Yet another milestone event in the slow decay of freedom, ignored by the masses who are placated with their bread and circuses. The pleas and rational arguments of those of us who value privacy and freedom are met with the time-old, apparently undebunkable reply of "if you have nothing to hide, why are you worried?"

Of course, we know that this won't stop Bad Guys from using encryption. It's trivial to go and use 8192-bit RSA or something else wickedly strong using algorithms that have been in the public domain for aeons. If you were a Really Bad Guy and wanted to send messages that are stegonographically hidden and encrypted to be resistant even to theoretical future universal quantum computers, it would only really take a little bit of work to rig that up.

So what is this for, then? What will it help? Who is it going to stop?

Impulsive crimes, murders, rape, none of that will be stopped. State-sponsored terrorism will not be stopped. Individual madmen will not be stopped.

Looking back at the terror events of the last decade, how many of those would really be stopped by being able to read encrypted messages? Maybe you could piece together the event better in retrospect... maybe. Certainly stopping it in advance is nowhere within the realm of possibility for the near future.

Perhaps some pedophile / human smuggling rings can be compromised this way, but considering the recent Encrochat thing - https://www.vice.com/en/article/3aza95/how-police-took-over-... - and the extent that people were willing to go to to have an encrypted chat mechanism (which these laws would have done nothing about) - it's clear to me that the laws will simply make it more and more financially viable to run organized-crime IT operations offering the kind of security that the government is trying to prevent. While it would be good to take down more of these sickos, the fact is that it would only be a temporary setback to them, and there's a very good chance that the more aware amongst them are paying careful attention to these laws and will be ready.

This sort of thing is like a "Minority Effect" pipe dream - the idea that some massive complex of computers will be able to determine that someone is going to commit a crime before they do it, and that the creaking ancient broken legal system is going to be able to do something about it without a huge false-positive rate that will threaten make the wrongful police shootings of the past few years into an everyday occurrence. It's simply ludicrous - even if the technology could do something about it, the legal system that can't even keep thugs off the street is not going to be able to make reasonable judgements about people with limited information in the timeframe needed to actually do anything.

If I know this, then they know this too, right? They're not stupid. So this clearly is not the shot, even though it is going to be the popular justification.

My suspicion is that the actual shot here is to go after people posting things that the government doesn't like. Europe, in particular, doesn't really guarantee free speech, and it's clear from how their totalitarian-liberalist governments act that they want to clamp down on anyone saying anything that actually critiques the system itself (rather than the false-dichotomy strawman of fellow-citizen-with-conflicting-opinion-as-enemy that they endorse you attacking).

When people were still engaged on Facebook and Twitter, it was actually comparatively easy to track dissidents, and there was a tendency to think that it would also be easy to stop them - but heavy-handed moderation has actually just resulted in people posting crimethink moving to encrypted messaging platforms instead. This hasn't stopped people from engaging in the free spread of ideas, of course, though it has hampered it, but again - momentary setback.

Perhaps the nanny-state losers that run these institutions should consider the idea of actually engaging with people who have piercing criticisms of the way that they run the institutions instead of giving in to the fallacy that you can just "peacefully" quash dissent and move on. It gets louder over time until you either engage with or kill everyone who disagrees with you.