I hope it&#x27;s obvious that I don&#x27;t support crypto bans of any sort†.<p>But: I find this sentiment a little hard to understand.<p>The principle at play here goes way back into common law, and was most famously articulated in the 1700s as &quot;the public is entitled to every man&#x27;s evidence&quot;.<p>Access to all an individual&#x27;s communications has been a privilege of the judicial system for the whole life of this country, and for many centuries of the country we came from. The founders didn&#x27;t carve out a rule saying that individuals had the right to conceal evidence, and, one by one, when they assumed the reigns of government, their actions confirmed that they intended no such rule.<p>The norm for centuries has been that if you&#x27;re being investigated, and the courts sanction that investigation, your documents and communications are fair game. In fact, before 1967, it wasn&#x27;t even the law of this country that the government couldn&#x27;t intercept and monitor your communications <i>by fiat, without a warrant</i>. Forced to confront the abuses of wiretaps by unscrupulous government agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court didn&#x27;t choose to ban wiretaps; instead, they systematized them.<p>When people discuss the need for backdoors in crypto, they&#x27;re generally not talking about the status quo. What they&#x27;re worried about is 15 years from now, where <i>all communications and storage technology is end-to-end encrypted</i>, and no warrant or judicial order of any sort can retrieve evidence from them. That&#x27;s not a crazy worry: it&#x27;s what&#x27;s inevitably going to happen.<p>† (<i><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptopals.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptopals.com</a>, &amp;c</i>)