>Mass surveillance is not going to go away without huge cultural reform of the security services. They don't take concessions.
FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.
It's not going to happen on "slightly preferable terms". Either those with political power in society want surveillance, or they don't. If they do, they'll take all that they can get, and the only thing cooperating with them will do is make it all happen faster - the moment you provide a "compromise" surveillance scheme to them on a silver platter is the moment when they'll start devising how to get around the remaining limits.
So you simultaneously think the other side is so powerful that you cannot even compromise with them without being pushed back further, but they are also so weak that you believe you can achieve a total victory without conceding any points? How you you reconcile that? Or do you just resign yourself to fighting for a purer goal since you know you will lose without achieving it regardless?
Total victory, no. Total victory would be strong encryption free to use by everybody without fear of persecution. That looks increasingly unlikely.
However, I do not believe they can effectively enforce any encryption bans. Thus, people who need encryption will still have access to it. And as far as I am concerned, my duty (as a software engineer) is to ensure that it remains the case, even if using it becomes illegal.
That attitude sounds like a myopic focus on the software at the expense of everything else.
Say that in the year 2160 you have perfect, unbreakable encryption on your pocket computer. How will you use it?
With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it. Of course, the master key is most important but all of these concerns apply to the data being protected as well.
The real thing that can never be effectively enforced is privacy. People who need encryption can have access to it or not. It matters not one whit. Our duty (as people) is to push society in a direction where this change feels less catastrophic, not to fight a Caligulan war against the sea.
> With a touchscreen or keyboard, allowing microscopic cameras to see you input it or read the thermal signatures off your input device afterwards? With your face or voice that are continuously being recorded from hundreds if not thousands of angles? Plugging in the future equivalent of a yubikey that someone can just steal from you? You're lucky if fMRIs don't become good enough to just pluck the information out of your brain as you think it.
You're basically describing a totalitarian Panopticon. A society like that should be fought by all means available, including physical force, so the question of legality of encryption is somewhat moot at that point.
>"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." – John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.) as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
FakeComments was mostly talking about targeted surveillance, but I agree with him/her in spirit, since I believe that mass surveillance is not going to go away. Ever. So you can either yell futilely into the wind as it happens over your objections, up to, including, and perhaps going beyond a swarm of camera-bearing networked nanodrones coating the planet, or you can try to nudge it towards happening on slightly preferable terms.