Ask HN: What are your arguments in favor of end-to-end encryption?

I was literally sat in a Crown Court on Wednesday for a trial where two guys were on trial for knives and GBH. Cops chased one and he had a blade in his back pocket when they caught him. Why? Well based on the call to the police and the witness evidence I expect if I'd spent a couple more days in court the story would be that he'd just stabbed somebody and so that's why - but even if he'd been caught on his way to stab somebody and never got there it's the same story. Nobody who'd come to play PS4 needed a knife. Nobody who'd come to play hide the sausage, or watch TV, or just sit around and get drunk needed a knife. They had knives so they could "defend themselves" when shit kicks off, which is why shit kicks off, which is why we have a law so they get locked up before they kill each other. Among the witnesses I didn't miss (because they refused to say anything) were the stabbing victims. Code of the streets see, it's OK to try to murder one another, but you mustn't tell the cops anything, this massive slit in my stomach must have been from being clumsy with nail scissors. (The medics unsurprisingly take the view that wounds are instead consistent with getting stabbed by somebody with a bladed weapon...)

The calculus for knives probably looks pretty different if the majority of nearby large mammals are Starbucks employees versus if they're Grizzly bears, or indeed Sheep, and so I don't pretend to think these laws make sense everywhere.

But the calculus for encryption is the same everywhere. We definitely don't want most people to be able to attack this stuff. But it turns out "Not most people" wasn't on the menu. "Nobody" and "Basically any motivated bad guy" are our available options, so let's pick "Nobody" and deal with the social consequences of that.

Counterpoints:

- Do we currently have a big door problem?

- Wait, don't doors also serve an important function?

- Won't that make everybody much more insecure and basically do nothing against "bad stuff"?

- What if I put a wooden plank in front of the hole in my building? Wouldn't that be a "door"? Making doors illegal is not going to stop people from making "doors".

Now, people like to spin this analogy further and revise their proposal and say "Fine, keep your doors, but I get a spare key for every door made".

Problems with this:

- Yes, you and everyone in your office can grab the spare key and steal all my stuff (see TSA locks and basically any time in history that was tried).

- Remember the wooden plank above? That guy will not give you a spare key and can still hide "bad stuff".

- Fine, we will just use magical (blockchain) keys that nobody can steal and not make things insecure, but have an officer visit and inspect every room you have every 5 minutes. You have nothing to hide, do you?

Anything these people think of as "normal" activities has at one point or another been made illegal by a government, but without 1. Knowledge of specific cases 2. An emotional connection to those who suffered / are suffering and 3. A willingness to go beyond the fantasy of perpetual personal exceptionalism there can be no appreciation of the value of privacy over law, or privacy weighed against inevitable concomitant harms.