I'm sure all criminals will stop using encryption as soon as it is banned.

Because criminals won't find a way.

When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like this.

> When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like this.

I doubt anyone bothers to pay people to post this stuff to Hacker News. The battle over crypto is essentially over at this point.

As an aside, 'qualitative' is not a synonym for 'quality'; it means 'involving distinctions based on qualities' and contrasts with 'quantitative', which refers to distinctions based on numerical measurements.

I have seen repeatedly comments appearing on subjects like these, written by relatively new accounts and supporting some form of surveillance measures. What they have in common is, that they just make a 1-sentence statement "we should be thankful that someone is protecting us", and provide no further arguments for their case. But them being troll baits might be more realistic. After all we are still arguing about it.

If you are trying to nit-pick about word definitions, kindly include the second part of the definition, that clearly supports my use of the word for comparing good/bad quality: "2. qualitative - relating to or involving comparisons based on qualities".

> I wish he had succeed. Digital, not just email, encryption is a threat to national security.

Since this comment is on its way to being killed, I quoted the entirety so my response would not be deprived of context.

Twenty years ago, this would have engendered actual debate. Fifteen years ago, it would have been harder to defend, but it would have found defenders. Now, of course, it's seen as utterly absurd and impossible to consider seriously.

Our culture has come to depend on encryption to do even the most basic business; trying to shove the genie into the bottle even partway, by mandating weaker encryption, would simply open our businesses' bank vaults and warehouses to criminals from around the world.

The nail in the coffin for crypto bans seemed (to me) to be the rise of crypto competency overseas. In the mid to late 1990s there was a lot of progress outside the US.

Also, when VISA comes politely knocking, saying "We'd really like our stuff to be secure, and available to anyone," congre$$ tend$ to li$ten.