The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption
Another argument against the "going dark" claim is that before smartphones and the internet, the only conversations the FBI could monitor was through phonelines and mail. These were known to be easily monitored and I doubt there was much more criminal activity happening through those then than now.I would argue that the conversations that have gone online are the interactions that were previously happening in-person (at least in term of criminal activity), to which the FBI didn't have access before.There is something Orwellian with the idea that there shouldn't be a word that can be pronounced in the country that the government cannot record and listen to after the fact. The limits of what is legal or not have always moved (see homosexuality, drug and alcohol consumption, etc). So a 100% enforcement of the law is counter-intuitively undesirable.