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> Access to the internet is a privilege, not a right. There is nothing in the US Constitution regarding the internet. An individual is not required to use the internet to communicate with another person, this is a matter of convenience, ergo privilege, but not a right.

I think the recent 8-0 ruling by the Supreme Court completely invalidates this statement in the context of the government being able to block ones access to the internet in general.

> Justice Anthony Kennedy began by outlining what he described as a “fundamental principle of the First Amendment”: that everyone should “have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more.” And even if once it may have been hard to determine which places are “the most important” “for the exchange of views,” Kennedy concluded, it isn’t hard now. Instead, he reasoned, it is “clear” that the Internet and, in particular, social media provide such opportunities, with “three times the population of North America” now using Facebook. Emphasizing that Packingham’s case “is one of the first this Court has taken to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the modern Internet,” Kennedy warned that the court should “exercise extreme caution before suggesting that the First Amendment provides scant protection for access” to ubiquitous social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Source: https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/06/opinion-analysis-court-in...

That's an excellent ruling, thank you for sharing that. Brings the internet closer to a "right" for certain, but does not require the government to provide access to the internet.

And, it may not matter: When making its case, the Justice Department will disassociate the use of encryption technology from access, arguing that limiting encryption options on consumer devices does not limit participation in an online forum.

A lot of what you describe is only true/relevant to the US.

In other countries access to the Internet is a right [1]. Of course it depends on how one defines what is a "right". It's not a right in the same way that everyone have the right to food or clean water (even though we cannot provide even these consistently to everyone), but it is a right and an increasingly important one.

The fact that many international companies are based in the US is indeed quite unfortunate and I find extremely appalling that they can just hand over my data to anyone asking, especially if that "anyone" can also define what is "lawful".

Things should be end-to-end encrypted for everyone, with absolutely no back doors or any kind of weakening of the encryption.

The argument that "this enables bad guys to do bad things" can only stand if they can show us hard data about how many bad guys they have caught because they were communicating in clear text and how much this number decreased because of the increased adoption of https and end-to-end encryption. But of course they cannot do that, because "National Security".

Well, they can't have it both ways.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access

I'm really disappointed by this comment. I'm not sure it's as bad as the newspaper analogy but let me try another.

In the US you do not have a right to drive a car (s/car/transportation). But lack of access to a car greatly hinders you in almost every aspect of life. Time spent traveling can easily be 2x-100x without access to a car. Some places it's impossible to travel without one. This is such a problem that in America it is all but a right to drive. Drivers licenses are easy to obtain because of this need for access. Overall this low barrier provides much more production and utility that it does downfalls (crashes and fatalities from underexperienced drivers, driving while drunk, etc). Access to transportation is all but a right. In today's day and age it is an essential part of life. Without it life becomes extremely difficult in modern society.

As to your second paragraph, I'll remind everyone that this is not the first time in history that we've had these problems. They are generally rooted from other societal problems. I'm not convinced that the internet amplifies this problem. There's historical examples of rumors spreading faster than a horse could travel between cities. The difference here is really number of people. It's node connections after all that's the issue, not really speed of information between nodes.

When Daniel Bernstein sued the government, he settled the question over whether code is protected by 1A. It is. Publishing cryptographic algorithms, publishing ciphertext, and privately recording ciphertext are all constitutionally protected rights. Given the right circumstances the government may search your property to recover that ciphertext, or intercept it in some way, but if they are unable to find the keys, you also have a constitutionally protected right to not provide them.

If you think the government should have the right to regulate speech via ciphertext, then that would require a constitutional amendment.

Let me edit this in the way I read it

>Access to the [grocery store] is a privilege, not a right. There is nothing in the US Constitution regarding [grocery stores]. An individual is not required to use [grocery stores] to [obtain food], this is a matter of convenience, ergo privilege, but not a right.

People will always do bad things, and taking away the tools to do bad things isn't going to stop it. Without even touching privacy rights (where America has less rights than many other countries), there are many other ways the government can lawfully spy on you. Encryption technology is great; the genie is out of the bottle, and I doubt anything can really stop it.

This is a strawman argument.

I do not believe (and have not said) that Congress will outlaw encryption. As you said, the genie is out. However, they can, and eventually will, restrict technology companies from providing high-quality, turn-key, encryption solutions on consumer devices. This is what Barr is building up to. Individual users will be free to implement custom encryption on top of said platforms.

This is like saying that access to newspapers is a privilege and not a right. What use is free speech if there is no common medium on which to distribute it? This is another case of people blaming the tool instead of the people that are doing bad things.

If we lived in a lawful society, your argument would have some merit. Unfortunately in the case of the USA, agents of the state can literally throw hand grenades into the cribs of sleeping toddlers and face no consequences. We need to minimize the power of the state to harm the people, weakening encryption does not do that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-georgia-deputy-acqui...

How do you propose law to become the gatekeeper of tech when most US laws today are written and controlled by corporations, via campaign donations and lobbyists?

How can US law understand/regulate tech, given lawmakers are woefully uninformed, especially relative to those tech companies they seek to regulate?

How do you defend looking back to the Constitution in your argument, given its authors couldn't have envisioned the Internet or all its technological brethren? Do you think that male slave-owners in 1776, "representatives" chosen in a plutocratic fashion, should define what our rights are for all time, or is it possible we may gain new rights to previously un-thought of inventions?

This comment is woefully wrong on all fronts, but the most galling is the final paragraph. The Fourth Amendment is touted time and time again when full-disk encryption is challenged. To turn around and say "How could the founders have foreseen the Internet??" and therefore imply that it wasn't meant to cover the Internet is hypocrisy of the highest order. You can't have your cake and eat it too!

My personal files in my home are protected by my data on my phone is not. How convenient.

The first two points are absolutely not "woefully wrong". Many laws are essentially written and controlled by corporations via lobbyists, and most politicians are incredibly uninformed/misinformed about tech

Something not being in the US Constitution doesn't make it not a right.

>If anything, it enables tyranny by corporations, since they are unelected and not responsible to the public, whereas elected governments, in fact, are.

I feel the opposite. Corporations can easily be taken down when you stop paying them. Governments are extremely hard to fight against, especially with rampant corruption and gerrymandering. There's also the fact that almost all tyranny in the world is enacted by governments telling people what their "rights" are.

> Full-on disk encryption and end-to-end encryption make it impossible for the government to access those records even when a lawful request is made.

Is this not what courts are for? The government has plenty of tools to enforce lawful orders against companies.

They can have access to the records - they don't have the ability to decode them. Their powers are still intact but they are useless to them.

I believe the state has methods to compel obedience. Again, this is what the courts are for. Do you think any actor in this scenario can resist the power of the government, who has the ability to jail or kill you?