[yawboakye]

Sounds to me like he's trying to kick off a conversation about how to go about making it difficult for the bad guys to hide behind encryption and other security products. It's really not an easy solution as there's very few bad guys we need to expose but many good people we need to protect, for reasons currently known and, more importantly, unknown. This one is a hard dichotomy that will be interesting to solve: (1) give no hiding place to the bad guys (2) make the good guys undiscoverable. It'd be sad to see a solution by decree (9/11-style) but I fear that's where we're headed so long as private companies are unwilling to find a workable solution. Peacetime is a delusion.

[me_again]

They can issue as many decrees as they like but they can't solve the problem with decrees any more than they can decree that water is dry. All they can decree is that it is illegal to use effective encryption, which would be, um, unfortunate.

[yawboakye]

You have a point. By decree what I meant was that in the event of a disaster and panic the public will back any law that forces, say, Apple to give unfettered access to law enforcement. By then it's too late to engage in debates. The public became interested and very unforgivenly sided with law enforcement. They'd have prioritized their safety over being able to send cat pictures securely. Similar to 9/11.

[redisman]

Breaking encryption would cause breaches orders of magnitude more catastrophic than encrypted communications between bad guys.

[yawboakye]

See it this way: we have to know what the bad guys are saying in order to be able to protect the public. The way I see it the US government (and governments around the world) will make this a non-negotiable objective. There's not a lot of pressure now because, as Barr said, the event that will turn the public against encryption hasn't arrived yet. If the parties involved don't find a solution in the meantime they'd be forced to weaken encryption for everyone when a catastrophe happens. The public is fickle. Our safety is paramount.

[inetknght]

> we have to know what the bad guys are saying in order to be able to protect the public

Why do you think that?

[loudmax]

Speaking of dichotomies, referring to people as "good guys" or "bad guys" is a peeve of mine. Obviously, society should do what it can to prevent people from committing crime or terrorism, even using lethal force when necessary. These "bad guys" don't imagine themselves as evil actors though. They may be wrong or misguided, but most of them are doing what they think is right. To put things in perspective, Martin Luther King was considered a criminal by segregationists and WW2 resistance fighters were considered terrorists by the Nazis. You're never going to win wars on crime or terror by sifting out bad people from good people.

[yawboakye]

We can't defer to people's judgement of themselves and their intentions. The law and the courts make an independent distinction between legal and illegal.