After the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many have called encryption as something that we need to give up in the name of safety. Many of those voices say that encryption enabled the terrorists to carry out their attack, because it made it's movements to pass undetected.
The truth is far more complex, and encryption was not an major factor in the terrorist ability to carry out the attacks. The whole intelligence gathering apparatus failed, since there are many other ways to gather information about people.
Focusing on the communications made via smart phones, or the information stored on a hard drive, is to narrow. People moves no only on a virtual world, but they also need to contact other people on the real world. As such, saying that people who use encryption on their electronic devices must be doing something bad are evil is not only shortsighted, but dangerous. Most people who use encryption, myself included, just want to keep something private.
The obsessive talk about how evil encryption is borders on the obscene, and it only takes our liberties away. We have the right to keep whats on computers and smart phones private, and the government needs to understand that they have no business asking for back doors on any encryption. If they want in on any of that data, they better have a good reason that convinces a judge to give a warrant to access it.
Most importantly, the focus on electronic intelligence gathering is not healthy. There are more ways to gather intelligence, so there is a need to actually work on those areas as well as the electronic one.
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