Your comment is made in bad faith. Notably, you posted from a brand new account echoing the most inflammatory talking points that the government uses in support of eroding encryption. Either this is some blatant (and bad) astroturfing, or you've drunk the kool-aid from the government.
Nobody is here to defend child pornography or terrorism. But even accepting that they exist, those are a drop in the literal ocean of use cases for encryption relative to the overwhelmingly legal and productive and often necessary uses.
> They should come up with a useful alternative
We have a useful alternative - criminal laws. Make the criminal penalty a strong enough deterrent and you'll stop everyone except the most craven malfeasors (and those people will find ways to continue to disseminate their materials irrespective of encryption status).
Rather than accuse privacy supporters of being "stubborn", you should come up with a legitimate argument why ordinary, law abiding people should have to sacrifice their autonomy in service of an effectively phantom boogeyman.
wrt making criminal penalties stronger, I wonder what effect an add-on charge (idk the technical term) for deliberately using encryption in the commission of a crime would add.
I.e. using encryption is never illegal, but if you commit a crime and directly employ encryption as a means to commit that crime, your sentence is doubled or whatever.
(inb4 pedantic "all internet services use encryption", which I don't think a court would buy if this is meant to be an add-on charge)
I'm on the other side. IMO; CP is used more and more as an excuse to pass more anti-privacy agenda, because it is difficult to argue against "We want to protect children". That perspective moves discussion to a different place where it is difficult to discuss. Why can't we have both? Is only way to prevent CP eliminating privacy?
I mean in the UK there were cp rings which were known about, that is the girls told the authorities about what was happening to them, and it was buried, so maybe get their own house with systems in place, training and funding (which is universally in short supply in UK since [edit: about] a decade now) to act on info they already get before trying to come after innocent people with a drag net in the hope of catching a few paedophiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
The only way to prevent all crime is 24/7 surveillance combined with constant control and no free will, but any reasonable person would find that unreasonable. That aside, a significant number of people sharing CP aren't smart enough to use an encrypted platform anyway.
But I suspect it's a relatively tiny, albeit terrible, problem compared to breaking encryption, which isn't just about privacy but about every action over the internet.
I don't see that you can have it both ways; secure encryption and being able to inspect traffic. There's no alternative so it's either using other mechanisms to go after CSE and terrorist material, as currently happens allowing us to know about the scourge, or we may as well revert to everything being on http.
In reality all rights are contingent upon and in direct conflict with each other. This is not some special case, and no, contingency and conflict does not make one side immediately the worst case scenario of itself.
"Your right to prevent incitement to violence does not exceed my right to free speech. To have it otherwise is to live in a panopticon."
It factually does exceed that right and that fact does not yield a panopticon.
> It factually does exceed that right and that fact does not yield a panopticon.
Poor analogy. The panopticon analogy was to relate the fact that allowing inspection of every single message sent by everyone ever is a panopticon. Preventing someone from speaking doesn't equate to a panopticon.
I am very concerned for the worldviews of people who genuinely think it's a good idea to let the government (and consequently, any entity with moderately-skilled hackers and a motive to mass collect data) view every message sent between private parties.
I’m going to assume that both you and the OP are engaging in this in good faith. I am thoroughly in the “legislating encryption is basically outlawing math” camp and believe it’ll be highly ineffective at accomplishing any of its goals. However…
Get a warrant for what exactly? On, say, an iPhone where you can have reasonably secured encryption-at-rest for your data (the entire disk is encrypted using an AES key that is protected by your passcode and that key is destroyed after too many failed attempts), simply getting a warrant to take physical possession of the device doesn’t really provide any evidentiary value. In the US and many other jurisdictions (but not the UK from what I recall), courts generally can’t compel someone to reveal their passcode. The E2E keys are stored encrypted at rest as well.
why don't you save us all a bit of time and just go ahead and tell us exactly which rights we're allowed to have in order to protect the children in your perfect kingdom?
like, will you allow me to drive a car, or eat beef, or own a kitchen knife?
This begs the question of there being a "scourge" of child porn and terrorist propaganda. You're also assuming the UK's attack on encryption would do anything at all to combat either thing let alone end the presumed "scourge".
Strong encryption is the foundation of pretty much all online commerce. Without it little else is practical online. It's not up to the EFF to come up with solutions to made up or exaggerated issues.
> This begs the question of there being a "scourge" of child porn and terrorist propaganda. You're also assuming the UK's attack on encryption would do anything at all to combat either thing let alone end the presumed "scourge".
And the "terrorist propaganda" part doesn't make sense. Propaganda is useless if it doesn't reach an audience, and encryption is all about restricting the audience. I mean, didn't ISIS put up its propaganda videos on Youtube? They're hardly trying to hide it out of sight.
They've been coming back with these proposals with this every few years at least as long as my adult life (~20yrs) just that thus time they've got it through. Until now it's been knocked down for the ridiculousness it is. "They only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time"
