It's easy to forget but not everyone lives in a bubble full of privacy-conscious techfolk. There are people whose children were groomed online and convinced to submit themselves to sexual abuse. There are people who were those children. There are the law enforcement officers and NGOs dedicated to fighting this stuff. These people are all real. They all exist.
Other people are parents. They see the stories, they worry that it'll happen to their own children. Whether you like it or not, this justification garners sympathy from a not-insignificant number of people.
Often, these people don't understand E2E encryption or why they should give a hoot about it. They see the very real, tangible problem of child abuse on one side and some kind of vague objection from technical people on the other.
If you want to move past venting and have a real chance of inducing change, you need to acknowledge that other people with very different worldviews exist and you need to think about how to engage with them, see things from their point of view and convince them that E2E encryption should be protected.
I would add that some may see E2EE as important, but protection of vulnerable as *more* important. Life just isn't so black & white.
I'm sure the police would also have a much easier time solving crimes if they had a CCTV in every living room. They might even pinky swear that that they'd only look at it with a court order. And promise to keep the recording extra, super safe so no bad guys can ever look at it. Just think of how much child abuse takes place inside houses - the very notion of houses that the police can't look into is an abomination that must be banned immediately!
The pushback if they proposed something like that would be enormous. But the only reason they think they can get away with the same thing, just regarding chat systems, is that they want to take advantage of the fact that most people are tech-illiterate enough not to understand how encryption works, while they do roughly understand how CCTV works.
Some things are just too dangerous to exist. A backdoor into every communication channel on the planet is one of those things.
You live in bubble. Most citizens include all age groups, backgrounds, etc.
Most people literally have no idea what encryption is, what it means, does, how it is used.
Along comes a trustful thing, a news site or tv channel. It explains that encryption is being used to harm little kids, or to allow thieves to do evil.
Governments spout this blather, because it works on the majority.
The thing is, I don’t think the people who work at those agencies would want this either, except for maybe law enforcement. It’s the bureaucrats who think it’s a good idea, everyone else knows it’s a shite one. It’s an utter farce.
Someone in such an agency believes they act for the greater good. To watch, aides in protecting society from bomber, insurrection, threat.
They see themselves as noble, and likely most are.
The problem here is misuse, and the scope of information. While the majority behave acceptably, agency culture, and political leanings become a trap.
And so the noble use, becomes corrupted. And because the person believes themselves to be good, who they work for is surely good, and so the work done must be good.
Just look at all the devs working at facebook Do they see themselves as evil? Causing civil wars, breakdown of societal cohesion for profit, destruction for stock price?
No.
They see themselves as non-evil. They see what they do as non-evil, because of <reasons>.
You may as well support banning E2EE because nobody needs it.
That would be enough.
There would be people made less safe by such a restrictive regime! Of course a much larger number would be safer. Tradeoffs are exactly what they sound like.
If actually proposing legislation such distinctions would be important. For an internet discussion what you meant is clear enough.
We should uphold the Constution as it is now and remove every single gun law.
Regardless this is why citizens need modern military equipment.
1. there are enough armed forces personnel to police the third or fourth largest country by land mass in the world (the United States)
2. that every single armed forces personnel would unquestioningly obey what constitutes illegal orders (military deployment on American soil)
3. that the entire population would simply sit down and let themselves be overrun by the military.
I think you should check your assumptions.
If you count the standing paramilitary forces (“police") that work for the government and do this job already, plus all the other armed forces, that's not that much of a stretch.
> that every single armed forces personnel would unquestioningly obey what constitutes illegal orders (military deployment on American soil)
Military deployment on US soil is not illegal. (That would make defensive war, as well as suppression of armed rebellion, impossible.)
Military deployment to enforce domestic order isn't illegal, either, though for federal regular military troops there are procedural requirements for it under the Insurrection Act (mostly, a completely discretionary Presidential determination of one of several specific kinds of need—some of which involve a request from a state governor and some of which do not—and particular notifications to the civilian population and any potential insurgents before employment of the military for certain uses.) State forces not called in to federal service may have their own procedural rules for law enforcement deployments, but most state forces can also be activated federally under federal rules.
And if elements of the military are involved on both sides, it's not exactly citizen resistance anymore.
Side note: I’m not actually against E2E encryption. Strong proponent really. I just think these arguments tend not to resonate with a very broad audience outside of the security/privacy/technolibertarian communities
We're in the middle of a whole bunch of cases of policemen being sacked or charged here for asking our underage girls on dates, keeping and sharing nudes from crime victims phones etc.
And remember: if someone is lying about why they're doing something that's further evidence it's not something you want. If they had a good reason, they'd be up front about it...
Fwiw seems rather clear to me that we live in an age where information is groomed for us, for the same reasons.