To be honest, I think it sounds like the view most people have about encryption (if they bother to think about it at all).
To a lot of people the analogy about securing your home rings true.
You want your home to be secure. You also don’t want your house to be so secure that if you lose your key, you can’t ever get in no matter what you do. You want the fire brigade or ambulance service to be able to get in if you are injured or trapped in the burning building.
To achieve that people are prepared to accept a degree of vulnerability.
Most people don’t actually want unbreakable crypto, they just want really hard to break crypto, crypto that a very small number of (the right) people do know how to break.
See for example Mark’s story about using a weakness in the security to get into his cryptocurrency wallet when he forgot his password.
With really strong security that wouldn’t have been possible.
I think most people simply don’t realise how easy computers make the process of finding and exploiting weaknesses or how reliant they are on sufficiently strong crypto.
Obviously someone who supposedly does know all about how crypto works and is trying to shape policy in that area should know better.
He probably does. It just doesn’t suit the aura of supreme government power to admit it.
At the end of the day which government is going to be prepared to make it official government policy that we can either try to protect you, your money and your business or personal secrets against hackers or try to be able to snoop on terrorists’ and paedophiles’ emails. We can’t do both. We probably can’t actually manage either of them.
