Except of course that this is entirely unlike speed limits.
In a nutshell, and in case it didn't register with you when it should have: attempts to curb cryptography have been made in the past. The phrase 'you can't outlaw math' is a simple observation: strong cryptography will be available to everybody that wants it regardless of its legal status. So a government that would love to read your mail would do better to realize that they will only be able to read the uninteresting mail and for the rest of it they'll be staring at white noise. Meanwhile the baddies, alerted to the fact that the government is able to read your mail will either resort to other methods of communications or will use channels that they assume to be overt to signal covertly using other methods. There are plenty of examples for this.
So, in conclusion, no matter how much you want to outlaw strong cryptography, those that want it will have it, better plan accordingly or all you will do is waste more time reading data that you will find stupendously boring.
This is not about hardcore cypherpunks or terrorist that want encryption at any cost.
This is about joe random using WhatsApp. And now he has some xanax and pete over there says he deals. Joe probably won't have strong encryption if it is properly outlawed, even if he is a low level dealer.
Because the thing is, making encryption software is hard. I doubt there will be convenient and easy to install software out there if you ban this stuff. And the majority of people won't use it if it isn't convenient and easy to install.
> So a government that would love to read your mail would do better to realize that they will only be able to read the uninteresting mail and for the rest of it they'll be staring at white noise
This is the crux of your argument, but it's false. E2EE has been available for decades but it wasn't used widely, by everyone including criminals, until it was pushed as the default.
Strong encryption has been available for decades as well, but it wasn't used widely until HTTPS and encrypted email. What is your point? That availability doesn't equate use? That's obvious. But now that it is widely used nothing has really changed, we're back where we started: traffic analysis and humint, which is not a bad basis for an investigation or an infiltration op.
It's not as if all of the old volume of mail was steamed open and read or everybody's TV equipped with monitoring equipment. Even libraries did not track who read what (though they did track who borrowed what).
It's more like, "If you outlaw guns, the only people with guns will be outlaws."
And regarding internet privacy and secure communications, that's exactly what they want: for privacy to be associated (in the mind of the average citizen) with organized crime, terrorism and pedophilia.
yet 99% of people break that speed limit regularly. We all know speed limit laws are less about public safety, and more about generating revenue for the state, at least in the US anyway.
and 99.x% of people aren't engaging in sharing child porn anyway, it's the 0.1% of motivated criminals that will share encrypted files anyway, no matter what the law is. They will find ways around the law, they always do.
This is a thinly veiled excuse to take basic human rights away from people.
I'm curious where you get your information about speeding, because it kind of seems made up.
Speeding is tied to one third of traffic fatalities the last 20 years (https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding), so of course speed limits are put in place in an attempt to increase safety on the road. There are plenty of arguments to be made about the best way to enforce speed limits, or ways to discourage aggressive driving (such as speeding), but there is little doubt that speeding is dangerous.
"Speed related" is another one of those examples where the government lies with statistics to sell some safety FUD while failing to address the root cause of the problem.
Countries such as Germany have much lower traffic fatalities than the USA but they can operate vehicles at much higher speeds. Speed isn't the problem... uneducated drivers, poor vehicle maintenance, poor road quality, etc are the problem. But all those things would upset the masses who think they are entitled to operate a vehicle for 50 years after 2 months of training and a 15 minute test, so (in the USA) we get the lowest common denominator and roadways that are engineered to handle vehicles at 80+MPH are stuck with 55MPH speed limits.
>Speed isn't the problem... uneducated drivers, poor vehicle maintenance, poor road quality, etc are the problem.
Speed isn't the problem, neither are any of the others you mentioned. They all add to the problem of traffic fatalities though.
They did a study in Germany and were able to halve traffic fatalities by adding a speed limit of 130kph on one Autobahn section, measured over 3 years.[1]
Sure you can improve road conditions and driver education, but a multi-pronged approach including speed limits is sensible.
> We all know speed limit laws are less about public safety, and more about generating revenue for the state, at least in the US anyway.
That's absolutely not true. Sure, some stretches are just to generate revenue, but that you're not allowed to go 200km/h through a city is not for revenue generation. It's also not given by common sense - the fact that you need to set the limit 20 lower than what's save should be plenty of evidence.
