I wore a "this t-shirt is a munition" tee back in the day. With a quarter century of hindsight, I think encryption as a privacy tool may not have been a solution, but a sedative that prevented the smartest people from seeing how bad things really were and applying their courage to those problems.
All this stuff is really convenient. Would we have really said “no” to turn-by-turn navigation? Avoided online purchases? Used cash for most of our transactions? Printed things out so we don’t use the internet while outside?
You could have recognized that if you even think you need Tor and Signal to protect yourself from your own government, you need to organize politically to install representatives who ensure you don't think you need those things.
We overlook that young people with tech jobs in the 90's humiliated a lot of their peers, ones who went on to pursue messy politcal careers instead of business ones. Those peers learned to hate the knowledge that gave a lot of economic advantages to tech people, and the principles we ultimately used to morally justify it. Privacy, freedom, and anonymity separated us from the all against all power game of elite competition that ran on gossip, compromise, narrative, and mainly a lot of guile.
As art, I think the season five finale of Rick & Morty captured the dynamic pretty well, where Sanchez represents the freedom and security of competence and technology that, more concretely, allowed a lot of genX to disengage from the messy political game represented as the family life of people who didn't have the benefits those skills conferred. While he shares them, in the world of the story, they are still always his.
The evil Morty character is a millenial child politician who believes he can have all those benefits for himself immediately and today instead of waiting to develop and inherit them with time - if he just decieves and betrays Sanchez and destroys the world in which his story (history, get it) represents the ideal he has to live up to to recieve them. Evil Morty the politician doesn't want to be a steward, he wants to be his own god becase the one his grandfather represents is humiliating to him.
Where we are now is that we have these politicains who are actuated by the shame of their impostor syndromes and their envy of the true popular desire that the products of competence provide. These X'ers can't get a 100 person rally going, but some hacker in a basement can do some magic and suddenly actuate the desire of billions like some kind of rockstar without the gatekeepers.
That's what this legislation is about. It's the coup de grace by a resentful pretender elite who have been taken in by people older and much more dangerous than they could ever have percieved.
To be blunt, I don't think the majority of the populace actually want those things, or at least don't mind the current state of affairs. And then it doesn't matter how much you politically organize - a superminority in a democracy doesn't get much say either way. OTOH if you evolve the tools, they keep working regardless of what the law says (even if the law specifically prohibits such tools).
I think most people do care, but when you have no option to change it what do you do? I don’t think most people care enough to contact their local politicians. If their friends are using app X they resign themselves to doing the same and compromising because you either accept app X’s terms or you don’t use it.
I think that's an over analysis. Sweeping statements about how each generation thinks sound a bit daft. I don't think UK politicians have any shame or envy.
This legislation comes from politicians believing that the general populace would vote for a government that places catching criminals over having e2e encryption. I doubt those legislating have a grand surveillance of the masses plan, or much in the way of philosophical thought at all. Now we're trying to convey to the general public that will be the consequence one way or another even if it's not the intent.
I think the problem is a pretty old one: you can't use technology to solve social problems. Encryption as a tool is great for some particular kinds of privacy, but using encryption to "fix" privacy was misguided from the start. Privacy is a policy problem; we need laws on the books that prevent both governments and companies from collecting and using data about us.
Rules like the US Constitution's 4th amendment, and laws like the GDPR (and to some extent, CCPA/CPRA) aim to do that, but neither goes anywhere near far enough. 4A often gets interpreted narrowly by US courts, to the benefit of law enforcement. And the GDPR enforcement mechanisms are far too clunky and -- at least from what I've seen so far -- don't work particularly well. Not to mention that, for it to be truly effective globally, the US would need a federal-level law to match it.
Encryption alone doesn't matter. If your social and political climate is not oriented toward privacy, your privacy tools can simply be made illegal.
In some ways the faithful seeking the grail of "encryption" which will protect them from the Evil mirrors the belief of earlier generations that a Constitution is enough on its own.
Nothing is meaningful without the physical and social power to enforce it. When you have that then even the absurd becomes reality and common sense.
