what leads you to believe that end to end encrypted communication is a net good for the world?

esp in liberal democratic countries where the governments are at least in theory accountable to the people

are the costs of letting malevolent actors coordinate worth the benefits? 

what exactly are those benefits that justify something like kiddie porn being easy to distribute at scale? 

or are the alleged liberal democracies currently in power more of a fiction than reality? 

or is it more that someday a less liberal less democratic regime will come into power?

steel man positions only

A very good and legitimate question.

My answer would be that there has been nothing in human history like the surveillance apparatus created by the internet. Governments could and did always surveil their people, but that was a labor and resource intensive process that forced them to make choices. With the internet, however, it has become trivial for a state to find the tiniest intimate details of any person's life. It makes slipping into a mass tyranny far too easy, and there have already been glimpses of this.

Critically, encryption does not totally prevent surveillance. But it raises the resource requirements needed to get someone's messages. This makes it more like the old norm of surveillance, where it can be done, but it requires a commitment of time and resources to each case that makes mass surveillance too costly to pursue. You can still target criminals and those suspected of child pornography and so forth, but encryption makes it less feasible to impose a Panopticon on the whole population.

Writer, podcaster, and commentator on foreign affairs and politics. Runs /dropglobalnews

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Internet revolution has been crazy, what do you think the impact of AI tho?