[phyalow]

Assange has written about the chilling implications in Cypherpunks:

JACOB: The force of nearly all modern authority is derived from violence or the threat of violence. One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.

JULIAN: Exactly.

JACOB: This is the important key. It doesn’t mean you can’t be tortured, it doesn’t mean that they can’t try to bug your house or subvert it in some way, but it means that if they find an encrypted message it doesn’t matter if they have the force of the authority behind everything that they do, they cannot solve that math problem. This, though, is the thing that is totally non-obvious to people that are non-technical, and it has to be driven home. If we could solve all of those math problems, it would be a different story and, of course, the government would be able to solve those math problems if anyone could.

[hellbanner]

Yes, but people could still be ordered to give up their encryption keys.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140116/09195525902/uk-ma...