FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

That's the distinction that drove me to make the political versus economic benefits distinction. Rent control as a whole makes things worse - there's less housing, it's of worse quality, and it drives up the cost of market rate housing. On the whole, it's a bad allocation of resources: we'd much rather have cities with more housing that's of higher quality (because people are more than willing to pay for it). The problem is that this sort of policy creates winners and losers, and the losers are often the ones who get to set local policy.

There's two solutions - have a ban on rent control at a higher jurisdictional level (Washington State does this), or bribe current residents to lift rent control. The latter should make everyone better off - we pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls.

Anyhow, my overall point is that we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_homebrew

IMNAL, but my understanding is that such a law would run into rock solid, granite hard, iron clad parts of a little issue called the US Constitution. E.g., if the cops ask you a question, then you don't have to answer. The person's lawyer can just tell the cops that "My client has no idea what that base 64 gibberish is."

For encryption as a recognized right, no, that's asking a bit much of the US political system.

BTW, for the person receiving the base 64 code (that's the way JPGs, etc. are sent in e-mail), first go through base 64 decoding and, then, apply the receiver's private key to that to decode back to the secret message, e.g., where and when the boy and his girlfriend are going to meet and carve their initials on a tree.

Base 64 is in the internet standard for e-mail and there is called MIME for multi-media internet mail extensions. So, the idea of MIME is to permit sending pictures, audio, movies, etc.

So, in arithmetic, base 10 has digits 0-9, that is, 10 digits. Base 16 has, right, 16 digits, 0-9-A-F. Base 2 has, you guessed it, 2 digits, 0-1. Well, presto, bingo, base 64 has 64 digits, 0-9, a-z, etc., all simple, ordinary printable characters such as e-mail had been sending right along.

Well, with 6 bits, can count from 0 to 63, that is, have 64 different patterns. So, given a stream of bits, can replace each 6 of them with one of the base 64 digits. And there is a simple solution for what to do with any few bits left over. So, that is how to take any stream of bits and 'encode' it to just printable characters easy to send via e-mail.

A huge fraction of all Internet data is sent as base 64. So, base 64 data alone is nothing suspicious.

To most people arguments like "it will help us find terrorists and pedophiles" and flawed analogies with doors and keys are much more appealing, only because they are easy to understand, while the opposite arguments sound philosophical, alien or carry less weight because they contradict what "the experts" (i.e. the FBI) claim.

But they shouldn't sound so: what's happening is wrong not just because of the practical fallacies of the pro-restrictions arguments -in which most discussions focus currently- it is wrong because the only way for government monitoring to be effective in the end, is to outright criminalise secure encryption by everyone. It should be blatantly obvious that the most dangerous of their claimed target group, wouldn't be dissuaded by the inconvenience of using custom/non-friendly software/hardware, so any lesser measure would be just useless.

And on that premise, how can many people not see how wrong it would be if one day we are called criminals for exchanging a truly private message with someone? In what words and with what simple examples can you make non-technical people see how bad this reality would be and how far it can stretch to things that they do care about? And that even if it didn't, it would still be fundamentally wrong...

Not a rhetorical question by the way, I've tried to participate in such discussions and failed miserably to be convincing -so any tips are appreciated.