Its like saying in the 1950-s - if we ship enough weapons to the MLK supporters they will get their civil rights. Maybe, maybe not. What we will have for sure is more volatile and bloody situation.
Cryptography cannot be stable response to a surveillance/government overreach state. It just creates an arm race in which the government still has the power to beat you up to a pulp on whim. With a robot(wait 5 years).
It's the second amendment fallacy - enough technology in the hands of the people can stop the government.
By encrypting everything you just open the door for arbitrary enforcement on various laws.
What makes me disagree with this point is the same sentiment behind the phrase "the universe believes in encryption." As far as anyone on earth knows, prime factorization takes exponential time on a deterministic machine. Without one or two major advances in human knowledge, there can't be any "arms race".
More to the point, encryption isn't a "weapon" in this situation, it's the goal. If people are able to use encryption that can be trusted, the people have means to the basic right of privacy when they wish for it.
The arms race doesn't need to happen in the pure math realm of crypto. It can happen in a myriad of other areas. One example - if I have a keylogger installed on your computer, it doesn't matter how perfect your encryption algorithm is.
There is some math proof that you can always encrypt more than someone can decrypt, thus if everyone used crypto no government would be able to decrypt everything.
You are assuming that because he's proposing that crypto alone cannot be the answer to a surveillance state, that he wants a surveillance state. But I don't think that's what he wants.
Its like saying in the 1950-s - if we ship enough weapons to the MLK supporters they will get their civil rights. Maybe, maybe not. What we will have for sure is more volatile and bloody situation.
Cryptography cannot be stable response to a surveillance/government overreach state. It just creates an arm race in which the government still has the power to beat you up to a pulp on whim. With a robot(wait 5 years).
It's the second amendment fallacy - enough technology in the hands of the people can stop the government.
By encrypting everything you just open the door for arbitrary enforcement on various laws.