Encryption Is Not a Crime

Political efforts against encryption

• Many comments focus on EU “chat control” and similar US efforts as recurring attempts to criminalize or weaken encryption, often exempting politicians and law enforcement themselves.
• Motives are seen as a mix of “think of the children” and “tough on crime” messaging, which several describe as emotional, manipulative, and resistant to rational rebuttal.
• Some note a surveillance‑industry lobby behind such laws, and connect this to broader systemic corruption and revolving‑door politics.

Tools, crime, and bad analogies

• Participants compare banning or weakening encryption to banning air, wheels, roads, or houses because criminals use them, arguing encryption is a general‑purpose tool with both good and bad uses.
• Others criticize oversimplified argument templates on both sides and warn against strawman analogies that ignore real harms.

Law enforcement access and backdoor schemes

• A long subthread explores a “devil’s advocate” proposal: expiring, warrant‑based decryption certificates issued by vendors.
• Critics argue any mechanism that lets a third party decrypt data is effectively a master key, vulnerable to abuse, leaks, coercion, and future authoritarian regimes.
• Some stress that encryption doesn’t make investigations impossible, just less scalable and more work‑intensive; mass access to cleartext is framed as institutional laziness.
• There is acknowledgement that surveillance has helped catch some terrorists, but several question effectiveness, trade‑offs, and lack of proper counterfactuals.

Trust, rights, and slippery slopes

• A recurring theme is distrust of governments and police: even if “good” today, they may change, and powers granted are rarely rolled back.
• Many see the right to try to keep secrets as foundational; making strong security itself suspicious or illegal is described as inherently tyrannical.
• Some compare the call for backdoors to torture or prior eras of overbroad national‑security measures.

Nature and necessity of encryption

• Commenters emphasize that modern internet usage (banking, authentication, messaging, commerce) depends on encryption; without it, routine accounts would be trivially compromised.
• Others note encryption is not synonymous with privacy: metadata, client behavior, and policy/operational choices still matter greatly.
• Several argue the public neither understands privacy nor sees where the fight over encryption is happening, making them susceptible to fear‑based arguments.