I absolutely understand the sentiment and the goals that citizens should, by default, not be tracked. However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals (drug/human traffickers, and plenty of other people) who, through their trade, make the world a shittier place for the rest of us?
If we accept that the right to privacy is real, that not being followed, watched, and monitored every hour of my life, is something democratic societies should strive for:
This has changed before. HTTP used to be just fine. Only your bank used HTTPS. Now everyone uses HTTPS. It's the default, if you don't support it on your webserver, customers will have troubles reaching it.
Your reasoning is so biased that it is hard for me to wrap my head around it, but at the same time it's very common because it confuses the tool with the crime. Criminals use cars and phones, too, but we don't ban them for everyone.
The argument ignores the catastrophic cost of the solution: destroying privacy for all of us. Creating a backdoor for police doesn't just hinder criminals; it makes everyone's data, from journalists to your medical records, vulnerable to hackers and abuse.
I believe we stop crime with good policing, not by building a system of total surveillance that sacrifices the very freedom we're trying to protect.
But this has been "squared" already. Can the police enter your home without a warrant? No? Why? I bet criminals are pretty secretive around their stuff too, no?
I'm unconvinced that secure communications is the bottle neck when it comes to criminal prosecution. We can expand police power without sacrificing our communications like that.
Anecdotally, take a look at China where privacy doesn't exist and yet Chinese syndicates are responsible for a major chunk of the issues you've listed. So clearly lack of privacy doesn't even correlate with decreased criminal behavior.
Which happens due to totalitarian control of CCP which prohibits self correction mechanisms we have in democratic societies, so what's the Goldilocks area of authoritarianism here? My bet is that compromising all secure communications is all the way in the big bears bed, if we're sticking to the Goldilocks analogy. It's just a fundamental dead-end without fantasy scenarios like benevolent dictatorship which we all know doesn't exist in the real world.
If you have two networks, one encrypted and one not, and the unencrypted network is significantly easier / cheaper to use or has better network effects, that's where most people will naturally flock. The only ones who will put in the effort to use the encrypted one are criminals and a few principled technologists / civil libertarians. In such a world, the mere fact of using the encrypted network is suspicious in itself.
We define "criminals" here as "anybody the government doesn't like." In the US, this is mostly child predators, drug traffickers, thieves, and maybe a few (legal) sex workers. In other places, this is mostly homosexuals, human-rights activists, journalists and the opposition.
The way to fix the "witch hunt" problem is to make all networks encrypted and secure.
While cryptocurrency is mostly used by criminals, as the traditional financial system is just good enough for most people, TLS is used by everybody, as it is just the default way to do things on the internet nowadays. This is despite the fact that TLS makes wiretapping criminals' communications much harder.
The US and Europe[1] should use the influence they have over standards bodies to make prosecuting the latter group of "criminals" much harder, recognizing that this comes at the expense of also letting some criminals in the EU/US sense of the word run free. It is just the morally right thing to do.
[1] I mostly mean American and European companies and organizations which participate in the process of standard setting, not governments, which mostly cannot do things for complicated political reasons.
However, with the current "regime change", the targets of tracking are expanding exponentially to basically anyone who says or does anything the current leadership does not like.
This has been warned about repeatedly with this type of tracking for decades - when "bad actors" take power and abuse that power, then everyone becomes a target. Fascists love data collection, aggregation and data-based decision-making.
Better remove the locks on your house and bathroom and set up a public webcam while you're at it. After all, I'm not sure you're not a criminal, and to be sure of that I — and the rest of society — need to be able to observe you in your bathroom.
"innocent until proven guilty" exists for a reason.
It’s quite easy to square: your argument is nonsense through and through, barely deserving an iota of rebuttal. I could justify absolutely appalling invasions of privacy with what you’re saying.
We are not beholden to ruining everything for almost everyone to stop a small fee from doing bad things. It’s not any more complicated than that.
>By your logic me and the majority of people using Signal are criminals
False. "The majority of X are Y" does not imply that any particular X is Y.
I don't have data for Signal. I use it extensively. Even setting aside that the American legal system makes everyone a criminal several times a day so that the laws can be selectively enforced against anyone who becomes a target, I have no data on whether the majority of Signal users are criminals, but given that criminals have significantly higher interest in secure communications than the general population it wouldn't shock me if evidence came out that it was the case.
maybe we need a law against selective enforcement of laws. together with the comprehensive statistics collection agency that would be required to enforce it.
