Re: Nope, don't care
RE; AndrewDu " " It removes the benefits of encryption accruing to criminals without harming the rest of us."
Until the definition of "criminals" is expanded by the elites to include something you didn't expect, and then you're toast. "
Speaking of 'toast'.. and the world of 'political economy' and why we do what we do and how we go about doing it.
Far and away the largest chunk of terrorism and general anarchy is rooted in the sense of hopelessness generated by a total distrust in the validity of the philosophies and logic upon which 'modern economics' rests and upon which the increasingly small proportion of mankind which benefits from it relies for its 'moral authority' to keep things arranged as they are and to brook no dissent whilst at the same time engaging in sweet words and rhetoric as a Machiavellian exercise in good governance.
Remove the hopelessness by aligning the goals and actions of all the institutions of state and commerce, everywhere, to the enlightened moral precepts of the 21st century, which everyone claims to subscribe to, then you will remove 99% of terrorism and the need for this debate. We can all have our privacy, subject to 'probable cause' and limited to physical access and search of living space. Everybody would be able to live and do the real jobs they expected to do, with the freedom and the security they expect.
In the respected world of serious study and analyses, the Georgian and Victorian precepts of morality that provide the inescapable context of the logic underpinning the whole of neoclassical 'modern economics', as well as Marx's Communism and Liberal Socialism and Social Democracy, is well recognised to be 'houses of cards' al built on the same invalid and inappropriate idealised model of an 'economic man'. For us today, the imagined 'free markets' through which they exchange and distribute the products of their particular specialisations to their mutual and fairly distributed individual advantage have been shown not to exist. Not then and not now, and not likely to. Without a complete rethink and rebuild/redirection of the plethora of political and commercial institutions which have been built on those archaic and naive premises.
Unfortunately for us all those same institutions that have grown up to support a system which concentrates wealth and power to an increasingly small fraction of people are the realm of those same people. Their moral super-hero is the idealised 'economic man' exercising rationality and self-interest in all his unfettered and minimally controlled activities. Be they activities involving production, exchange and distribution, or consumption.
Both sides of this crypto debate are in the same camp. It is logical and rational for app and device makers to protect their own commercial interests and not compromise security demanded by you and I. In their role of being agents of a power hegemony fully convinced by the benefits of its own self-righteousness, our security forces must see their need for ubiquitously broken crypto products as logical and rational in their self-interest to be seen to be defending successfully those that reward them for doing so.
The real question is not the short-term one of 'Which is right?' but the long-term question of 'Are either of them right?' and if not 'Should not both them be actively seeking to bring their moral precepts into line with those of the 21st Century and seeking to modify our social, commercial and political institutions to achieve, support the and develop the universal and global application of those goals of equality, brotherhood and liberty which once were conceived as applying in practice to only an educated and commercially successful, largely hereditary, elite?'.
If we cannot expect such an introspection and 'epiphanal' conviction of spirit and the actions to demonstrate it from those who are the receptacles of the accruing concentrations of the wealth and power that are needed to make those changes in an evolutionary but rapid and deterministic way, then there will inevitably be those whose lives are so dire and hopeless that there will be those who, struck by empathy and a sense of injustice and convinced of their own ability to challenge its causes by publicising to the iniquitous the iniquity seen. They will seek to chip away at their comfortable self-righteousness using whatever misguided, misconceived and desperate ways as would seem proportional to the scale of the stasis amongst those that can and should be the ones acting positively to facilitate real change.
Whether or not broken crypto? It is a mere sideshow. It has no logical resolution and has no moral precepts to choose between for the most powerful protagonists share the same 17th Century philosophical foundation. It can only be resolved by paradigm shift and an update of governance and commercial practices in governments and boardrooms to be in line with the rhetoric expressed in the hustings and by corporate spin doctors.
Rather tie your elected 'representatives' in knots of inescapable logic than entangle hexcodes and electron spins. Rather find ways of creating a democracy that controls governance in the interests and for the well-being of every person and not primarily in the interests of the few people who seek to influence and control 'our' representatives by feeding their personal senses of well-being with candy and cake.