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

First of all, break the assumption that encryption is for paranoid people. Ask the opposing side to defend regulation over E2EE.

You're in luck because there are no objective arguments against it. When they inevitably turn to emotionalisms like "terrorism" and "sexual abuse", cite how insignificant of a percentage "terrorists" and "abusers" are of all E2EE usage. Explain that a ban for one is a ban for all, them included, and that encryption in fact protects from people's spying on and planning over one's significant other/children/etc. Ask why politicians like Trump or Clinton can seek protection from aggressors but you, an honest-working tax-paying citizen unentitled to a private security force, should not.

Explain that criminals overtly show their psychological traits every living moment and it is the failure of the authorities to help rectify their behaviour lest they commit a crime; that it is a well-paid police proffession to monitor people for such traits. Such a profession that is gladly and frugally assisted by artificial intelligence which can be tied to any camera that sees you, any website that you visit; that the government and companies can make deterministic psychological profiles from metadata alone and some graph theory.

You can also reference absurdity by stating that, to avoid "terrorism" among E2EE, the government should simply ban "terrorists" from using E2EE. However, the Wars-On-.* have been proven not to achieve the original goal in US history but rather to cause collateral damage, much more drastic than foreign subversion could. So banning or regulating E2EE is an ambiguous goal which will fail.

Suspicious, maybe it was foreign subversion indeed. Would you like E2EE when you pay taxes and go vote? So why not for more close-to-home data such as intimate details that could be used against you by an enemy or in court of law?

And finally, the police force and government authority use and _develop_ E2EE. They ought to have hidden back doors in it. For the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars law enforcement receives in funding, they ought to have. So even if we assume they could catch "terrorists" and "abusers" more efficiently. Well, then they don't need such giant budgets from your wallets. Would you consistently pay dozens of dollars a month for private investigators to aimlessly roam the country, not even saying what they are looking for? So why let the government do it? You could purchase many sources of joy with that money.

* If it's really about few really bad crimes, then nothing needs to change. In addition to the traditional methods, Governments already have ways to hack a few people. It's just that the more people they hack the more likely it is that the hack gets discovered and they want to spy on the masses.

* We leak tons of metadata. Even with encryption it will be available to governments and gives them tons of ways to pin down people. Eg. in some cases police used location information of cell phones to create a list of suspects. A lot of that metadata is very hard to avoid so it's likely going to stay.

* You don't just protect yourself from the government, but also the provider. Recently a report surfaced about a yahoo employee searching his colleauge's yahoo accounts for naked pictures.

* Providers can also get hacked. If the data is in encrypted form at the provider, the hackers would have to issue an update of the client which is usually harder than "just" hacking some servers. Those hackers can even be foreign governments.

* Safe deletion gets much harder when you have to worry about data on your provider as well. There were stories about providers not deleting data that users explicitly wanted to be deleted. There's also the problem of safe hardware decomissioning. Although most big shops are handling this problem more professionally than most individuals who just run format on their laptop's hdd and then offer it on ebay, you still have to take them by their word and rely that they do their job well.

You cannot remove your personal data once it is released (except via a time machine...) and your government and state can use this information for political motives that are as questionable as child sexual abuse and terrorism. In particular, you can never discard the rise of terrorist states.

Maby if they could actually start acting on intelligence when dozens of people report that a kid is likely to conduct a school shooting I'd believe them. Even then, we all know this type of rhetoric from law enforcement is just posturing to force their way in through the front door. This is still a good exercise (documenting why end-to-end encryption is necessary), but don't kid yourselves. They will whine just like Trump until they get what they want. If nothing changes and they stop whining it's time to start digging, that probably means they got what they wanted in secret.

If you use E2E as a means to sell or auction a person against their will, wouldn't that directly link the technology to their illegal action?

Also, distributing child porn is itself a crime, separate from the abuse. So you would be directly using E2E in a crime that way. Are you implying that some laws hold less moral or legal value? If so, what are the differentiating factors in that decision?