A hammer, a knife or a government can be pretty useful, or pretty violent - depending on how you use it. This alone does not imply that a hammer, a knife or a government should not exist or be banned.
edit: words
Well, that's a very evasive argument in my opinion. It's absolutely true that objects are neutral, but you can't make a blanket argument with topics like these. That argument has been made lots of times by many (including me).
But it eventually breaks down. You can't give a child a gun and when the kid shoots someone say it was the kid's fault. Whose fault is it? I'm guessing you're going to say the adult responsible for putting the gun within the reach of a child. You're still taking away an object from the kid. In this case it was a kid who didn't know better.
Now this isn't a narrow argument. This becomes interesting when you get to powerful things, like say nuclear weapons. They aren't inherently evil too. But if you look around, UN is trying to ban them[1]. Shouldn't UN ban them?
What I'm trying to get at is that you can't always but the blame on people. Just like you can't blame a child for not knowing better, you can't blame a person for knowing better (although people do). Sometimes you just have to take the gun (or nuclear weapons or encryption) away.
What if the huge nuclear arsenal was in the wrong hands? That begs the question, what is 'wrong'?
Your definition of peace was probably characterized as oppression/dominance by the people who did want to revolt. You don't account for the extremely subjective nature of things, especially when it comes to nationalistic actions of people.
You rightly said that I will answer that it was the adults fault. The bad act done with the weapon was giving it to a child, not the childs shooting someone. It gets clearer if the adult hands the weapon to a monkey or a randomized shooting machine. All three scenarios change nothing in regard to the moral responsibility of the adult.
I do not know whether the UN should ban nuclear weapons, but if someone uses a nuclear weapon and we would check out who might be morally responsible for the attack, I'd point at the attacker.
Well I meant evasive argument as in statements which directly avoid the question. Because the thing is, we don't live in a perfect world. So putting the blame on agents doesn't solve the problem. That's why I brought up that sometimes things have to be taken away from people. The question is when and how.
> The bad act done with the weapon was giving it to a child
I didn't say the adult gave the weapon. I just said the adult left it within the reach of the child. One is direct, the other is indirect. I wouldn't even say indirect, but lets go with it.
> I'd point at the attacker
It gets blurry deciding who the attacker is, depending on whose side you are on. Things aren't always so clear.
But we both believe that the world is not perfect. This is why we need to talk about moral responsibility in the first place. Blurry definitions might only make us even more humble while proposing new, disruptive power centralizations like an encryption ban.
With their utterly poor understanding of encryption and the harms of compromising it, people in governments who want to do so might as well be monkeys.
By providing backdoored encryption products, we would as you put it be handing out randomized shooting machines to monkeys.
I was with you up until 'government'. I regard states as exercising unjust authority over people and defenders of private property which is why I'm an anarcho-Communist. The way in which the modern world is divided up means that one must be a subject of some state, which I believe makes there no way to provide proper consent to be governed.
You can flip this for privacy too. The more governments can spy on everyone, well sure we may catch more terrorists and terrorism might even decrease. But at what cost? Totalitarianism? Shudder.
As always it's a trade off, some people loose the right to arm themselves at home but that means other people may not loose their life to a shooting.
It's whole purpose is, to hurt someone; i think that's some point to acknowledge first.
//Playing devil's advocate
First of all, I don't want any company in transit, from my ISP, to the message broker, to the receivers ISP to mine my data and use/sell it for profit.
Secondly, there are a lot of messages which are not illegal, but can be personally embarrassing if they were to become public. Think of sexually-tinted messages, psychological help, a kid who lives in a very conservative community and has doubts about their religion, discussions about a candidate for a job position, etc.
The problem with backdoor is that the question is not if they are exploited, but when they are exploited. And this is all assuming that the organization that has backdoor access is not of ill will.