>So WireShark is now illegal in your ideal world?

If if it's not your network and/or network traffic, or you don't have the network owners permission, then yes.

Why should it be legal? Because you like playing with it?

That's a strange, old school way of thinking. Why are you trying to legislate technology when you could just make the tech work the way you want?

"Impossible" trumps "illegal" every time.

>Why are you trying to legislate technology when you could just make the tech work the way you want?

Because I don't want technology to rule us, I want us, humans, to rule technology. We say a lot of times that "technology is a tool". If we have to adopt ourselves and our society to it, instead of adapting it to our preferences, goals and morals, then it's not a tool, it's a ruler.

In this case, cryptography might be a solution. But it's not a perfect solution for me. For one, it's not widespread and it's confusing for most people to integrate to their mailing habits. Second it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails).

Second, I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case.

Third, while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed.

"I don't want technology to rule us, I want us, humans, to rule technology"

Personally, I want technology to solve human problems. If technical solutions to problems exist, they should always be preferred over legal solutions. We do not need to increase the size of an already out-of-control legal code, and we do not need more laws that will be selectively enforced (as almost all laws are).

"it breaks lots of workflows and conveniences (e.g full text search of emails)."

That is not an insurmountable problem: get an email client that can do full text searches of your email by automatically decrypting it while the search is performed. If for some reason you need to export your search to some server, cryptographers have developed systems for doing that in a secure way, though their computation cost is a bit high (much more than searching the plaintext).

"I don't want the government, Google, or anybody else to have it be legal to look into my email if they can break the cryptography or find the key. I want it to be illegal even at that case."

I would be cautious about that. It is almost certainly the case that such a law would not be enforced when a government agency or large corporation are breaking it -- see e.g. the warrantless wiretapping program. More likely, such a law would be used when a whistleblower exploits a weakness in a cryptosystem to expose government wrongdoing.

Expanding the legal code is dangerous. We have so many laws that the government has lost track:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230431980457638...

We have seen over and over how this vast legal code is abused to crack down on protesters and dissidents. Adding more laws to it is just asking for more trouble, and doing so when we have technical solutions is a pointless risk.

"while cryptography might be a case were technology can solve this problem (privacy) there are other issues just piling technology cannot be used to solve them -- where legislation is needed."

Sure -- but we are not talking about those problems, we are talking about a specific problems that is well studied and which has been solved for decades.

>"Impossible" trumps "illegal" every time.

Indeed. Making something that could be made impossible (or extremely difficult) "only" illegal will tend to make people complacent. If the expectation is that bad people won't do something because it's against the law, good people may fail to ensure that they can't. And then bad people do it anyway, leading to outrage, panic and harmful reactionary legislation. Not to mention bad people getting away with doing bad things, which could all have been prevented with sound engineering.

This isn't to say that every problem can be solved with a technical solution -- but when the technical solution is extremely effective, a legal solution is surplus to requirements.

It's a matter of "Do I want to spend the time necessary to accomplish X?" Impossible is a very strong word, like hate. Very few things are impossible.