Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

Gondolinian

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Recently, there has been talk of outlawing or greatly limiting encryption in Britain. Many people hypothesize that this is a deliberate attempt at shifting the overton window, in order to get a more reasonable sounding but still quite extreme law passed.

For anyone who would want to shift the overton window in the other direction, is there a position that is more extreme than "we should encrypt everything all the time" ?

The criminalization of all encryption in the U.S. is just one big terrorist attack away.

10emr11y

Frame attempts to limit the use of encryption as unilateral disarmament, and name specific threats. As in, if the government "has your password", how sure are you that your password isn't eventually going to be stolen by Chinese government hackers? Putin? Estonian scammers? Terrorists? Your ex-partner? And you know that your allies over in (Germany, United States, Israel, France) are going to get their hands on it too, right? And have you thought about when (hated political party) gets voted into power 5 years from now? A second good framing is used by the ACLU representative in the Guardian article: You won't be able to use technologies X Y and Z, and you'll fall behind other countries technologically and economically.

7fubarobfusco11y

To be a bit more specific than "we should encrypt everything all the time": Mandatory full-disk encryption on all computer systems sold, by analogy to mandatory seat belts in cars — it used to be an optional extra, but in the modern world it's unsafe to operate without it.

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