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> If torture didn't work, Kiefer Sutherland would never have gotten anywhere. But if everyone were against torture, the show wouldn't have existed.

If you want to see a fictional counterpoint to the "torture works" argument, I'd encourage you to watch Burn Notice. It has a blacklisted CIA operative who fights crime in Miami and one of his mottoes is "Torture doesn't always get you the truth. It gets you the quickest lie that will stop the torture" (he does a voiceover narration). Instead of torture he uses deception, misdirection, and other tradecraft to extract secrets. For example, he kidnaps his target and holds him in a dark warehouse, then has himself beaten up by an associate and put in the warehouse as a "fellow" captive, thus gaining his confidence (it's much better on-screen, I've probably forgotten some details).

Of course there is an answer to unbreakable encryption, the same answer to in person conversations at a private location: bug the location where the communication takes place.

You don't need a back door on communications if you are "looking over the shoulder" of someone as they type it in. If the person is a suspect, then they can get a warrant to plant a bug.

There are plenty of options outside torture also. But the fear of unbreakableness is persistent, just as is those who believe torture to work or to be okay.

The fundamental underpinnings of any related correct and incorrect behavior is still emotional though. And that is also why loaded words such as "terrorism" get the ball rolling fast, regardless of which way that ball is rolling...

You can say that taking a preventive action helps against anything. (Cue "Minority Report" by Philip K Dick.)

The problem is that a preventive action usually hasn't been taken, but now, when a problem exists, they have something to do with it, and they can't.

They want a built-in backdoor exactly as a preventive measure, a bug.

The problem, of course, is that those breaking the law would still use the unbreakable version, the same way they use other illegal means, and the law-abiding majority will stay safely vulnerable.

Their complaint about this is that it's hard to do that.

Well, that's good. I think that law enforcement SHOULD be hard. It should be hard and complicated and time consuming. One of the worst things I can imagine is idle law enforcement officers. Bored cops will find something to do. Whether it's going from car to car and ticketing anyone who is 12.1 or more inches from the curb or ticketing people for spitting on the sidewalk, no good can come from idle police.

Idle prosecutors are every bit as much of a potential nightmare. We see District Attorneys being used as political weapons now. Just imagine if they had the power to go fishing through the electronic communications of every political rival.

If the work is difficult, they'll only do it when they have reason to believe a serious crime has been or soon will be committed. It's easy to justify overtime for surveillance on a suspected drug kingpin, organized crime figure, rapist or murderer. It's not so easy to justify it to monitor some guy from a TEA Party Group, BLM or Occupy just so find out what they're doing.

> Whether it's going from car to car and ticketing anyone who is 12.1 or more inches from the curb or ticketing people for spitting on the sidewalk, no good can come from idle police.

So... enforcing our existing laws? What's the point of having those laws if they're never enforced?

Reinforcing their role as revenue generators instead of peace officers.

>>> Same with why we tortured. It counterbalances their vulnerability to secrets.

If you study history and interrogation techniques you quickly realize that torture has nothing to do with information. It doesn't work that way. The 24 situation of a terrorist with a secret code in his head that will prevent a nuke going off is so circumscribed that if you think you are entering that situation you should assume that you are mistaken. Torture is about confession. It's about getting someone to say something that you want him to say regardless of whether it is true or not. That's the difference between actual intelligence and "actionable intelligence", the actionable stuff need not be true. If it is enough to justify a warrant or a raid accuracy doesn't matter. This is also why torture is so closely linked to religion. Only a puritan need torture out a confession. It's far easier to forge a signature.

Go through the history. Be it the English rack or American Gitmo, they didn't care about accurate information. What they wanted and got was signatures on documents written almost entirely by the interrogators. (I'll leave aside the other use of torture, as simple punishment, because that's a totally different debate.)

Well it's sort of true.

If you find a bad person and get someone to follow them with a really good camera you'll likely get the code (especially for a phone ). If you are at a mall in a high tech country I was told that you can read what they write on their phones ( No source, and if not think about the future ).

So you will need some police work but that's actually how it has been used for most part of the last hundred years, where you can't just look stuff up on a computer.

So yes there is no real guarantee that you can crack a phone. But if we learned anything from the dark markets it's that it's very hard to never makes mistakes.

Way to present a nuanced issue as a seemingly clear-cut case of governmental oppression. It's pretty solidly ingrained in America that a properly-issued warrant should be enough to get law enforcement whatever evidence it needs. Encryption also breaks this fundamental principle, and contrary to popular belief, not everyone who is against government surveillance is necessarily cool with this implication of law enforcement being unable to do its job through the properly established legal means.

that's daft.. you might as well ban writing on burnable materials and while you're at it burn fire...