Now consider there are people who feel exactly the same about your thing as you do about theirs. Civilisation absolutely requires that for them to leave you alone, you must be willing to do the same.
Of course, then nobody "leaves us alone" on these things, but we agree by majority on first principles and then argue from those to collectively decide what is allowed and what isn't (i.e. allowed from the people and allowed from the government). Free speech and privacy are examples of such principles. So you can definitely have a social contract where mass surveillance is unacceptable, but rules on not hunting endangered species or owning certain type of weapons can exist[1]. I don't think May should be prevented from arguing for surveillance, but by the same token, people also have a right to oppose her on it.
Yes, this opens us to the possibility of losing the debate on encryption, at particular times and historical periods. Whereas having the iron clad rule that all can do as they please does not. But the later rule, applied in extremis, makes civilization impossible. Because again, we do want to ban people from doing certain things, that is what civilization means. The point that we need to argue is that banning people from having privacy causes more harm to what makes us human than a few horrific crimes do.
The anarchist posture is... complex. But the (absolute) libertarian posture is hypocritical. It wants a very particular set of rules to apply and be enforced by the state (e.g. private property), whereas decrying rules and state enforcement in general.
[1] And U.S. gun-owning folks agree on having rules against owning some kinds of weapons, I would think. At the very least I have never heard one argue for their god given right to own an ICBM on 2nd amendment grounds... is just that we disagree on the type of weapons that should be controlled.
Consider nuclear proliferation: in theory it does not affect people 'directly', until it does (note that any logic about increased potential risk applies to gun ownership too, at a different scale). Now consider pollution: affects people directly, but in a diffuse degree. Vaccinations? (I was born in a country where a specific set of those are mandatory, I approve of that [1]). There is a limit to how much a man is an island.
I am a firm believer in having a right to privacy; a strong, fundamental, constitutional right. I would consider forms of deflection or civil disobedience in a society that aligned itself too strongly against that right. But that doesn't mean is not ultimately a matter of societal values of societal construction.
[1] Obviously they are mandatory to those with a healthy immune system who can be vaccinated, and a number of other caveats, but still, the state makes it its business whether or not you vaccinate your kids, and we are better off for it...
You'd be surprised. There's an absolutist argument that goes like this: back when 2A was founded, it was common for private people to own artillery and warships, which were the pinnacle of that era's military technology. Therefore, the authors of 2A did not envision any limitations. Therefore, this should still be the case.
Granted, this is very much a fringe view even in the gun owner community. But there are enough people holding it, that you can actually see it argued on American gun forums etc occasionally.
It also springs up in fiction sometimes. In Vinge's "The Ungoverned" short story, there are privately owned tactical nukes. Which are actually used. Granted, that is considered an extreme case even for the described anarcho-capitalist frontier society, enough so to warrant an immediate all-out attack by other people on anyone discovered possessing them. And Vinge is actually ancap himself - and, so far as I recall, he actually said something along the lines of that story describing a society he wouldn't consider undesirable.
Many of us object to gun control on that basis, and the same reasoning can be applied to encryption.
In fact, there's really not a lot you can say about one that you can't say about the other. No private citizen "needs" access to encryption so strong that even intelligence agencies can't break it, any more than any private citizen "needs" to own a weapon whose only purpose is killing. Right?
With a single gun, a man can only kill as many people as he can see with the number of bullets on his person. With a computer and a connection to the internet, his reach and potential scale is much greater. That is why such powerful encryption is required for your average citizen.
I wonder if the encryption dilemma will ultimately be resolved with blockchain-like techniques. Cryptocurrencies work because their underlying trust processes are deliberately designed to require ever-increasing amounts of CPU time. They can be attacked, but only by spending enough resources to out-mine the other nodes. While possible in theory, it's simply not worthwhile for an attacker to marshal the kinds of resources that would be required to attack Bitcoin or similar blockchains.
So, while back doors for government access are stupid and unworkable for all of the reasons that people have stated, what about requiring a hypothetical encryption standard with no known backdoors or attack surfaces, but that is just strong enough to be broken by agencies like the GCHQ or NSA who can throw gigawatt-hours of computer time at the problem? Basically, if the government really wants to read my mail, they can, but it will cost them. It might take them hours to discover a given key, while nobody with a room full of GPUs or even a botnet could do it in less than several years.
In such a scenario, we'd be sufficiently safe from attack by cybercriminals, and most of the time, from our governments as well. Governments would still be able to target anybody, but unlike the case where a back door is mandated, they wouldn't be able to target everybody. That could limit the amount of harm that bad actors in the government could do.
It would be similar to the rationale of banning ownership of high-capacity magazines, except unlike that sort of feel-good measure, it might actually work.
I see this as the equivalent to governments having access to tanks, artillery, airforce and nukes while civilians have mere access to guns and knives.
Whether civilians should have access to guns is a discussion I would like to remain not a part of.
But ultimately, the real question is - how do you enforce this, short of a massive censorship effort (and even then)? We already know how to make strong crypto. You can make it illegal, but unless you have a specific plan as to how to prevent me from coding, say, AES from scratch, I don't see how this would actually help prevent secure communications between terrorists and other high-risk criminals (and I would argue that criminal activity that is not severe enough that its perpetrators wouldn't invest into crypto even if it's banned, is not the kind that can be reasonably used to justify banning crypto in the first place).
So it is actually a lot like the high-cap mag bans - it's so simple to make them, that someone who would really derive benefit from having one would just do so. Same thing here.
> A good place to draw the line is one that places
> responsibility on the tool-wielders [...] many of us
> object to gun control on that basis.
Or do you think private people should be allowed to buy hydrogen bombs?
On what planet do you anticipate gun control laws having any effect whatsoever on the plans of someone who is inclined to acquire a hydrogen bomb?
I'm just taking your argument to its logical conclusion. I think that argument makes no sense, since it clearly leads to absurd outcomes, such as being able to purchase nukes, armed fighter jets, tanks, MRAPs, mines, chemical weapons etc.
You're in good company, though, because the ACLU does the same thing in attempting to wriggle out of supporting Second Amendment rights.
Yes of course any country trying to cell hydrogen bombs or chemical weapons to its citizens couldn't do so without international sanctions. The example is clearly ridiculous, but it's brought up in the context of illustrating that your argument is equally outlandish.
It's an interesting question, all right. I'd ultimately have to throw up my hands and classify it as one of the ever-growing threats to human existence over which I have no control. Frankly I'd be more comfortable with Tim Cook's finger on the big red button than Donald Trump's or Mike Pence's.
I could totally see Woz building a nuke in his garage, just to see if he could do it...