NSA Codebreaking: I Am The Other
> The NSA's official response is to suggest that wanting to secure our communications from our surveillance is inherently suspicious and suggestive of criminal activity.<p>No, their official response is to suggest that encrypting your communications makes you indistinguishable (at their end) from those who encrypt for criminal activity. There <i>is</i> a difference, and there's no getting around the idea that if the set of Bad Actors are to have the crypto broken then it will necessarily involve breaking the same crypto in use by the Good Actors.<p>Even the NSA also says <i>in the very paragraph quoted</i> that encryption is also used for "nations [...] to protect their secrets" (which is hardly a criminal or illegitimate goal).<p>Likewise, if the government hires a lockpicker to plant a bug in an embassy then by definition they now have the technical ability to pick locks (even if they don't have the legal permission).<p>The rest of his points, on the whole, are quite valid but are sometimes answering a question that isn't actually behing asked from the other side.