The answer is no of course - they have the thought terminating cliche of "national security" to protect against accountability.
Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around.
If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker? That is inexcusable incompetence.
At first I thought that you linked to the wrong poll by mistake.
The last question does show more "favor" than "oppose" for installing back doors in encrypted systems, but the first question shows much more "oppose" than "favor" for reducing encryption to help government agencies. The second question shows that more people want tech companies to protect customer privacy than to cooperate with government agencies to fight terrorism and crime.
So people want encryption back doors that don't reduce encryption and don't require tech companies to cooperate with government agencies. Of course "we can have all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff" is a common delusion among government agencies proposing encryption back doors too.
Yes, since the operational outcomes of the first and last questions are the same, the main notion this poll really confirms is that people in general don’t understand cryptography.
c.f. also the recent Australian prime minister who claimed that legislation can override mathematics.
I mean, when you the word question like that and say the backdoor is to “monitor suspected terrorists” of course the average idiot will agree. They think it won’t apply to them & their communications. They aren’t terrorists, so why should they mind? Most people have no idea how far the government is able to stretch the law under the auspice of “safety.” Perhaps naively, I believe people would be outraged if they actually understood how the Patriot Act is used and what a backdoor would allow the government to do.
Other funny thing on that is if you are a citizen of one of the five eyes and china was putting a backdoor into phones it would probably wouldn't matter too much since they have little influence on you unlike say your own gov having that same capability and using it.
> However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication".
This is appropriate, under the assuption of accountability; right now, three letter agencies aren't subject to it.
> "We" also have nothing to hide.
This is disingenous or naive (and it's a worringly widespread idea). Literally (as in literal-literal) anybody can be accused and charged, it's just a matter of legal power¹. Giving up privacy makes it dangerously easier.
I think it’s normally wrong to pose these issues as intelligence services trying to come up with new ways to oppress the population. It requires some kind of conspiracy either of the whole organisation or a conspiracy of the highest levels to trick the rest of the organisation into oppressing the population.
In reality these are massive organisations of people who want to do good and protect people from actual dangers and repeats of actual harmful incidents. So I think framing the motives as malevolent isn’t helpful because the motives aren’t malevolent.
I think it’s much more reasonable to ask why these things arise. Eg maybe the government says “how will you stop something like x happening again” and they say “well it would have been really hard to detect but we were slightly suspicious of them. If only we could get a warrant to find out what they were talking about...”. And this probably seems reasonable to the minister who still thinks these intelligence agencies are steaming open letters or tapping into phone lines.
It doesn’t even need to be the case that people know these laws would work/be useful, all they need is to feel that they would. And this can quite easily happen without any malicious intentions.
Other things one could imagine happening are finding warrants annoying because they feel like a formality and feeling that the pause in the process potentially causes harm. Or seeing the whole “I ask my ally to spy on my citizens” process as a silly way to get round an annoying loophole. I can imagine something like this happening in a multinational company and if you see intelligence allies as actually working together in a team it doesn’t seem so crazy to see it as a silly legal formality to allow the actual teamwork. So (to say the same thing again) I don’t think these things arise from bad intentions.
A final thing is that many people in these intelligence organisations seem to care about how this surveillance is done in an ethical way (although some people don’t). Eg note here that they want to get this ability with a warrant (perhaps they really want it warrantless and plan to get it or perhaps they feel like they were burned by the various revelations and don’t think they could get it anyway).
Compare this to the way much of the modern mass surveillance we are exposed to every day is planned where there is virtually no ethical oversight at all.
Those are all great points butit's still unbelievably scary to think of a government that is storing all digital communications of all its citizens forever.
You'd have to be super naive or ignorant of history to think any different. Even if you trust our current regime, you never know what could happen in the future. It's just too much potential harm in exchange for the convenience of simply not having to do targeted spying instead of mass surveillance.
Nobody likes terrorists but mass surveillance is just way too open to abuse.
To be clear, I’m not saying that these changes are good or that they can’t/won’t be used to oppress. I merely want to say that they aren’t designed and planned to do that and so I don’t think it’s helpful to frame arguments about it as fighting against tyranny.
Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around.
If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker? That is inexcusable incompetence.