More encryption means less privacy

What you've just expressed is one of those fascinating pieces of mental junk that clutters up social groups, a political desire that's so strongly held you've managed to rationalise to yourself that it's a fact and not a personal desire at all. But it's still not a fact.

It is trivial to use cryptography in ways that yield some sort of balance between personal privacy and the needs of the state. In fact it's almost the default:

• Client-to-server encryption with central message routing is "unbreakable" against neighbours, friends, your employer (when not using their equipment) and most importantly criminals, but is easily accessed by any police officer who can serve a warrant on the provider.

• Disk encryption enforced by secure hardware like iOS, Android, BitLocker etc can easily be given a backdoor by the manufacturers. It's only a few pages of extra code at most.

And that's about it for "mainstream use of crypto up to about 3 years ago" right? It's only since Apple and Facebook started refusing to unlock devices and claiming (wrongly) they have end-to-end encrypted their service so they can no longer comply with warrants that this situation has changed.

That's not even including other techniques like key escrow, the dual-EC RNG that the NSA was pushing (with the interesting fillip that it's got a cryptographically strong "unbreakable" backdoor!) and a whole host of other tricks that aren't really used much (we think).

PHK's article even spells this out for you - Kazakhstan breaks the supposedly unbreakable TLS by simply insisting everyone configure their computer to allow them that ability, a feature well intended by the TLS designers.

The truth is that there's a vast middle ground between "unbreakable crypto" and "effectively no crypto at all" and it is in that middle ground the virtually all services we use today sit. Enough crypto is used to keep out ordinary criminals and snoops, but not enough is used to keep out determined governments with jurisdiction. The point the author is making is that attempting to pursue the ideal of unbreakable crypto (a) won't work and (b) will actually end up making privacy worse for everyone.

This isn't just governments either. Corporations do things like proxy HTTP traffic to cache pages and save on bandwidth (some ISPs do it too). By moving that to HTTPS traffic you are removing the ability to do this, and that gives them an incentive to do things like install root certificates for all their devices. Now your banking website has it's traffic sniffed as well, all in the name of caching the youtube videos that get distributed around the office.

Also, I believe trustworthy and political to be mutually exclusive.

But tellingly, activism has failed to solidify a victory there. It was COICA, then SOPA, then PIPA, then ACTA, and now TPP, all pushing a bunch of the same core changes. Whenever there's resistance, the thing goes into hiding and comes back wearing new clothes. Lately, it's been handled in settings where debate happens behind closed doors and domestic activism has little power.

And yes, that might look different if major corporate players were more involved. But their stances are varied and inconsistent at best, and to the extent that this is for the benefit of private citizens the political approach appears to be an endless defensive fight.

Before crypto, basically all guarantees where conditional on a judge's say so. With crypto this changes. The issue also comes up, in a clearer way, with crypto currencies. There is no way to deal with fraud or mistaken tranfers in bitcoin.

That loss of intervention hurts, and we gotta think about it. Even though no government has given a satisfactory solution, that doesn't mean there isn't a problem in need of solving.