I don't mind taking the conversation in a different direction, but I just want to make it clear that nothing you said has anything to do with what I said.
> ...for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption...
They learned their lesson after the first attempt to do so. Just jumble those words up a little and you'll see the current strategy: actually ban practical encryption. The state doesn't care about gnupg, or any other software that requires more than an hour's worth reading to safely use - because 99% of people won't. So they only have to target the stuff that is easy to use or on by default... unless they can depend on corporate cooperation (Apple up until recently, Microsoft, AT&T, etc).
> Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation.
One can very easily manufacture a firearm using the same equipment that one would use to produce common consumer products like garden hose nozzles. The schematics are all available online. The state doesn't ban the means of production, they ban the stuff that makes it accessible to the common folk - like retail sale of firearms. You see where I'm going with this right? The state doesn't ban math, they ban the stuff that makes the math accessible to the common folk.
> ...where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority...
lol, unlike encryption software? I'm not talking about the kind that lets you buy crap online that the state can easily circumvent, I'm talking about to kind of crypto that only terrorists, pedos and anarchists want to use... and that the state can't break.
The kind of encryption that we use to safely buy stuff on-line (such as TLS for securing our HTTP connections) and the kind that security-aware people use to secure data (which includes criminals and anarchists, but also activists living under repressive regimes, healthcare professionals, lawyers, software developers, etc.) is quite similar from a mathematical standpoint. The underlying algorithms (such as AES, SHA-2, RSA, etc.) and mathematical concepts are often the same.
There is no practical difference in the kind of crypto a criminal uses and the kind you would use to store your passwords and scans of important documents.
Again... there is very little material difference between a garden hose nozzle and a 1911 handgun, just as there is very little mathematical difference between the functions powering TLS and PGP. But one is completely centralized and offers practically zero protection from government lawyers and NSLs, and the other offers protection from even determined state level adversaries. Guess which one is widely deployed and which one had to be published in a book and shipped over seas in order to circumvent munition export restrictions.
> ...for all practical purposes impossible to actually ban strong encryption...
They learned their lesson after the first attempt to do so. Just jumble those words up a little and you'll see the current strategy: actually ban practical encryption. The state doesn't care about gnupg, or any other software that requires more than an hour's worth reading to safely use - because 99% of people won't. So they only have to target the stuff that is easy to use or on by default... unless they can depend on corporate cooperation (Apple up until recently, Microsoft, AT&T, etc).
> Guns are physical items that require physical ammunition. It is a completely different situation.
One can very easily manufacture a firearm using the same equipment that one would use to produce common consumer products like garden hose nozzles. The schematics are all available online. The state doesn't ban the means of production, they ban the stuff that makes it accessible to the common folk - like retail sale of firearms. You see where I'm going with this right? The state doesn't ban math, they ban the stuff that makes the math accessible to the common folk.
> ...where owning a gun is rare and completely undesirable for the vast majority...
lol, unlike encryption software? I'm not talking about the kind that lets you buy crap online that the state can easily circumvent, I'm talking about to kind of crypto that only terrorists, pedos and anarchists want to use... and that the state can't break.