but as the world industrialized so did America. Britain & Germany definitely take the cake in terms of the most extreme economic transformations but America was on the upper end of the curve - it did quite well in industrialization building a strong power that it transformed into global power as the other colonial powers collapsed.

Lastly, I don't know if the US really is the pre-eminent power of the globe - certainly in terms of military it's on the top of the pile... but economically - dutch and british service industries move a lot of money around and, the ordering you didn't mention, quality of life for the citizenry, is one category America is really hurting in at this point with endemic obesity, poor healthcare and extremely poor education.

I think that the founding fathers would have believed people had a right to encryption, but that it was covered by the tenth amendment or first amendment. I believe that at least some of the founding fathers did use codes and invisible inks. I can't imagine any of them would have seen codes as weapons.

Not sure which part is about cryptography. Unless you consider algorithms to be "arms", but then what isn't?

As the Arms Export Control Act did.

> but then what isn't?

Things not named in the United States Munitions List.

You're right, it's not a common-sense definition, it's a "rule of law" definition. If the government decides to regulate encryption as arms, then it must deal with the consequences that it is admitting that encryption is arms, and that the constitutional limits on how it how it regulates arms apply to how it regulates encryption. Individual laws form a system, and even though parts of the government can change individual laws, they must still obey the system as a whole; that's what the rule of law is about.

That the medium of transmission of the message is different should make no difference.

What it boils down to is whether people are allowed to have private speech or not. Any argument that says I'm not permitted to write an electronic message to you in a way that only you can read is fundamentally equivalent to one that argues I cannot speak to you where someone else is unable to record.

I can't tell you which part of the U.S. Constitution pertains, but I'm fairly certain the Founding Fathers had a robust belief in the right to maintain a private life separate from a public life. Having zero separation between public and private was a more primitive state in ancient Athens, for example. One of the advances of Republican Democracy as a form of government was to say that a) there is a distinction, and b) the government should be restricted from interfering with private life, so long as your actions didn't damage someone else's freedom.

The Founding Fathers explicitly denounced legal mechanisms that could be used to encroach on things like a mother expressing her opinions to a child, or teaching them religion. The trade off for this freedom was to make it harder for the government to police. It was a trade off gladly accepted, because it was well and viscerally understood what the other side of that equation looks like.

We seem to have forgotten that.

The open question to me is how we can maintain this separation with respect to employers. The nature of employment as changed dramatically since the early days of the republic, and I don’t believe the Founding Fathers could have conceived of the type and size of employers we have today.

That employers have abused their power over employees to control their private lives is a matter of historical fact (see the Ford Sociological Department: https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...). Clearly, we need legal protections for workers to prevent these types of abuses of power.

When do you think cryptography and end-to-end encryption specifically was invented? I think you're likely to be thousands of years out.

If journalists are exempt, suddenly we all become journalists.

Or someone could start a news org and get "recognized" and then allow anyone to affiliate.

People are creative. They'll find a workaround.

Only if Jeff Bezos wants us to be "affiliated" with them. Same goes for every other media outlet, and their respective billionaire owners.

When your "workaround" depends on the benevolence of billionaires, it isn't a very good workaround.

I could start a "news" organization and allow anyone to affiliate. We'd publish articles on our online newspaper once a week. Maybe hire a correspondent to be part of the White House press pool.

Reminds me of my elementary school French language teachers, when I would ask them why somebody would want to learn French in Anglo Canada, and they say "you can get a government job!".

The core problem with this is that it concretely undermines the basic privacy of every American.

You're confusing the 24/7 TV infotainment with proper journalism. TV anchors peddling stories optimized to maximum viewership for the purpose of advertising is just one aspect to it, and it would be the least hurt by this. Real investigative journalism would be hit much harder.

Hell even the article is lukewarm criticism instead of speaking truth to power and saying that it is bullshit and so is the purported goal. If you want to stop child molesters you stop the molestors first as opposed to the byproducts. And even though the byproducts do their own damage cracking down on the bulletin boards is completely removed from being helpful.

Thiugh I feel it would also be a violation of a combination of the right to free speech and the Tenth Amendment, that line isn't as clear cut.

The weakening of structures that allow political journalists to expose corruption is not a small issue and should be discussed on its own.

In other words, I'm asking: "Why does this topic not deserve its own conversation?"

That's not "one of the bigger issues" of the bill. It's not even that interesting as an issue -- journalists have other ways to talk to sources. Deep Throat didn't use "end to end encryption".

But not allowing end to end encryption affects all of society (e.g. everybody's text messages, chat, and voice calls), not just some specific use case of a specific line of work.

Do you think that a system like this won't be abused in targeting journalists trying to expose corruption? Surely that's a big issue.

Journalists however, having a special need to protect their sources, and being aware of a potential lack of E2EE can always find other ways - similar to what they used to hide their sources before E2EE, when their phones could be tapped, etc, including intermediaries, face to face meetings, etc.

Journalists might be hurt from killing E2EE, but theirs is less of an issue (and they can take precautions). The big issue is with masses lacking E2EE.

Except now there's stingray towers, scraped social media profiles, phone metadata, databases of license plate reader data, Palantir, CCTV with facial recognition, Clearview AI, and an army of private tech companies attempting to create detailed profiles of everyone on the internet and selling that information to god knows what malicious actors/governments.

As technology has progressed, journalists have accordingly updated their methods for protecting sources. E2EE is one of the technologies in the 20th/21st century that is essential to that end.

This could even have totally perverse impacts: suppose that China can read your messages, but all you care about is that your provider is not hosted in the US?