But backdoors and unacceptable, that's like mandating that every house have microphones in every room connected to the police center
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
OTOH for "Animal Farm" he specifically wrote an essay[1] explaining why he wrote it, meant to be a preface to the book. Ironically, the preface was dropped from the book when it was originally published for the very same reasons discussed in the essay. And I feel that many of those reasons are still at play today.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Digital rights, digital ownership, digital business models, privacy, security, speech, digital policing... they're all very different from their analog analogs.
The differences between A & B are less pronounced in the digital realm.
Police hacking into devices has more in common, practically and culturally, with signals intelligence than it does with ordinary policing.
I don't disagree with you. I just don't agree that "it's very simple." We need to invent or adopt novel concepts, not insist that nothing has changed.
That's not the same for software. It's pretty much trivial to write an encryption software which is basically unbreakable. Complex software has bugs, but sometimes simple software is enough.
That said, I don't see how backdoors would help here. Evil guys won't use vulnerable software.