I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.
> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.
A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.
And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.
In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,
> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.
I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.
Yes, it's supposed to be an unrealistically optimistic thought experiment, both in favour of the efficacy of technical solutions (e.g ignoring the societal component in making those successful) and government power (e.g ignoring economic side-effects, and also ignoring push back from society - which is the whole point). To show how technological solutions are insufficient when they are left to play out against unchecked power.
In reality, there are multiple forces beyond legislation that naturally add friction, which you allude to... However government can get very far before hitting those thresholds, especially if there is no pushback from the people. The other factor is that the more progress they make with such democratic eroding policies, the more power they may gain, and the easier more extreme policies are to enact, in spite of economic consequences. For instance this is very much the case with the GFW in China where not all workers have access to the full wealth of information available on the wider internet.
> I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.
Part of that is also made possible by controlling the internet. In my made up scenario this is at the "we mess with the fabs" level of government intervention, for which it's infeasibly hard for society to come up with a technical solution... and this does have real consequences on China's economy as workers do not have the same degree of access to information that we enjoy in the west to perform our jobs efficiently.
The point being, it can and does reach extremes when any style of government is left to it's own devices and people do not, or cannot fight for such freedoms.
that would be the intended outcome: comply or die.
I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out:
1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next?
2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what?
3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement?
Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud.
If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate freely.