We can solve the terrorist encryption problem with this one simple solution

> None of their dire predictions came true. "Indeed, in 1992, the FBI's Advanced Telephony Unit warned that within three years Title III wiretaps would be useless: no more than 40% would be intelligible and in the worst case all might be rendered useless. The world did not "go dark." On the contrary, law enforcement has much better and more effective surveillance capabilities now than it did then."

This seems like a silly argument as the goal of publicly available strong end-to-end encryption is to make exactly this prediction come true. Strong privacy advocates are rarely concerned with their friends or even some corporations having their data, it's precisely the vague yet menacing government agencies monitoring everyone's online activities that are the targets of these 'encryption for everyone' projects.

I absolutely agree with the author in general but there's no sense pretending that protection against mass surveillance and state level actors isn't the end goal.

It seems like the tech community is stuck on encryption because they belive their government is evil, corrupt, and if they can just win this one fight then they will be able to shield themselves from the rights violations they can't hope to change. It's noble but incredibly defeatist. State level actors will always have smarter people and unlimited resources to break whatever walls you try to put up. This won't end until surveillance is made impossible via legislation (or I suppose revolution if that's your thing).