> The international police organization Interpol plans to condemn the spread of strong encryption in a statement Monday saying it protects child sex predators, three people briefed on the matter told Reuters.
Let me fix that for you
> it protects nearly every single person on the planet.
This is close to saying child rapists rape children behind closed doors so you shouldn't have locks, ignoring that well locked doors benefit everyone who has a house. It's disingenuous.
While I support the sentiment that privacy is important, comparing encryption to locks in this ghastly context is self-defeating.
Recall that there were more than one instance where critical evidence against a wealthy person, required for the prosecution to make a compelling case in court, was obtained by force with a police raid. At least one such instance happened in the US in 2019 and was well-publicized.
Now imagine a real-life security system that is absolutely, one hundred percent immune to unauthorized entry, even if it is attempted as a part of law enforcement raid.
It is possible to identify with the argument that everyone should have access to such an impenetrable lock. However, it’d be really hard to argue that widespread access to it wouldn’t create a radically new situation.
> It is possible to identify with the argument that everyone should have access to such an impenetrable lock. However, it’d be really hard to argue that widespread access to it wouldn’t create a radically new situation.
With regards to communication, we already have that impenetrable lock built in. I can say something incriminating to someone else in private, and the only way law enforcement will ever know what is if either party involved in the private conversation agrees to divulge it. Traditionally, the means for law enforcement to address this is to be part of the conversation.
In your example, law enforcement can force itself into the conversation in multiple ways (without compromising your counterpart), including listening devices or a break-in.
Most real-life analogies to encryption are not good enough. A smart layperson can easily spot issues with the “if crime happens in private, you shouldn't ban privacy” type of argument.
There is no encryption that is 100% immune. All encryption can have its key guessed, if the key is expressible in bits. This ensures that classical encryption schemes, even post-quantum ones, have a guessability or hardness in terms of the number of bits that must be correctly guessed at once in order to forge credentials.
This reasoning leads to export-grade cryptography, a bane of our praactice that nonetheless was an acceptable compromise for many years. It seems that that era of compromise is coming to an end, though.
"Export-grade encryption" was always a bad idea. You can block the export of stronger encryption schemes but nothing prevents them from being developed outside the country. The result is that all new and innovative crypto work gets done elsewhere, leaving your own country playing catch-up.
If nobody had any freedom at all there would be absolutely no "crime". If everyone was locked in their own individual cells 24/7 there would be no "predators". Fortunately, for now, most people (unlike you) reject the idea of giving up our freedom so that all of our actions can be controlled and monitored by the police state just because an infinitely tiny percentage of the people do bad things.
Let me fix that for you
> it protects nearly every single person on the planet.