First let me clarify that I agree the notion of "banning encryption" is misguided and wrong. I'm looking at Obama's position (perhaps incorrectly) as "we need to be able to have backdoors", not "ban encryption".
I think the government's argument would be that yes, the most sophisticated adversaries will always find a way around monitoring. But I think they'd argue that 95% of adversaries are not the most sophisticated, so the position to is to make it as easy as possible to catch that 95%.
"If we're trying to monitor 100 bad guys and 95 of them are just using iMessage, then let's make it easy to read what the 95 of them are saying and deal with the other 5 with more sophisticated countermeasures, rather than having to use more sophisticated countermeasures for all 100 of them."
I absolutely see the whole argument here. I'm just trying to figure out what the right solution is.
First let me clarify that I agree the notion of "banning encryption" is misguided and wrong. I'm looking at Obama's position (perhaps incorrectly) as "we need to be able to have backdoors", not "ban encryption".
I think the government's argument would be that yes, the most sophisticated adversaries will always find a way around monitoring. But I think they'd argue that 95% of adversaries are not the most sophisticated, so the position to is to make it as easy as possible to catch that 95%.
"If we're trying to monitor 100 bad guys and 95 of them are just using iMessage, then let's make it easy to read what the 95 of them are saying and deal with the other 5 with more sophisticated countermeasures, rather than having to use more sophisticated countermeasures for all 100 of them."
I absolutely see the whole argument here. I'm just trying to figure out what the right solution is.