Minimizing the incidence of digitally-enabled child abuse is not a winning strategy for protecting our right to use strong encryption.
For one thing, it puts you in the position of defining what incidence of child abuse is low enough to be somehow acceptable. Is the Internet helping one person to abuse a child? Any normal person would say that even one is unacceptable.
For another thing, it can easily make you look like an unserious fool because the people you're arguing with--law enforcement--are going to know way more than you do about the actual incidence of these particular crimes. They are privy to every ongoing investigation, and are generally not legally permitted to tell you about them.
We don't need to doubt the good faith of law enforcement--at least on this issue of child abuse--to advocate against encryption backdoors.
Encryption backdoors are a bad idea because they can be later abused or hacked, causing untold harm.
And we get to use strong encryption for the same reason we get to deny the government placing cameras in our houses. We get strong encryption for the same reason we get to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Efficacy or efficiency for law enforcement is not enough, and should not be enough, to supersede our rights to privacy, expression, assembly, etc.
For one thing, it puts you in the position of defining what incidence of child abuse is low enough to be somehow acceptable. Is the Internet helping one person to abuse a child? Any normal person would say that even one is unacceptable.
For another thing, it can easily make you look like an unserious fool because the people you're arguing with--law enforcement--are going to know way more than you do about the actual incidence of these particular crimes. They are privy to every ongoing investigation, and are generally not legally permitted to tell you about them.
We don't need to doubt the good faith of law enforcement--at least on this issue of child abuse--to advocate against encryption backdoors.
Encryption backdoors are a bad idea because they can be later abused or hacked, causing untold harm.
And we get to use strong encryption for the same reason we get to deny the government placing cameras in our houses. We get strong encryption for the same reason we get to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Efficacy or efficiency for law enforcement is not enough, and should not be enough, to supersede our rights to privacy, expression, assembly, etc.