I get where you're coming from, but I think that argument needs some work. Currently, none of those rights you mention that are enumerated in the Bill of Rights are guaranteed through absolute means, they are preserved via checks & balances among branches of the government. And even if they were more absolute, there would still be asterisks as things stand today:
- You have freedom of speech/thought unless it was the motivation behind a criminal action, in which case you're additionally punished for a hate crime
- You have freedom to keep & bear arms except not in some states if your Sheriff doesn't like you
- You have the right to privacy unless there is probable cause to believe you're involved in criminal activity, in which case the court can issue a search warrant
- etc. etc.
Even if you tried to argue that "crypto is a basic right," that wouldn't change anyone's mind who is arguing that there should be an asterisk if you're under criminal investigation.
> Currently, none of those rights you mention that are enumerated in the Bill of Rights are guaranteed through absolute means, they are preserved via checks & balances among branches of the government.
The idea that private use of encryption is any different than that is the recent propaganda.
If the police have a warrant then they can place a bug in your house or trojan your device, which gives them access to everything starting on the day they execute the warrant.
Which is the same as it is for anything else. A warrant isn't a time machine. You can't get one today and use it to read files the accused shredded five years ago. Nor does the government have the right to make everyone submit copies of all their paper files to them to put in a locked government room for hypothetical future access with a warrant. But that is what they want to do with encryption.
What encryption actually prevents is warrantless mass surveillance of content, which is exactly the sort of thing all the other rights categorically protect people from the government doing.
>If the police have a warrant then they can place a bug in your house or trojan your device
If they trojan your device, they can certainly view all of your communications and files from the past unless you've explicitly securely deleted them before-hand.
Would it be fair to paraphrase what you saying like this: The U.S. Bill of Rights are not 100% absolute; therefore, people/courts/whatever are not going to accept a right to unbreakable crypto that's even stronger than those in the Bill of Rights?
I don't think that crypto needs to be a stronger right than the Bill of Rights (confining myself to U.S. laws for the purpose of this discussion). What I'm saying is that whenever government proposals come up about restricting or backdooring crypto, we techies (and other thought leaders) should take the strong position that this is a right and then--maybe--have discussions about warrants, etc., afterward. What we've been doing for over 20 years is arguing that crypto is necessary for good security and backdooring is bad for security. That's all true, but it's a technology argument. It would be much better if we start off with the premise that unbreakable crypto is a right, that we're allowed to use it, that we don't need permission.
You're presuming critics of these rights have long ago won any moral and legal battle over the righteousness of thesr rights in absolute terms.
However, this is not true.
To give an example， even as we enter an age of extreme political correctness and government authority--interepreted as intended to protect people from mean words--you can still find in mainstream media people arguing for the opposite.
In other words, unbreakable crypto may be a worthy goal to aim for, even if we know just as with other human rights that there will be slip ups and set backs.
I wouldn't say that the right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment be thrown out just because the military set up Guantanamo and other black sites around the world. It means we need to fight even harder, not give up on our ideals.
Unbreakable crypto is a natural phenomenon, like gravity, or the hardness of steel. Like gravity, you can access unbreakable crypto anywhere. You can't give the police the power to defy it. Making laws against it is like saying you can't put up a fence or grow a hedge higher than a policeman can jump over.
Rights are, in part, a recognition of the limits of the law. It makes sense to include the ability to hide and potentially destroy information in a way that the law cannot access, any more than policemen and prosecutors can levitate themselves.
As a believer in Jesus, I agree. Within the larger atheistic framework of the world, who or what are these authorities of which you speak? There are no moral absolutes in such a world. Heck, look at the Bill of Rights. It's predicated that there is a god that has made it manifest in creation that humans are a) special, and b) have intrinsic rights that Bill of Rights simple enumerates.
- You have freedom of speech/thought unless it was the motivation behind a criminal action, in which case you're additionally punished for a hate crime
- You have freedom to keep & bear arms except not in some states if your Sheriff doesn't like you
- You have the right to privacy unless there is probable cause to believe you're involved in criminal activity, in which case the court can issue a search warrant
- etc. etc.
Even if you tried to argue that "crypto is a basic right," that wouldn't change anyone's mind who is arguing that there should be an asterisk if you're under criminal investigation.