Open Letter from Governments to Facebook Is an All-Out Attack on Encryption
It's interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to government. They took place hand to hand, either in cash or barter. But now that transactions are digitized, it is actually illegal to conduct certain types of transactions anonymously (KYC/AML laws). This came about because governments got used to being able to peer into the financial lives of their citizens, and once they got used to it, they didn't like it when people circumvented that, so they made it a crime.<p>The same is true here of private messaging. Governments got used to being able to read our messages. They have come to rely on it. And so now they want to make it illegal for us to keep them out.<p>I guess what i'm saying is: We ought to be extremely careful what we allow our governments to get used to doing. There is an argument to be made that the original sin here was allowing wiretaps <i>at all</i>, even when the medium was un-encrypted.