Comment Re:crypto war 3.0 you mean? (Score 2) 91
Bullshit. One of the most interesting things to come out of the Snowden revelations was the discovery that the NSA doesn't have any secret ways into properly done crypto -- Schneier even noted as much in his interview with Snowden.
You're right that most people's communications aren't encrypted -- that's an artifact of people trusting large corporations like Google and Apple with their data. But dm-crypt and loop-AES on Linux have been safe for a long time, and, though I wouldn't personally trust BitLocker and Apple's equivalent, I've seen no concrete evidence they're backdoored, either. And then there's TrueCrypt and its successors, which are brilliant pieces of work. TrueCrypt has even been audited and found solid.
This is the second crypto war. The government lost the first with Clipper and Skipjack, but the low priority most people put on security and the general low level of intelligence of criminals meant that they didn't often run into problems, despite their loss. Most people accept the defaults on software, and encryption isn't the default.
Now, Google and Apple are announcing that they will make encryption the default on their phones. This is the cause for the government's alarm: encryption by default would be very inconvenient for them. They've always known this, which is why they fought the first crypto war. They lost, and encryption slowly but surely became more and more prevalent. Now it promises to be Android+iOS-level prevalent. They don't want that, for obvious reasons. This is their last stand. And they will lose, for the same reason they lost the first crypto war: encryption is a fait accompli.
Unfortunately, they have a point. Not being able to read legitimate criminals' communications will likely make the police's job harder. We have a system of privacy protections that attempts to strike a balance between privacy and law enforcement, and encryption tilts the scale all the way in favor of privacy and against law enforcement. There's nothing anyone can really do to fix that; it's just how the world works now. But it's worth acknowledging that there is a problem here, even though we don't have a solution to the issue, and even though the FBI's proposed solution is completely insane.