[mindslight]

Politicians/regulators can never be encryption utopians because they always seek more power. However, widespread adoption of secure encryption [0] could turn proposals to ban it from being seriously "debated", to the equivalent of that state senator who wanted to legislate pi = 3. "Physics drives finance drives politics", and all that.

[0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point out.

[rayiner]

It's not even a matter of "politicians wanting more power." The public wants the government to have power over people, because they are (reasonably or not), more scared of other people than they are of the government. People fall on different places on the spectrum for how they weigh the loss of privacy versus the need for security, but very few are willing to say "we need pervasive unbreakable encryption, whatever the consequences to law enforcement." Even terrorism aside, very few people are willing to give up the power of authorities to investigate, say, the transactions of suspected financial criminals.

[mindslight]

It's natural for regulators to want more power - since they're good, they can always choose to not wield that power later. The motivation is the same at the smaller per-person scale, with democracy encouraging every person to think as a mini regulator - deciding whether a behavior should be prohibited or encouraged and then enforcing the majority's opinion onto the minority, rather than leaving the behavior unjudged.

Encryption is such an obvious target because it enables nothing besides hiding. Society/government can never see the value in anything that serves to keep society/government out of individuals' business, even though the former only exists on the proceeds of individual autonomy.

So in essence, the crypto/software war is self-defense against govermment/society. Not in the sense of overthrowing or repudiating the entire concept, but in the sense of holding the Schelling point of freedom of speech/thought versus a society/government that, through the same information technology advancement, would otherwise seek to subject them to totalitarian regulation (even if by the majority).

[rayiner]

I agree with most of your analysis. That said, between the time the telephone was invented to the time encrypted email was invented, we had a rather prosperous and progressive period during which there did not exist a convenient means of communicating over long distances the government could not access with the appropriate process. I think the whole system is more robust than you give it credit for.

[mindslight]

That seems like a pretty short time period to claim "robustness", especially with the quantitative trends the entire time. Remote communication was not so heavily relied upon in the past, whereas now it is a staple of modern life. Furthermore, the scale and inhumanity of the system has increased geometrically, no longer limited by actions of individual agents to perform taps/investigations, but instead a court order (in name only) for an ongoing wireline/database dump of millions of people who are then all investigated statistically.

FWIW, your statement could be made even stronger by saying that never before in history has it been possible for individuals to securely communicate over long distances. But technology adoption does not respect a fundamentalist approach - talking in an isolated house with no electronics was a lot more relevant a hundred years ago than today! So we need to judge the autonomy of an individual carrying out his usual day-to-day tasks in both time frames.

[greggman]

The problem is it isn't a debate about privacy vs security. Backdoored encryption = not secure = bad guys can steal your id, your money, shut down essential services, ...