you don't need to "outlaw math", you only need to increase the friction to the point where commercial providers can't provide encrypted services and 99.x% of people will comply. Not sure why people always bring this up like some gotcha.
We've already seen plenty of examples of that irl.
Unfortunately, our beloved decisionmakers are gerontocratic, completely incompetent and bought out by corporate interests that also don't want encryption (e.g. copyright industry).
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but it seems to be employed very selectively by the tech industry.
We already rely on many backdoors of exactly that kind in form of mandatory auto updates. Not only is this seen as perfectly fine, it's widely regarded as a security best practice.
Why can Apple or Google or Microsoft manage to keep their signature keys secure for decades while any keys managed by a government agency would leak with mathematical certainty?
Also: who is to say that Apple, Google or Microsoft manage to keep their keys secret? Not all thieves would be stupid enough to tell, and nationstates tend to hold such advantages on ice until they have a good enough reason to use them.
At worst the entire industry in that region is broken more often than they are functional. It's also notable that companies existing in this state of brokenness would be competing with companies living in a functional world. One might find that the defective universe continues long enough its inhabitants are extinct.
And as some lower-hanging fruit: The repos of common programming languages and things like Docker Hub.
Python PIP, NodeJS NPM, Ruby Gems, we pull in a lot of stuff from people we don't even know. Every python project installs a gazillion of stuff from its requirements.txt. At least the OS updates come from a party we at least chose to do business with.
And it's not like this is not yet happening already. But I think it'll take a major Wannacry event before we'll stop doing this because it's just so damn handy.
But if you think of it, imagine you're coding and some random 'willywonka2586' on a public slack group says "Hey I wrote a handy library for that, here, go and install it and use it in a project for your customers!". This is kinda what we're doing.
Was it a Microsoft dependency?
It's not "perfectly fine"; but the alternative is millions of computers with known security vulnerabilities exploitable by anyone, which is far far worse than a potential backdoor used by large companies or governments.
At the very least, this would need some quantification of risk: Probability and impact of keys getting leaked vs probability and impact of not installing a backdoor.
Yes, of course.
And in the case of autoupdates:
1. the risk of finding a RCE in any random PC within the next few years is close to 100%
2. an unpatched RCE is strictly worse than a backdoor
3. how many computers won't be patched without forced autoupdates?
In the case of e2ee, I'm afraid it's much harder to quantify, though.
That X makes things worse for people in general just isn't strong evidence that governments will not do X. If you don't want X then you need to explicitly push back.
and 99.x% of people aren't engaging in sharing child porn anyway, it's the 0.1% of motivated criminals that will share encrypted files anyway, no matter what the law is. They will find ways around the law, they always do.
This is a thinly veiled excuse to take basic human rights away from people.
That's absolutely not true. Sure, some stretches are just to generate revenue, but that you're not allowed to go 200km/h through a city is not for revenue generation. It's also not given by common sense - the fact that you need to set the limit 20 lower than what's save should be plenty of evidence.
Speeding is tied to one third of traffic fatalities the last 20 years (https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding), so of course speed limits are put in place in an attempt to increase safety on the road. There are plenty of arguments to be made about the best way to enforce speed limits, or ways to discourage aggressive driving (such as speeding), but there is little doubt that speeding is dangerous.
Countries such as Germany have much lower traffic fatalities than the USA but they can operate vehicles at much higher speeds. Speed isn't the problem... uneducated drivers, poor vehicle maintenance, poor road quality, etc are the problem. But all those things would upset the masses who think they are entitled to operate a vehicle for 50 years after 2 months of training and a 15 minute test, so (in the USA) we get the lowest common denominator and roadways that are engineered to handle vehicles at 80+MPH are stuck with 55MPH speed limits.
Speed isn't the problem, neither are any of the others you mentioned. They all add to the problem of traffic fatalities though.
They did a study in Germany and were able to halve traffic fatalities by adding a speed limit of 130kph on one Autobahn section, measured over 3 years.[1]
Sure you can improve road conditions and driver education, but a multi-pronged approach including speed limits is sensible.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/tempolimit-mit-130-km-h-...
And regarding internet privacy and secure communications, that's exactly what they want: for privacy to be associated (in the mind of the average citizen) with organized crime, terrorism and pedophilia.
In a nutshell, and in case it didn't register with you when it should have: attempts to curb cryptography have been made in the past. The phrase 'you can't outlaw math' is a simple observation: strong cryptography will be available to everybody that wants it regardless of its legal status. So a government that would love to read your mail would do better to realize that they will only be able to read the uninteresting mail and for the rest of it they'll be staring at white noise. Meanwhile the baddies, alerted to the fact that the government is able to read your mail will either resort to other methods of communications or will use channels that they assume to be overt to signal covertly using other methods. There are plenty of examples for this.
So, in conclusion, no matter how much you want to outlaw strong cryptography, those that want it will have it, better plan accordingly or all you will do is waste more time reading data that you will find stupendously boring.
'Oh that, that's just white noise.'
'You are under arrest for illegal encription with the intent to <insert horrible criminal activity here>.'
This is the crux of your argument, but it's false. E2EE has been available for decades but it wasn't used widely, by everyone including criminals, until it was pushed as the default.
It's not as if all of the old volume of mail was steamed open and read or everybody's TV equipped with monitoring equipment. Even libraries did not track who read what (though they did track who borrowed what).
Because the thing is, making encryption software is hard. I doubt there will be convenient and easy to install software out there if you ban this stuff. And the majority of people won't use it if it isn't convenient and easy to install.
This is an impossible task. There is no way they will be able to enforce this. It would literally require them to stick their dirty fingers into every piece of software built in the EU.
They can attack large corporations like ISPs and such and force them to do certain things, sure, but there is no way they can "ban" any kind of encryption with any real success, because, as the OC said, it's basically trying to outlaw mathematics. Forcing ISPs to perform deep packet inspection or whatever won't change the axioms of mathematics or fundamentally alter computer science so that they can suddenly break encrypted data coming from their clients.
Of course, the argument is that this is to combat criminals and we all know that it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't matter at the end of the day if the true goal is to just monitor people.
You are not interested in just "people". You are interested in very specific subgroup of those (1-x)% that already operate outside the law.
And another fact is that these bans can even give you access to the people outside of the law. Practical example, Australia's sting operation of pushing their own 'secure' app on the blackmarket to lure criminals in. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/08/fbi-app-arre...)