Obama Sides with Cameron in Encryption Fight

> "They are plotting and coordinating these bad things via communications with one another"

Yes, but has anyone considered the means they might be using to do this? Why assume it's electronic? Check the wikipedia page for the Millennium Challenge, especially the section on 'Exercise action'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

I would add Brave new world to the mixture, so there's awareness of what happens when there is surplus of cat pics and reality shows.

edit: oh, one starts to write a comment, attends the phone, and your idea is already submitted :/.

Because as someone smart said - If we want to defend our own freedoms, we have to start with defending freedoms of scoundrels, because the government will always start with taking away theirs. And when it's gone, ours will be gone too.

How did they find out Person Y's phone needed to be searched/monitored to begin with? Obviously they have other sources of intelligence.

The question also doesn't address the issue of how far is too far, imagine how many crimes would be discovered with nightly searches of everyone's homes. Should we begin searching everyone's homes warrantlessly? What is more detrimental to society, the criminals, or the police state?

What are they doing to do, deploy unremoveable malware on every phone by default? Because as long as phones have CPUs and we can tell them what to do, they can employ unbreakable encryption. How are they supposed to get around that? Mandatory spyware?

What did police do before the telephone was commonplace? Criminals met and still meet in speakeasies and other safe locations to communicate without a phone, are we gonna install mics in every room as part of new building codes?

If phones do become irreversibly broken and monitored, guess what, criminals will stop using phones. Kevin Gates (rapper) has a song about drug dealing called... I Don't Talk On Phones, lol.

tl;dr: surveillance state monitoring all phones just means criminals will stop using phones to communicate so its only going to hurt "legitimate" privacy.

> Historically, we have been able to intercept those communications, read them, and interrupt our adversaries from the bad things they are plotting.

I challenge this assertion. It has happened in some cases, but the claim that surveillance is an effective way to stop terrorism has failed to be backed up with many success stories.

> If our adversaries' communications are completely impossible to intercept, we have lost one of the most valuable tools in our ability to prevent them from doing bad things.

The most organized adversaries' communications are already impossible to intercept. They know they are under surveillance and are taking measures to counter that surveillance. The people that surveillance affects most are innocent people.

In a different perspective (and I'm going to speak in an American context because I'm American and the article is about the American president) there are some things that are worth the lives of Americans. Our nation was founded with a rebellion and many Americans died in that struggle. They died for freedom, to gain rights. American history is full of people dying to protect the rights of Americans.

And from another perspective, terrorism is a hugely overblown concern. More Americans die in car accidents every year than have died from terrorism in the entire history of the United States[1]. 33561 people died in car crashes in the US in 2012[w]: that's like the September 11 attacks happening almost once a month. The fact that we're spending $10.8 billion in a year on the NSA[3] to prevent a handful of deaths that it may not even prevent, and less than 10% of that ($815 million) on the NHTSA[4] shows that our priorities are not where they should be.

[1] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_Traffic_Safety...