<i>&gt; privacy is a fundamental human right. Law enforcement doesn&#x27;t understand this, they only know &quot;getting the baddies&quot;</i><p>Law enforcement doesn&#x27;t have any issues with their understanding or their clarity of thinking, but frankly I think people like us on tech forums often do.<p>Remember: one man&#x27;s terrorist is another man&#x27;s freedom fighter. The difference between &quot;terrorist&quot; and &quot;dissident&quot; is mostly nuanced definition, depending very much on whether the observer supports the people at question or doesn&#x27;t. People trying to overthrow the Chinese government are &#x27;dissidents&#x27; unless you&#x27;re a member of the Chinese government, in which case they&#x27;re terrorists. The fighters in eastern Ukraine are either pro-Russian rebels or anti-Ukrainian terrorists, again depending on who is talking. Islamic mullah&#x27;s are either exercising their inalienable right to freedom of speech, or spreading extremism and brainwashing people ... probably depending on whether you grew up in the USA or the UK.<p>It&#x27;s for these sorts of reasons that the UN has never been able to arrive at a working definition of terrorism.<p>So now look at the arguments deployed by the technical community for strong encryption. Privacy and encryption is important for democracy, we say, because it&#x27;s important that people be able to coordinate in order to resist an increasingly totalitarian government. It is easy to find encryption products that make this sort of argument.<p>In short, the tech community argues that strong government-proof crypto is important because dissidents must be protected (who else is both sympathetic and needs the ability for their communication to have court-order-proof levels of privacy?). But those same governments hear these arguments and say, wait, the dissidents we&#x27;re dealing with are not dissidents, they&#x27;re terrorists!<p>So this is an unresolvable conflict of views. The tech industry will unfortunately always be in the position of explicitly supporting terrorism, from at least <i>some</i> observers point of view. It&#x27;s inherent in the idea that sometimes governments must not be all powerful.