The reason you're getting downvoted is it seems like you believe encryption should be illegal unless it has a govt backdoor. Encryption is just math, so it's a hard thing to criminalize and to enforce. Furthermore, if the government has a backdoor to all encrypted data then that means China and Russia and any independent hacker would be also searching for that same backdoor and once they find it everyone's screwed. It's really impractical to think that the government could enforce backdoors into all encryption and it'd be exceptionally dangerous if they required all US companies to comply with backdoored encryption. Not to mention the privacy implications of never being safe from government surveillance.
Nah, I'm pretty sure I'm getting downvoted because people don't want to answer questions like, what if it was people killed who mattered to you, or, exactly what other avenues of evidence gathering?
It's the online version of turning away with an angry huff because they don't like where this is going.
OK, back to your point, and thanks for a decent response. The encryption issue is difficult and I made it clear I was ambivalent eg. "I care greatly about privacy...". I fully understand the implications of a legal backdoor, and I don't want it [x]. But if phones are the main comms tool now, and if further killings are pending and can be prevented, at least ask the questions.
So I'm wondering if there is some compromise or something. Some way of putting a backdoor in which a 2nd party has a key to (not the gov't). Or something. Yes I'm aware that gov'ts may unfairly lean on the 2nd party. Is there some way through this? Let's try to be creative.
Perhaps this is a mathematically way of proving, based on some assumptions, that I can't have what I want then we can stop wasting time on it and we can get on with the fight against government strong-arming.
Can we at least have a conversation on it without angry, downvote'y silences? This isn't a constructive. It gets us nowhere.
edit, add clarification [x] that if a compromise can't be found and I had to choose between the government having backdoors or not, I'd fall pretty rapidly on the side of Fuck, No. They will be abused. I probably know this better than you.
The truth is that hypothetically we already probably possess enough intelligence to pick out the whack jobs as a class but not which of them is definitively going to actually going to go off.
However we have consistently shown that we are often incapable of competently using that information even when say the family members of a terrorist call us on the telephone and forewarn us let alone when the worrisome info is buried in a mountain of data.
We don't need less privacy or better technology to gather intel. We actually need a smarter system and better tools to sift the mountain of data we actually already possess.
