Can you give an example of that from the past, say, 10 years?

There is no bill submitted yet, but it's too early for that (and, well, there's that whole Congress session transition thing). But note that they were willing to go public, first to newspapers, and then in front of the Congress, demanding that either the companies "help out", or that Congress force them to. I'd say that shoots down your claim that they would not want the publicity - on the contrary, they are very much trying to make this public. And given past track record on things like Patriot Act, I can totally see why - there is sufficient support for such measures among the populace when the timing is right (like right now, with all the ISIS panic).

Re: strawman. I was specifically addressing your point to my post, in which I said that FBI is demanding a backdoor by law, and you responded that this is totally not the same thing because it does not pertain to private encryption, while that's exactly what it was about. There's no strawman there, just correcting your misunderstanding of what I was saying.

Uh, what? We're talking about on-device encryption here. That is very much the issue where YOU encrypt things. The FBI are complaining that Apple and Google have made it too easy to do full encryption (and Google has now made it on by default in Android 5.0), and when people make use of it, they cannot decrypt it even with a warrant.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fb...
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Well, FBI is publicly demanding backdoor to all phone encryption. And the outrage is largely restricted to tech forums and such - your typical user is like, "well, if they need it to catch pedos and terrorists, I suppose it's fine?". So it doesn't seem that they're worried much about the backlash.

You have not demonstrated that so far. Outright ban is one thing, and is indeed not viable. A strict permit regime with mandatory backdoor keys is perfectly viable.

For one thing, the people who are pirating stuff are getting something immediately beneficial out of it, and its value is readily understandable to everyone. Not so with encryption. If you ban/regulate it, 99% of the population simply won't know where to start, or why they even want to - with no premade stuff like Tor bundle readily available etc.

For another thing, penalties for piracy aren't all that harsh in practice. It will most likely be a civil suit, not criminal, and even then they'll offer to settle. Realistically, people know that unless they run a tracker, they will get away with a fine of a couple of thousand or so even in the worst case. Now make it a mandatory 10 year stint in a federal prison for even a single downloaded track, and make the first couple of cases front page news, and then it'll be comparable to what I'm talking about.

Only at this particular moment - and even then I think you haven't kept and eye on the polls, where 50% of electorate is perfectly happy with whatever privacy intrusions they may have to live with if that makes them "safe" (because the NSA told them it is necessary). And they always have several jokers which have yet to be beaten here in US - "think of the children", "the terrorists hate our freedoms" etc. Come next 9/11 (and it will happen, it's only a matter of then), they will have all the support they need to push that stuf through.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, it's already happening. Haven't you seen FBI pushing for backdoors to cellphone encryption? All they need is a few more hawks in Congress, and they will make it a law.

“Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”

You might be surprised as to who wrote that.

Why would you need to decrypt the messages? Most encrypted protocols have some unencrypted handshake when connection is initiated; said handshake can serve as evidence of intent to establish an illegal encrypted connection, if the other party is not on the whitelist.

Or you could even just ban server software capable of providing such connections, again, with only certified users being eligible to possess it.

Unenforceable? You don't need to enforce it for everyone. You just publicize a few high-profile cases, and most people will steer clear for the fear of being next.

"Legal" is not always the same as "legitimate".

So? Crypto will be allowed, but heavily regulated, with only certified users allowed to maintain servers that can be connected to over encrypted protocols. All keys used in such connections will be shared with NSA etc.

The reason behind American evidence rules are not to "precisely follow the codified rules" for the rules' sake. It has a purely utilitarian purpose - it is supposed to be a powerful deterrent law enforcement from conducting illegal searches in hope that they will produce evidence that can be used to convict, by rendering such evidence useless.

Of course they subcontract the actual BTC processing to someone else. That's not the point. The point is that they deemed the demand sufficient to warrant doing something like that in the first place, and to make a public announcement about it.

Thing is, distasteful as you may find it, it's ultimately what won the war. Were USSR to surrender the same as France did, unwilling to pay that high a price, that would mark the complete dominance of Germany in Europe. Given that USSR is ultimately responsible for 2/3 of total Axis casualties (including Japanese; if you only count Europe, that proportion is even more skewed), you can imagine the likelihood of Allied victory if Soviets were knocked out, and their territory - including natural resources such as oil, as well as heavy industry, all far removed from the front lines - would all become German strategic assets. Even if that was doable - which I find dubious - the cost would've been insane. Just as it was, for the country that ended up bearing it, because it could (being a totalitarian state).

Let's settle at 10-20% of the prewar population, then.

Allowing non-intrusive ads is an option in Adblock Plus, that you can set as you see fit during the initial configuration step (it's all explicitly spelled out). And my understanding is that the money they're asking for that categorization is basically a fee for the service of verifying that the ad is, indeed, "non-intrusive" under their established criteria.

I suggest you actually read the decision in Quirin. That constitution applies doesn't mean that they get all the rights that civilians do.