[lisper]

> the second option is basically the government's position

The second option is the government's ostensible position. But you seem to have forgotten the central point of my argument which is that the government is not trustworthy. Just because the government says that it will only use its decryption keys when it has a warrant, history shows that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word on matters like this. The government does end-runs around Constitutional rights regularly. Therefore, the power to enforce the Constitution's constraints on government action cannot be entrusted to the government. It must remain with the people.

[slg]

Now we are just going in circles. This goes back to the first sentence of my response to you:

>The problem with this line of argument is that it is a general argument against government and not specific to this issue.

If your argument is that you can't trust the government, you can't trust the government regardless of whether they have a warrant or whether they are operating in the digital or physical world.

[lisper]

> you can't trust the government regardless of whether they have a warrant

If they have a warrant, what exactly is it that you think I need to trust them about at that point?

[slg]

A warrant is a check and balance designed by one arm of the government to give another arm of the government oversight into the actions of a third arm of the government. If you don't trust the government, your trust in the entire system should logically fall apart.

[lisper]

Very different kind of trust. To serve a warrant at my home, agents of the government have to be physically present, and they have to give me a copy of the warrant printed on a sheet of paper. The physics of that situation provides auditability. If the warrant was not genuine, the people who served it would go to prison.

Cryptographic back doors are totally different. It is not possible to build a back door that has auditability built into its basic physics the way warrants do. That the thing that William Barr doesn't understand. His mindset is something like, "If we can send a man to the moon, surely we can make a way for law enforcement to break encryption that doesn't threaten people's rights." Well, no, we can't. Sending a man to the moon is merely difficult. A back door that only "the good guys" can use is actually impossible.